Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Mézières and Christin: "Valérian"




Please bear with me as I remember the Euro comics of my childhood!

Another immortal Euro classic is the science fiction series "Valerian", about Valérian and Laureline, two secret agents in time and space. The seminal stories from the early 70s were rollicking good space adventures featuring lots of drama, humour and often eco-conscious 1970s style messages.

Jean-Claude Mézières' artwork for this series is quite legendary, and very influental. Apparently the designers who worked on the orginal Star Wars trilogy had access to the "Valerian" books, and it shows. The Millenium Falcon looks remarkably like Valérian and Laureline's spaceship....






and there are many other suspicious similarities.

Laureline in a story from 1972... and then "Return of the Jedi"....



Valerian trapped in a story from 1971, and then Han Solo in carbonite:



or how about this:


or this:





Mezieres reaction to all this was this drawing:

Leia: "Fancy meeting you here"
Laureline: "Oh, we've been hanging around here for a long time!"

Anyway, great classic series. A few volumes were published in English ages ago, and it's worth looking for them on Ebay.

(Comparisons taken from the official Mezieres page.)

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Damn! I've never heard of this artist before, but the Star Wars similarities are impossible to ignore. The third image, with the huge stone door, bears a strong resemblance to Jabba's palace from "Return of the Jedi." The space fleet image with the rectangular window looks like the final scene of "Empire Strikes Back."

My Messy Blog said...

Oh I hadn't even thought of that, but you're right. Those others are just random images, they're not even from that page I found about the Valerian/Star Wars similarities.

I'll post a few more Valerian pages, spread the word! ;-)

partypao said...

This is really crazy......!! thanks for posting this one !!! a major revelation for all starwars fans!!!

EBalona said...

Even so, by now, the trailers from Luc Besson (must be, have to be) awesome movie, are great and it looks like it is going to respect all of the original environment.
August, the 2nd!!! I'll be there.