by Pierre
Christin (Author), Jean-Claude Mézières
(Artist)
Publisher : Cinebook,
Ltd (March 7, 2018)
Softcover, 64
pages
This
is volume 21, the final album, of the series Valerian & Laureline: Spatio-Temporal Agents. The Valerian
series (for those who don’t know) is one of the longest running series ever in
French-Belgium comic history. Now you might see that the series goes up to
volume 23, but the following two albums simply collect short stories and
vignettes from the two characters. The authors even write on page one, “This
volume is the conclusion to Valerian and Laureline’s saga. It brings back
characters and refers to events from just about every book in the series. It is
highly recommended that you read those first.”
Valerian
and Laureline used to work for the Spatio-Temporal Service which protects the
planets of the Terran Empire and its capital, Galaxity, in the 28th century. An
event in 1986 where a disaster did or did not occur has wiped this timeline out
of existence, displacing our two heroes in alternate time. They have discovered
that Earth has been displaced by a race of sentient stones, called the Wolochs,
has displaced Earth in the Great Void and our heroes rush to put time and space
right, not knowing which Earth will be released - the devastated one, or the
shining jewel of Galaxity.
In
a way this volume is a farewell to the entire series. All the old characters
show up to help our heroes fight against the Wolochs. Old enemies are destroyed
and goodness finally triumphs at a great cost to our heroes. Kind of like the
final episode of Seinfeld, this story is about taking a last look at old
friends and enemies rather than focusing on an amazing final story. While the
battle is intense, you always kind of knew they were going to succeed. What
happened after that was unforeseen and well done. A fitting end to our heroes.
For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.
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