Valerian/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternate Character Interpretation: The final volume gives a far more positive perspective to the Mad Scientist Xombul who was the Big Bad of the earliest stories. He is literally the only person in Galaxity who understands what Valerian and Laureline have gone through on their adventures, and their final encounter is a friendly one.
  • Fridge Logic: in "Sur Les Frontieres", rogue Earthling Jal rapes Kistna, a member of an alien race endowed with almost god-like powers... which she doesn't use to defend herself.
  • Seasonal Rot: Your Mileage May Vary when this happens, but at some point after "The Rage of Hypsis" the series starts getting worse and worse. Valérian & Laureline has always had it's share of political commentary and satire, but by the 1990s they have pretty much taken over the series. Instead of portraying cool and otherworldly aliens liked it used to do (remember, this is a series that actually produced its own bestiary), Mézières and Christin start making them into thinly veiled humans. For example, in the last few books we get to see alien gangsters who dress up like Mafiosos and speak Italian, an octopus creature who inexplicably wears a British gentleman's suit, and even a space alien version of Corto Maltese! What's worse, Christin seems to have lost his capability of writing coherently: the plots of the last few albums mostly just have various things happening in succession with little overall rhyme or reason. On top of that, Mézières' art gets more and more cartoonish towards the end of the series. He's still able to draw breathtaking cosmic visions if he wants to (the Wolochs, for example), but many of the supporting alien characters have turned into caricatures of their former selves.