Tag: Valerian

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How a French Comic Series Inspired Star Wars

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This is a blog post I’ve wanted to write ever since I started my first blog in 2011. After the news got out about Luc Besson releasing a movie in 2017 based on the comic, I thought it would be a good idea to get it done some time in advance. Similar blog posts have since been published by others especially in 2015, but I’m still going to release my version as I have new comparisons I believe no one else have had, and I’m also using original material from both the graphic novels and the movies that I have acquired myself.

I’ve always loved the original Star Wars trilogy and thought these movies have really earned the status as some of the finest science fiction of all time. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve rewatched the trilogy. The first time I saw the first movie, I got minor Flash Gordon comic book vibes, especially as our heroes discovered the Death Star for the very first time.

But after a closer inspection, it turns out that the movies actually owes a French science fiction comic series a whole lot more than Flash Gordon, a series called Valérian and Laureline that originated in 1967. And I’m not talking about just mere fleeting similarities or obvious coincidences. In this blog post, I will show you various comic pane extracts from the series and compare them to photos of the Star Wars movies. I think you will be quite surprised how much some of them match each other.

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Valerian and Laureline

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This is part of a blog series about European graphic novels. See this blog post for a small introduction.

Valerian and Laureline is among my most treasured space and science fiction stories, right up there with monster franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Futurama and probably a hundred more. The stories of adventure, diplomacy and exploration are really intriguing, at least up until the two city books. The way this series was drawn left me in awe right from the beginning, and it still does. No doubt it has inspired a lot of other media since, especially Star Wars.

If you are new to European graphic novels, this series is an excellent introduction.

Page 2 in "Heroes of the Equinox"
Page 2 in “Heroes of the Equinox” where we see the astroship with our heroes in the last pane.

The series is about two spatio-temporal agents, Valerian and Laureline. They belong to Galaxity, the capital of Earth in the 28th century. Their most important task is to make sure that no one uses time travel to change the course of history, but also for Earth to establish contact with new civilizations. To help them with these tasks they are in control of a saucer-shaped astroship that can jump in both space and time, sort of like teleporting. The technology in the series is much closer to Star Wars than Star Trek; overly detailed and dirty, sometimes even breaking down. Taking care of their duty usually turns out to be a complicated matter that brings them on an adventurous and meandering path, typically with a lot of bizarre beings and a constant sense of wonder. The series is very imaginative and still have awesome science fiction ideas I have yet to see anywhere else.