Eurocomics, Valerian and Laureline Vol. 2 & 3 (4 points)

 For this week’s reading, I took a look at Valerian and Laureline volumes 2 and 3 by french comic duo Pierre Christin and  Jean-Claude. I had previously had some knowledge of this series because of the film adaptation which I was quite fond of. I had remembered that the original source materials came from french comics but I hadn’t had the time to read into it yet. What enthralled me most about this series in general was the classic sci-fi multi-dimensional world that the human characters had to navigate through. For this day and age, I guess it’s not that uncommon for themes/worlds like this to exist in the sci-fi genre, but I really appreciate the pathway that comics like these had influence over, especially for 1967. As an illustration/visual development major, perhaps I do hold a bit of bias for my love of the art style in particular as well. I absolutely love the graphic and crazy details in every panel, with each world/unique alien character having their own flair to them even if they’re only really in the story for a short amount of time. It’s not called “city of a thousand planets” for nothing, I can really see a lot of thought was put into each planet’s way of life/society. Fashion, color scheme, and language were also small but significant parts of the whole experience that really helped influence the story in various ways for me too. I think one of the main issues I had, if any, was the pacing of the story. This is where I really think the art and small details sort of make up for that. For one, I noticed a theme of traveling, coming in conflict with something/someone, then escaping only to do it all over again. I suppose most of these situations were meant to last a certain amount of time, but when reading both volumes I found that each adventure went by quite quickly, which made me feel like the danger they were experiencing never proved to be too fatal or significant, though I guess I would either have to give it more time or read more volumes to have a true opinion on this. For our main characters, they seemed to be very accustomed to strange things happening left and right as they seemed somewhat calm through a lot of their travels. It also seemed to focus less on dire straight on action scenes, and more on larger environmental art panels, which I really liked though that adds to my one issue with the storytelling pacing. From their point of view, nothing was too weird to exist, but as a reader, I was yearning for more explanation to some things. (Like what kind of society was this, what type of creature certain characters were, etc) Since they traveled so often and so quickly I saw that most interactions were rather brief give or take some very small lore explanations, which can be understandable due to the number of endless planets and life forms there are in the story, yet I think they could probably make an entire volume on each planet alone with how fun and express the artwork was. One last small and interesting thing I found at the end of Volume 2 was the American influence (a majority of it from Star Wars) on the story and character design. I just think it’s fun and memorable to look at how all these classic forms of sci-fi entertainment were being shared and appreciated in the beginning, and seeing how they’re still developing today.