Introduction

When Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières penned the inaugural story of the science fiction comic series Valérian et Laureline in 1967, they did not expect the series to continue for four decades nor to create the transnational, transmedial impact that it did, from France to the USA – and even Japan. Valérian et Laureline was launched in the second half of the 1960s, a tumultuous time in many Western nations, with major social changes such as Civil Rights legislation and women entering the workplace as never before, but also a time of significant technological advances, notably the space race and the rapid implementation of computing devices. Within the first volume alone, readers of Valérian et Laureline witness these societal upheavals in action with signs of nuclear annihilation, environmental catastrophe, workers’ guilds and novel depictions of multicultural societies akin to the diverse cast of Star Trek, which debuted on American television screens in 1966. The television series’ speculative setting in a distant future was nonetheless firmly anchored in contemporary social and political preoccupations and was groundbreaking in the ways in which it brought subtle political commentary to ‘the ultimate mainstream cultural platform, network television’. This was, then, a pivotal time for SF, reflected in the critical acclaim afforded to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This film represented a turning point in SF cinema and amply demonstrated that the genre had come of age. It is within wider societal events and also in the context of the increasing acceptance of visual SF as both philosophical and popular that Christin and Mézières's comic series should be appreciated. As SF broadened its scope beyond the human impact of techno-scientific change, this also allowed other culturally specific traditions that engage with the fantastic to flourish, experiment and capture a greater readership.