Disappearance
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The comic book author who notably signed the drawings for the science fiction series “Valérian et Laureline” died at the age of 83 on the night of Saturday to Sunday, announced his publisher Dargaud.
An authentic space cowboy with a rattling voice has just disappeared. A founding father of modern science fiction, in comics but also in cinema, which he enormously inspired. Jean-Claude Mézières was 83 years old, he died in the night from Saturday to Sunday.
The genesis of his great humanist space opera, Valerian, looks like a biopic, as it sometimes seems too good to be true… The story of two friends from Saint-Mandé, in the Parisian suburbs, who find themselves by accident on the other side of the world, in Utah, in the middle 1960s. America’s force of attraction. Pierre Christin teaches French there at the University of Salt Lake City. Jean-Claude Mézières, who then called himself “JC”, managed to get hired as a cowboy on a ranch. “The fire crackles, muffled bellows echo somewhere in the canyons, the horses finish their ration of oats, the sky turns pale, it is almost clear now. Let’s go!” he writes once back, in the pages of the magazine Pilot. The article is accompanied by a brilliant archive image showing the cartoonist, 25 years old, parading around a ranch in jeans and a hat like in a John Ford film. Mézières, who nevertheless attended the School of Applied Arts and placed a few boards in periodicals heart goes…