If you’re a Luc Besson fan, you’ve likely seen at least one of the flashy trailers for his latest movie, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Like many big-budget movies these days, Valerian is based on a comic. If the Valérian and Laureline comics don’t ring a bell, that’s okay: you’re not alone in not knowing about the French source material.
The thing is that while the trailers for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets may look like a colourful Star Wars prequel rip-off, the reality is that the Valérian and Laureline comics were birthed a decade before the original Star Wars movie hit the big screen in 1977.
There’s been a lot of discussion about just how much of an influence Valérian was on Star Wars. It’s a controversial topic because though Star Wars creator George Lucas acknowledged many influences for his juggernaut sci-fi creation – including Flash Gordon, Toshirô Mifune, Akira Kurosawa, mythological heroes, old series and even comics – Valérian has never been mentioned. No one else who’s worked on the Star Wars movies seems to have listed the preceding adventures of Valérian as an influence, either.
Let’s take a closer look at the surrounding controversy and how the Valérian and Laureline comics might have influenced the Star Wars saga.
Unsurprisingly, Valérian and Laureline are the two eponymous agents of the French sci-fi comic series. The series is cited as one of the most influential French comics of all time, which makes sense given that Besson’s Valerian movie is reportedly the most expensive French movie ever made.
The series started in French comics magazine Pilote in 1967, and went on to have an incredible run that lasted until 2010. Valérian and Laureline is described as a fast-paced sci-fi adventure, and the titular characters are Spatio-Temporal Agents (read: time cops) who protect time (and sometimes space) from various evildoers.
Though set in the 28th century, Laureline is actually a peasant from 11th century Medieval France, who travels back to the future with Valérian to become a time cop. Together, they work for the Terran Galactic Empire which, unlike the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, is a benevolent leadership tasked with protecting all space and time.
In terms of those influences, the concept of time-travelling agents and galactic empires is more Isaac Asimov than wholly original. Similarly, Valérian and Laureline’s relationship is probably closer to the leading duo (doctor and companion) in Doctor Who on the surface, more so than Han Solo and Leia Organa.
Valérian and Laureline was created by childhood friends and creative collaborators Pierre Christin (the author) and Jean-Claude Mézières (the artist). After seeing Star Wars in 1977, both Christin and Mézières believed there were distinct similarities between their creation and Lucas’ galaxy far, far away. But the Valérian and Laureline creators had different reactions.
In an interview with German newspaper Die Welt (translated to English here), Christin refused to be baited into animosity towards the potentially pilfering Lucas. Christin felt more connected to Star Wars because of the similarities between Lucas’ movie and his comics.
Valérian and Laureline was created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières. After seeing Star Wars in 1977, both believed there were distinct similarities between their creation and Lucas’ galaxy far, far away.
He was, however, upset that Lucas hadn’t replied to any correspondence about what he believed to be parallels between Valérian and Star Wars. In the interview, Christin did acknowledge that sci-fi creations tend to feed off each other. He cites sci-fi legends Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury as key influences for Valérian and Laureline.
“That’s how it goes in sci-fi: it’s all about copying from one another,” says Christin, in the English-translated Die Welt interview. “Or, in other terms, you borrow something from someone else and develop it further.” In Christin’s mind, this meant it was okay that Lucas may have borrowed from Valérian – as Lucas acknowledges he did with other influences – but shifted the sci-fi storytelling in a different direction.
But it’s the debated impact of Mézières’ artwork from Valérian and Laureline that has added to the controversy.
Even Christin acknowledges this in the Die Welt interview. “In the ’80s, particularly in France, people were convinced that George Lucas had stolen from Valérian.” He goes on to clarify that French comics weren’t particularly popular in the US at the time.
“Nevertheless, the few people in the US who do know French comics fairly well are Hollywood’s art directors and storyboard artists,” argues Christin, in the same interview. “They might not be able to read the magazines, but they still flick through them now and then in search of ideas. That’s what French filmmakers who’ve been to Hollywood have told me: they happened to have seen piles of French comics in the creative departments of various film studios.”
Mézières was less diplomatic in his response to seeing Star Wars for the first time. In 1983, the same year that Return of the Jedi hit cinemas, Mézières published a crossover cartoon panel in Pilote #113 that depicted Valérian and Laureline sitting at a booth with Han Solo and Leia Organa (in her iconic Return of the Jedi slave outfit). “Fancy meeting you here,” says Leia. “Oh, we’ve been hanging around here for a long time,” responds Laureline. Ouch.
In some ways, Mézières’ saltiness is understandable as most of the parallels that have been drawn between the Valérian comics and the Star Wars saga have been based on visual references more than anything else. From a conceptual perspective, both IPs are space operas with leads who prioritise banter above believable dialogue when the Sith hits the fan.
It could be argued that Han Solo and Luke Skywalker may have been derived from parts of Valérian’s personality, as the latter sci-fi hero is “a classically handsome, slightly cocky, excessively loyal (sometimes to a fault) young agent”, as noted by IGN’s Lauren Lavin in her ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: What You Need to Know’ article.
“Classically handsome” and “cocky” describe Han well, and loyal-to-a-fault encapsulates one of Luke “your faith in your friends is yours” Skywalker’s biggest character flaws. For the comics’ leading lady, Laureline, the comparison is less nuanced: she’s a lot like Leia Organa, both in strong-willed personality, and even in character events.
Building from here, this is where the visual crossovers between the Valérian comics and Star Wars saga start to bubble to the surface.
One of the biggest visual similarities between Star Wars and Valérian is in design philosophy: both have lived-in worlds, which act as a stark contrast to the clean view of the future that dominated sci-fi at the time. Then there are the specific examples that leave the influence open to debate.
The Millennium Falcon has similarities to Valérian and Laureline’s ship, which has an infinitely less sexy name: the XB982 astroship. Both are built off a flying saucer design, and the XB982’s rear viewport looks like the Falcon’s thrusters. But given the prevalent fascination with flying saucers during the inception of both respective sci-fi IPs, the Falcon isn’t necessarily based on the XB982.
In a stronger argument, Laureline has a storyline that includes her being forced to wear a slave-girl outfit by a morbidly obese ruler in The Land Without Stars (1972). Leia, of course, has a similar experience in Return of the Jedi, which wasn’t released until 1983. Despite the close similarities in design, the counter-argument to this specific instance comes from costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers.
Rodgers said artist Frank Frazetta was her inspiration for the slave Leia outfit in this Wired interview, which can be seen in Frazetta’s Egyptian Queen painting, as well as his depiction of A Princess of Mars.
The irony of that latter painting shouldn’t be lost on sci-fi fans. Disney’s critically and commercially panned John Carter movie was based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom novels that were published from 1912. Part of John Carter’s failure was attributed to it feeling derivative of Star Wars, when the source material (greatly) predates the creation of Star Wars.
There are other visual cues, too. The Empire of a Thousand Planets (1971), the comic with the most debatable Star Wars influence, has a villainous and vengeful group called The Enlighteneds, who wear Darth Vader-like helms, and have echoing voices that are “deep if slightly muffled”. One of The Enlighteneds eventually removes his helmet to reveal a burnt, human face.
The Enlighteneds live in a fortress in the Syrtian Jungles, which has more than a passing resemblance to the look of Yavin IV in A New Hope (both jungle and temple). Valérian is also trapped inside liquid plastic in this story arc, in a pose that’s very reminiscent of Han Solo’s similar carbonite fate in The Empire Strikes Back.
Beyond this, the creatures that capture Valérian and Laureline look similar to Ralph MacQuarrie’s original sketches for Chewbacca. The Empire of a Thousand Planets also includes a desert planet, an ice world, the aforementioned Yavin IV-like locale, as well as a bazaar that’s reminiscent of Tatooine’s Mos Eisley in both A New Hope and Mos Espa in The Phantom Menace.
The comparisons don’t stop there, either.
On the False Earths (1977) introduces an army of Valérian clones, which are created for a very specific secret purpose, much like the secret Clone Army that’s based on Jango Fett’s DNA in Attack of the Clones. Ambassador of Shadows (1975) introduced greedy traders called Shingouz, who look quite a bit like The Phantom Menace’s Watto (a Toydarian). Watto was designed by Doug Chiang, who was the design director on The Phantom Menace, and produced additional concept designs for Attack of the Clones and The Force Awakens. Mézières reportedly claims Chiang is a Valérian fan.
There are other design parallels, too, with this niptastic NSFW look at what might otherwise be Yoda’s hut, what could have been an influence for the look of Cloud City, and a ship that may have inspired the design of the Mon Calamari cruisers.
Kim Thompson from The Comics Journal wrote an intro to one of the first English translation of Valérian: The New Future Trilogy, which claims that “over the years word leaked back that the Star Wars designers (some of them French) had indeed maintained a nice collection of Valérian albums.” Despite Thompson’s claim, no names of French designers were offered, and I couldn’t find any evidence of this while scouring through the IMDb credits, most notably for the earlier Star Wars movies.
Apart from some of those potential visual influences, by far the biggest parallel between Valérian and Star Wars, for me, is one that’s not great for either: clunky, overwritten dialogue. While the dialogue improved in the Original Trilogy as Lucas moved away from writing and directing, the clumsiness returned in the Prequel Trilogy when he came back to those roles. In Valérian and Laureline, the dialogue often dominates the panel and is unnecessarily expository, though I can appreciate that some of this may be due to the reality that it’s been translated.
As much as I love the original Star Wars, even the legendary Alec Guinness struggled with Lucas’ dialogue, and called it “rubbish”, according to letters Guinness wrote to a friend while shooting Star Wars. “New rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges [bundles] of pink paper, and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable.” There’s even recent evidence that Carrie Fisher rewrote Leia’s dialogue.
Ultimately, I expected the parallels to be more clear-cut, given the recent noise that’s been made about the similarities between Star Wars and the Valérian comics. From what I’ve read, seen and researched, there’s certainly an argument for design influence.
In his Die Welt interview, Christin even recognises that Star Wars influenced later issues of his comics. If Lucas or Macquarie had been influenced by Christin and Mézières’ work, that fed back into the Valérian comics, which Christin admits were inspired by earlier sci-fi works. In this respect, the circle is complete, albeit without acknowledgement. Given that the Valérian and Laureline comics aren’t terribly well known outside of Europe even today, though, it seems more likely that the crossover was, at worst, unintentional and, at best, coincidental.
English-translated compendiums of the Valérian and Laureline comics are relatively recent, and that’s in the Internet Age, let alone in the ’70s when all comic consumption was physical. Valérian and Laureline comics are interesting in their own right, but their titular characters explorations through space (and, tangentially, time) fall more into the pile of notable sci-fi works that delve into different territories than what George Lucas was obsessed with in his battle of good and evil in the Star Wars saga.
Nathan Lawrence is a freelance writer based in Sydney. He's a film freak and shooter specialist. Track him down on Twitter.
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