Une aventure space-opéra presque chaotique, mais après tout clairement arrangée, racontée avec beaucoup de joie du genre. Recommandée. ( )

The creators of Valerian and Laureline, Mézière and Christin, ended the series in 2013 with the twenty-second volume, Memories from the Futures. Then there was Luc Besson’s disappointing film adaptation. But now we apparently have the pair’s – that’s Valerian and Laureline, of course – further licensed adventures, which makes a point of attempting to be as much like the original as possible. And they pretty much succeed. Except, like the Edgar P Jacobs Studio picked up The Adventures of Blake & Mortimer from Jacobs himself, and actually starting to do a better job of it, with cleverly-plotted stories based on secret history instead of 1930s racist techno-fantasies, so this new Valerian and Laureline is much more twenty-first century than the later volumes by Mézière and Christin. For a start, the two are on a mission to apprehend a robot who is running multiple virtual tax havens in his main processor and so enabling rich people to break no end of Galaxity laws. But then the plot quickly complicates, with the Shingouz turning up having accidentally sold the Earth of three billion years ago to a voracious water pirate, Laureline having her likeness pirated and sold across the galaxy, and Valerian having to supply meat from an endangered species to a chef for a gangster’s banquet in order to… Lupano, the writer, manages to keep all his balls up in the air, and then deal neatly with them one by one. Lauffray’s art is a little more kinetic than Mézière’s but just as detailed. I like this a lot, and I hope it’s the first of a long series. ( )