I have one thought about the trailer for the upcoming movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and that thought is: “Dat is purty.” I’ll be reviewing the movie, and I know it’s important to approach the film with an open mind. However, I strongly suspect that my movie review will also boil down to: “Dat is purty.” In keeping with this theme, my review of the first Valerian graphic novel The City of Shifting Waters, originally printed in installments starting in 1968, is “Dat is purty.” Also, this comic is seriously and delightfully insane.

Valerian and Laureline is a French comic book series that was first published in 1967 and ran until 2010. The City of Shifting Waters is the second story arc, but the first to be collected in graphic novel form. This story is without a doubt the most late 1960’s thing in the history of all late 1960’s things (Laureline literally wears flowers in her hair), but it’s also eerily appropriate to 2017 since it deals with global warming (caused by the explosion of a hydrogen bomb depot at the North Pole) and a flooded, tropical, abandoned New York City.

I’ll let Valerian’s boss explain the plot:

Galaxity’s only political prisoner, the dangerous Xombul, has escaped. That madman who wanted to dislocate our society to become its dictator is now free. The worst thing is that he got his hands on one of our spatio-temporal ships and is moving around history freely. If he gets it into his head to modify our past, our civilization’s very existence is uncertain…He showed up in New York in 1986…and you’re going to follow him there.

Either phrases like “spatio-temporal ships” are music to your ears or they aren’t, and if they aren’t, this is not your series. It seems that the years from 1986 to the 24^th century are “a mysterious era.” Most of civilization was wiped out in the disaster caused by the hydrogen depot’s demise (which happened in 1986). So Valerian and Laureline, two spatio-temporal agents, have to head into the unknown of past Earth to capture Xombul. This involves a tsunami, killer robots, and a guy named Sun Rae who runs a criminal organization and plays the flute. At one point Laureline gets shrunk (she gets better), and at another point everyone ends up running through Yellowstone National Park while yelling, “THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!” It’s space opera crossed with, one suspects but cannot confirm, a lot of LSD.

The art is both busy and stunning. Prepare yourself for sensory overload. The images of a New York strangled with vegetation are haunting. The hovercraft escape from New York looks and feels like it’s actually in motion. Yellowstone is a hellscape of bubbling lava. Youdon’t get nuanced facial expressions, but you do get exquisitely detailed and surrealistic landscapes.

This is not a romance comic. Valerian and Laureline have a strictly platonic relationship and as far as I know their relationship stayed that way all the way through the comic’s run. According to Wikipedia, the longer the comic ran the more progressive it became. “The City of Shifting Waters” has a shrinking, furious Laureline saying “This kind of thing always happens to the girls!” but it also gives her a lot to do, including being a crack shot. According, again, to my beloved Wikipedia without which I’d have no career, Laureline advances from sidekick to a more equal footing in “The Land Without Stars.”

I can’t review the entire series based on one story arc, because the series evolved over time. What I can say is that “The City of Shifting Waters” is goofy fun in the old Buck Rogers sense. The plot isn’t very interesting (they chase a bad guy), and the characters are pretty basic, but the visuals are incredible. It’s a joyride through space and time made excellent by fine art!