In Review: Valerian & Laureline - Empire Of A Thousand Planets

Writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières' spatio-temporal agents Valerian and Laureline return in the second book of their series to be published by Cinebook, The Empire Of A Thousand Planets.

It is the 28th century and the two agents have been sent to discover if Syrte, the planet at the heart of an empire of 1000 worlds, is a danger to Earth. Working undercover on the planet they discover that the ruling family are remote from the people who instead look to the mysterious masked sect known as the Enlighteneds. Their cover is soon blown and, despite being captured by the Enlighteneds, the pair make their escape into the swamps before returning to the city and meeting up with the leader of the rebellious Merchant Guild. As the Enlighteneds are affecting their trade, the Guild are preparing an attack on the Enlighteneds planet of Slohm and request Valerian and Laureline's help.

Christin's plot is a fairly complex affair with the various groupings on the planet being introduced in sequence before everyone heads off to a different world for the final battle, although there are rather too many plot holes when thought about too deeply such as an empire of 1000 planets where space travel is being curtailed or it being extremely distant from Earth but the Earth is worried that this empire poses a threat. However, unlike the previous book, The City Of Shifting Waters, the humour content has been toned back and The Empire Of A Thousand Planets makes for a pleasing, if undemanding, read.

Originally published in 1971 as the second of the now over twenty Valerian books, it does rather betray its age in the artwork which has a sixties feel to it especially with its now somewhat juvenile looking spaceship designs. Yet again compared to the previous book, Mézières art is better by leaving the humour behind and treating this book as the straight adventure title it should be. His alien landscapes are interesting and the sheer number of different characters and races that he illustrates are impressive.

The Valerian books have an impressive reputation amongst their fans with many seeing echos of Valerian in the Star Wars movies and this book includes a final page of pictures comparing six Valerian frames with Star Wars images. While I can see the similarities, one could point to many other sources that these and other Star Wars images are similar to.

Cinebook label the book as 12+ and while some parts are plot and text heavy, I don't really see any reason why it shouldn't be read by children of late primary school age. I do wonder however that if the series does get as good as it is supposed to be, why Cinebook just don't skip these early titles and get on to the supposedly better later books - after all they jump around in the original publishing sequence of other adventure titles such as Blake and Mortimer or Yoko Tsuno.

Valerian and Laureline - The Empire Of A Thousand Planets is an improvement on the first book and is a good solid read with more than enough to keep a young Star Wars fan entertained for its duration.

• There are more details of the Valerian and Laureline books on the Cinebook website.

• There is more information on the Valerian books on Jean-Claude Mézières official website (in English).

• Jean-Claude Mézières will be appearing, in the company of artist Dave Gibbons, at the BD and Comics Passion event at the Institut Francais in South Kensington, London on Saturday 8 October 2011. There are mores details of the event and how to book tickets on the Institut Francais website.

In Review: Valerian and Laureline - The City of Shifting Waters

The biggest science fiction comic strip in the French language world is not, as you might think, Barbarella but rather a series called Valerian and Laureline. Running for over 40 years it has reached a total of more than 20 albums, all written by Pierre Christin with art by Jean-Claude Mezieres. The books tell the stories of two time/space agents, the 28th century born Valerian and his female companion Laureline who comes from the Middle Ages, and with both spacecraft and time machines available to them, the series has the same potential as Doctor Who for a vast range of settings. The City Of Shifting Waters is the first book in the French series.

Valerian and Laureline are spatio-temporal agents of Galaxity, the Earth of the 28th century, who are dispatched back to 1986 to recapture Galaxity’s only political prisoner, Xombul, who has escaped and travelled back to just after a devastating nuclear accident changed the planet into a flooded world. Valerian goes undercover in a flooded New York with hippy thieves who take what they can get from the upper, dry, stories of the skyscrapers as well as using scuba gear to target bank vaults. With them he discovers robots taking scientific secrets and traces them back to Xombul who effectively kidnaps Valerian and Laureline to his lair in the Rocky Mountains from which he plans to take over the world.

The Valerian and Laureline books have had sporadic English language releases before with the only UK publications being four books published by Hodder-Dargaud in the mid-1980s. While this story originally began in Pilote magazine in July 1968, this is the first time that this particular album has been published in English. The original story was split over two runs in Pilote, the first from July to October 1968 while the second ran from April to July 1969, and it does show in the book with the first half set in the partially submerged New York before our heroes literally sail off into the sunset and the second half of the story which is set in the Rocky Mountains.

If anything Christin's plot point of a flooded Earth is more relevant now than it was in 1968, albeit rather more familiar now to us through CGI effects in disaster films than it would have been to cinema audiences 40 years ago. Yet the story does reveal its age with the main protagonists in the city being hippies rather than the Mad Max-esque characters that they might be portrayed as today, while Laureline's frequent outbursts on women's liberation feel equally dated. Despite the time travel element, this is a simple story with few characters that moves along to its expected conclusion.

Yet the biggest problem for me is Mezieres artwork. In itself it is good with the partially submerged cityscapes in the first half and a decent representation of a heli-plane based on the Canadair CL-84 amongst other things in the second, but his style doesn't seem to fit with the story as this is an adventure story with humour artwork. Valerian and Laureline themselves are bland, with out of proportion heads, making them look rather like Terrahawks puppets, while the rest of the characters wouldn't look out of place in the pages of Mad magazine, with Xombul's mad scientist, Mr Schroeder, apparently based on Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor. For a tongue-in-cheek series like Clifton this would work but, for me, it looks out of place in what is basically a straight good versus evil adventure story. Which is a pity since, with the conclusion of The Chimpanzee Complex and the Aldebaran/Betelgeuse cycle, Cinebook is in need of a new mature science fiction series to add to their schedule and unfortunately Valerian and Laureline is not it – not yet, anyway.

Valerian and Laureline - The City of Shifting Waters will be of interest to younger readers but adults will probably not find it satisfying enough either story-wise or art-wise. Since the series has lasted for so long in France, I can only assume that it gets better than this.

• There are more details of The City of Shifting Waters on the Cinebook website.

• There are more details of the Valerian and Laureline books on by Jean-Claude Mezieres’ website (in French).

Cinebook Announces Titles For Late 2010

Cinebook, the Canterbury based publisher of translated Franco-Belgian graphic novels, have released their catalogue for the second half of 2010 and it includes new series that haven't been translated into English before.

These new series are Long John Silver, written by Xavier Dorison with art by Mathieu Lauffrey, and Crusade, written by Jean Dufaux with art by Phillippe Xavier. Long John Silver is, as you would expect, a sequel to Robert Louis Stephenson's novel Treasure Island set 20 years later while Crusade is a supernatural tale set in the middle ages during a forgotten crusade to the Holy Land. The first Crusade title is Simoun Dja and will be released in October while the first Long John Silver title is Lady Vivian Hastings and it is released in November. Both series are rated 15+ by Cinebook.

The first book in the contemporary thriller XIII series, The Day Of The Black Sun, written by Jean Van Hamme with art by William Vance, is due to be published in May and the new catalogue shows that they will continue to be published at a rate of one book every other month. The series runs to 19 albums and while the first three have previously been translated into English and published in America, Cinebook intend to publish the complete set with the fourth book, SPADS, due in November 2010, the first time that it will have been published in English.

The other big series that Cinebook are be starting is Valerian and Laureline. This is one of the best known and highly regarded Franco-Belgian science-fiction series running to 23 albums. Written by Pierre Christin with art by Jean-Claude Mezieres, the books tell the stories of two spatio-temporal agents, the 28th century born Valerian and his female companion Laureline who comes from the Middle Ages. With both spacecraft and time machines available to them the series has the same potential as Doctor Who for a vast range of settings.

The Valerian and Laureline books have had sporadic English language releases before with the only UK publications being four books published by Hodder-Dargaud in the mid-1980s. Cinebook will be starting with The City Of Shifting Waters which is the first book in the French series although, confusingly, there is a prequel 'Book Zero' that was published afterwards. While the story originally began in Pilote magazine in November 1967 this will be the first time that this particular story has been published in English and Cinebook are releasing it in July.

More details of each series are available on the Cinebook website where the new catalogue is available as a PDF download.