Valerian and Laureline Book 1: The City of Shifting Waters
Valerian and Laureline Book 1: The City of Shifting Waters, by Pierre Christin & Jean-Claude Mézières, Cinebook
BEGINNING AS long ago as 1967 in the French comic Pilote #420, where it continued to be serialised, Valérian, as its original title was, has subsequently been collected into over 20 best selling graphic albums from the publisher Dargaud, excluding foreign editions, an animation series and forthcoming major movie.
The English based publisher Cinebook actually chose to start with the second book in the series wherein tough-jawed hero Valérian travels back in time to capture Xombul, a political prisoner who sought to make himself dictator in the 28th century.
Valérian is a spatio-temporal agent for Galaxity, capital of the Terran (read: Earth) Empire, and his job is to prevent temporal paradoxes occurring either naturally or by the acts of troublesome time-travellers.
Xombul has gone back to a 1987 where global warming’s come on fast, the polar ice caps have melted and begun to flood the world.
So if you take a scenario from Waterworld you’ll see late one night on TV (because no one sat through it at the movies), prequel a scene reminiscent of the ending of Planet of the Apes, and have a plot that bears comparisons to Escape From New York you’ll have a few inklings about the direction this story takes. Only, you need to remember it was delivered in comic strip format during the late sixties way before those movies where ever made.
Not that the movie comparisons end there. Many Valérian fans have created lists noting the similarities between Valérian and the subsequent Star Wars franchise with artist Jean-Claude Mézières himself being quite angry in print over the matter.
Swipes, rip-offs, homage or influences spring from a common well? I’ll leave that one to the lawyers. Suffice to say this is still an early work in the series so it’s not firing on all guns yet.
But it is an adventure in the space opera sense where Valérian stumbles in his heroics, gets captured by a scamming salvage crew, gets saved by Laureline and escapes, finds Xombul but needs to make a deal with his former captors’ leader, Sun Rae, and then there’s a whole tick box of mad scientist sci-fi inventions to explore (that do tend to reflect the time the book was made in) before the book draws to its conclusions with at least two little twists in the tale.
Primarily an adventure, the book is not without conversational humour, and some underlying philosophical themes – matters that would develop further as the seventies harkened and liberation in all its forms took hold on our real world and the creative thinking of Pierre Christin’s scripts.
Mézières’s visual characterisations opt for a cartoon look, but his backdrops and world scenes are heavily detailed, and it is no wonder he was one of several great French comic book artists whose names can be seen in the credits at the end of The Fifth Element as having produced concept art. His characters would become more realistic as books would evolve, but here we see a strong Jack Davis influence (Mad Magazine) along with the slick inking of Belgian artist Franquin, and I’m informed Lucky Luke creator Morris was one of Mézières’s influences so that would explain the choreography of his action scenes while maintaining that cartoon flavour.
The creators came up with the name of Laureline themselves, one that like Wendy in Peter Pan has lead to parents in their thousands giving their daughters that name too. And so popular a character would she become that her name would eventually be added to the title of the series.
Having been nominated and won numerous awards the creators have seen their works translated into various languages before – The first time I saw the series was when the Ambassador of the Shadows book was serialised in the original American version of Heavy Metal back in the early 80s. Indeed, as that magazine was heavily influenced by France’s Métal Hurlant so was that influenced by the French comics scene of the late sixties among which the Valérian has to be counted.
That stated, it isn’t an adult orientated book, and Cinebook has recommended it as being for 12 plus aged readers. I’d say ten year olds would have no trouble enjoying it either, nor their parents have concerns over it. It’s a solid adventure this one, not an epic, nor giving too many clues that it would become such a raving success, but it’s pleasantly diverting enough even for this grown-up.
For more information on English language versions of Valerian and Laureline visit Cinebook.
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