French newspaper Le Monde reports that writer Pierre Christin passed away yesterday, on October 3, aged 86. Christin was best known for creating the sci-fi adventure series Valérian and Laureline with artist Jean-Claude Mézières, which ran for 23 volumes from 1967 to 2019.
A novelist, journalist, and academic, Christin was born in Paris on July 27, 1938. He and Mézières were childhood friends, who first met in an air raid shelter during the Second World War. However, Christin’s interests lay in politics and literature, as well as American culture, instead of art and comics. He studied journalism at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, and Sorbonne University, and moved to the United States to teach French literature at the University of Utah in the 1960s.
While in Utah, Christin reunited with Mézières while the latter was backpacking through the States, and the pair began working on comics together. They continued to collaborate when Christin returned to France to teach at the University of Bordeaux, during which time Valérian and Laureline debuted in the pages of Pilote magazine.
The series, which followed the adventures of a 28th century “spatio-temporal” agent, and the 11th century peasant girl he recruits, became a seminal and highly influential work of sci-fi in the Franco-Belgian comics scene, and beyond, with admirers like Star Wars concept artist Doug Chiang. It was adapted into an animated series in 2007, and a live-action film in 2017.
As well as Valérian and Laureline, Christin was best known for writing several comics by Enki Bilal, such as 1979’s historical thriller The Black Order Brigade, Annie Goetzinger (The Hardy Agency), and André Juillard (Lena), as well as the 2021 biography Orwell (penciled by Sébastien Verdier.) Further credits included Bilal’s 1989 film Bunker Palace Hôtel, and the 2017 opera La Citadelle de Verre.
He co-founded the IBJA (Journalism Institute of Bordeaux Aquitaine), and was recognized during his lifetime with several awards, including the 1976 Angoulême prize for Best French Author, and a medal from the Order of Arts and Letters in 2015. His death comes nearly three years since that of Mézières, who passed away on January 23, 2022, aged 83. Among his last projects was a Valérian and Laureline spin-off called Where Stories Are Born, illustrated by Virginie Augustin, where (rather poignantly in retrospect) the title characters become children in the present day.