Daily Scans - Valerian and Laureline: French Science Fiction Classic

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November 5th, 2009
03:57 pm
[houbanaut]
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Valerian and Laureline: French Science Fiction Classic


This classic French BD, which inspired Star Wars and The Fifth Element, has never become very popular in the US, though quite a lot of it has been published here at one time or another. This one, though, is my own scanlation of a story that was never released in English (15 pp., ~8 MB; dial-uppers beware!).


Valerian & LaurelineMetro ChateletFirst, a few words of introduction. Valérian was created in 1967 by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres, and has been one of the most popular comics in Europe ever since. In the story, Earth is destroyed by a nuclear catastrophe in 1986, and it takes hundreds of years for civilization to rebuild itself. However, by the 28th Century, Earth has become the center of an interplanetary empire, Galaxity. Valerian and his younger partner Laureline are agents of the Galaxity Space-Time Service. Valerian is the veteran of the two, an expert pilot and handy with a ray gun. He picked up Laureline in medieval France on an early mission. She's the brains of the outfit, and grows from an occasional sidekick in the first stories to become arguably the primary character later on. Their personal relationship is ambiguous at this point in the series. They have a space ship, called the astronef (rendered here as "space dish"), which allows them to travel in time as well as space. And no, it's not an imitation of the Millennium Falcon; Lucas ripped them off.

By the time of Metro Châtelet - Direction Cassiopée (1980, 46 pp. - part 1 of 2), which in English might go something like "Next Stop Châtelet: Bound for Cassiopeia," 1986 was no longer that far into the future, and the creators were forced to start thinking about how to reconcile the series' timeline with the actual course of history. That led to some of the best stories of the series, beginning with this one.

I particularly like this story for its dreamlike atmosphere, with Valerian increasingly spaced out, walking around a city he doesn't know, dealing with a plot he doesn't understand, haunted by visions from other worlds, and facing creatures straight out of fantasy.

Scans are not mine (though I've cleaned them up a bit). Translation assisted by Babelfish and a Scandinavian copy.








Albert informs Valerian that something has been observed in the Metro. They head down there to check it out.





Valerian is brought to a hospital, while the mysterious Americans leave in frustration.



Albert and Valerian go out to dinner, and they discuss the case so far. We learn that this was not the first creature to manifest: a while ago some kind of giant ogre emerged from an old mine, and the Galaxity military unit sent to take care of it (because mythical beasts appearing in the twentieth century is a major temporal anomaly!) was itself caught on camera. Valerian has been dispatched to deal with the matter in a more low-profile way.








Albert has discovered that Valerian is under surveillance by Bellson & Gambler, a multinational corporation that has been observed on the scene of both incidents. He shakes them, and they head out to the French countryside, where there have been reports of a sea monster in the marshes.

Meanwhile, Laureline is following the trail from the other end, and slowly putting together the pieces on what it is he is facing. But frustrated by the situation, his constant headaches and by being so far apart from Laureline, Valerian heads out into the city by himself, where he soon gets picked up by a mysterious woman who seems to know him...

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From:[info]aaron_bourque
Date:November 6th, 2009 12:52 am (UTC)
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That is an awesome trenchcoat.
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From:[info]taggerung301
Date:November 6th, 2009 01:02 am (UTC)
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this is hard to wrap my little head around, but it looks like a fun read
could you post some of the first issue perchance? I would be very grateful
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From:[info]houbanaut
Date:November 6th, 2009 01:24 am (UTC)
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This is from part one of a two-part self-contained story, starting with the first 6 pages. What's going on when it begins is that Valerian and Laureline are in a telepathic "phase" (Laureline is in space, Valerian is in a café in 1980 Paris), and Laureline is updating Valerian on her progress with her part of their mission (the nature of which will become clear later on).

It may seem like she's just sightseeing, making small talk with aliens and shopping for random knick-knacks, but she's a lot smarter than she lets on, and it's all part of how she digs up information. (A lot of her initial, seemingly off-hand comments turn out to be relevant later on.)

As you might imagine, the series had come a long way since the very first issue in 1967 (collected in Les Mauvais Rêves, "The Bad Dreams"), and I don't know how useful it would be to post it. The only thing you really need to know is that they're agents from the future, sent here to make sure that nothing interferes with the proper course of history (the "proper course" in this case includes a nuclear cataclysm about to happen). A good place to start with the series would be La Cité Des Eaux Mouvantes ("The City of Moving Waters," 1970), but it's unfortunately not available in English either.
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From:[info]houbanaut
Date:November 6th, 2009 01:43 am (UTC)
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I should also mention that the paperback that was put out by ibooks a few years ago, Valerian: The New Future Trilogy, is also not a bad place to begin. It collects three stories in sequence from just when Valerian and Laureline have left the space-time service and have to make a living working on their own. It's still available on Amazon.
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From:[info]icon_uk
Date:November 6th, 2009 01:07 am (UTC)
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Ye gods, but this is beautiful stuff! Thank you for posting!
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From:[info]nezchan
Date:November 6th, 2009 02:52 am (UTC)
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I adore the art here, but that's not a big shock coming from me. I remember my brother had a couple of the books back in the 80's that I read and enjoyed greatly, but honestly can't recall what stories they were. It was about the time that Ki>Heavy Metal</i> was still mostly translating the Metal Hurlant stuff, so the quality was high and there was a lot of good European stuff coming into the North American anglo market.

When I've got a bit of money again, I'm going to have to seek some of this stuff out.
From:[info]lonewolf23k
Date:November 6th, 2009 02:57 am (UTC)
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I used to be a big fan of the series, but the stories increasingly became a vehicule for the (male) author's intensely pro-feminist views and his criticism of masculine society which is apparently nothing but pure evil or something..
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From:[info]houbanaut
Date:November 6th, 2009 05:04 am (UTC)
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Like a lot of the SF that came out of the 60s and 70s, the series has always had an idealistic, political bent. Sometimes it can get a little preachy, I agree.

I haven't noticed that it's been specifically anti-male. It does like to pit the heroine against patriarchal authority figures, but those tend to represent tyranny, bureaucracy or the military-industrial complex more than masculine society, I think. In World Without Stars, to illustrate, the warring matriarchal and patriarchal city states are portrayed as equally bad.
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From:[info]ar_feiniel_
Date:November 6th, 2009 03:23 am (UTC)
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I really like the art!
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From:[info]snosten
Date:November 6th, 2009 03:55 am (UTC)
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when the french do it good, they do it gooood
From:[info]psychop_rex
Date:November 6th, 2009 04:46 am (UTC)
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Oooh - preeeeetty. I wonder if it's a coincidence that Laureline is from medieval France, and her spacesuit looks something like Joan of Arc's armor...? Any chance of posting more of this?
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From:[info]houbanaut
Date:November 6th, 2009 03:23 pm (UTC)
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Maybe? The scanlation is quite a lot of work, so in the future I'd probably stick to the ones that have come out in English (or post it in French, I suppose, but I like having most people be able to read what's going on).

A bit from On the Frontiers would be nice, but on the other hand I'm reluctant to destroy the TPB spine. It's a conundrum.
From:[info]psychop_rex
Date:November 6th, 2009 10:25 pm (UTC)
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Well, anything further is better than what I've seen so far, which has been nothing. Whatever works; any of it would be appreciated.
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From:[info]arilou_skiff
Date:November 6th, 2009 07:13 am (UTC)
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I love, love, LOVE Valerian (or "Linda & Valentin" as it was called here) It has some very awesome stories (I posted a few bits of "Heroes of the Equinox" on old Scans_Daily, and I think it's still some of the funniest stuff I've seen)

The art is wonderful, and well, I still kind of have a crush on Laureline. She's awesome in all sorts of ways. And yes, the art is fantastic.
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From:[info]tahngarth
Date:November 6th, 2009 12:36 pm (UTC)
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I regret not being able to read this in the original French. Like Arilou I read this series in the Swedish translations (they had some of them at my school library) and rather liked the weird sci-fi fantasy style of it.

The TV series adaption is just... ugh, though.
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From:[info]houbanaut
Date:November 6th, 2009 03:36 pm (UTC)
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Christ! It looks terrible, doesn't it? I guess YouTube embeds doesn't work in comments, but here's a link to a teaser trailer.
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From:[info]arilou_skiff
Date:November 7th, 2009 12:09 am (UTC)
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God that looks awful. Those voices? Ugh.
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From:[info]lakrids404
Date:November 6th, 2009 07:58 pm (UTC)
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"Linda & Valentin" It was my favorite comic when I was young. And yes I thought some time it was a little preachy in its morals. As I have become older I find that often like stories with a little core of morale, than violent amorale stories.
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From:[info]idreading
Date:November 6th, 2009 08:33 pm (UTC)
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This is really intriguing and so pretty! Thanks for the post.
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From:[info]ficticons
Date:November 7th, 2009 01:09 am (UTC)
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I ♥ BD so much!

I like this art. And, as a current resident of Paris, noting the details (particularly the area that leads down into the metro tunnel, the " Passage Interdit au Public - Danger" sign, OMG the metro! Chatelet is a crazy station....) was brilliant and some of them made me squee inside. :D Albert's way of getting Valerian out of the tricky situation at the hospital, and his way of explaining the "really big gun" (:D), were great too.

I hope you don't mind my asking, by the way, but how exactly did you do the scanlation? Was it in a graphics editing program? I have some French-language comics that might be worth sharing too, and I was wondering if I should/could translate and post it myself.

And lastly, despite my self-proclaimed love of BD, I don't think I'd heard of this one before. Thanks for posting the scans!
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From:[info]houbanaut
Date:November 7th, 2009 02:45 am (UTC)
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Oh, I just did it in Photoshop. I covered up the original text with white rectangles, and then entered the translation in a text box on top, using multiple layer folders to keep things organized. The biggest problem was finding a suitable font (I'm not terribly happy with the one I ended up using, but I haven't seen any good BD handlettering-style fonts out there). I had to make the ellipses specially, since just typing ... or . . . didn't come out right.

The only part of it that took slightly more advanced skills was the "I HEAR YOU FROM SOLUM" special effect caption (which is a near-exact match for the original, if I say so myself).

It took way more time to translate the text than it took to do the lettering (though it would probably have gone quicker if I actually spoke French).
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From:[info]blake_reitz
Date:November 7th, 2009 06:47 pm (UTC)
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Thanks for posting this! I bought the New Future Trilogy when it came out (mostly due to my high levels of love for The Fifth Element) and have been looking for more ever since.
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