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Interview
BiographyJean-Claude Méziéres was born in 1938. In an air-raid during the war he met a refugee, Pierre Christin. When he was fifteen he enrolled in the Institute of Applied Arts, where he met Giraud, although neither was to make a splash in the world of home furnishings. While still studying design he published some stories in "Fripounet et Marisette", "Coeurs Vaillants" and "Spirou". Then he began his long military service. When he returned to civilian life he gave up cartoons to dedicate himself to illustration and advertising. In 1965, faithful to his childhood dream ("Go west, young man) he left for the United States, where he worked as a cowboy from Montana to Arizona. When winter came, and with it the snow, he fled to join Christin, who was teaching French literature at the University of Salt Lake City in Utah. In order to earn money for their return tickets to France, they collaborated on a 6-page adventure, which was sent to the magazine "Pilote", and published in n.66. Returning to France, Christin and Mézières perfected their working method: interaction in the construction of plots, collaboration, bouncing ideas off each other. In 1967, when science fiction was still little appreciated in France, they published the first Valérian adventure in "Pilote". It was well received: readers were susceptible to the charms of Laureline, the heroine, as well as Barbarella. Unaware that they had created an endless saga, Mézières and Christin found themselves at the centre of an intereting temporal paradox: in an album drawn in 1968, they had predicted a universal cataclysm in 1986, a date which had seemed sufficiently remote in time, 1984 having already been spoken for... Hence the furious battles of the two albums published in 1984 and 1985, destined to correct this blunder... In 1984 Jean-Claude Mézières was awarded the Grand Prix of the city of Angoulême. In 1987 he and Christin began work on Lady Polaris, an extraordinary graphic novel on the great ports of Europe, published by Autrement. In 1991 they published Les habitants du ciel: Atlas cosmique de Valérian et Laureline, which brought together all the creatures encountered by Valérian and Laureline. This album, which combined encyclopaedic rigour with the fascination of a catalogue of arms and mythological cycles, demonstrated the internal coherence of a universe slowly created week after week over the course of twenty years. In 1994 Les cercles du pouvoir, 15th album in the Valérian series, was published. While working on various projects for television, Mézières was preparing Les extras de Mézières (1995), a collection of illustrations created for the press, advertising, cinema and cartoons over more than ten years. Many were created for the Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element (1997). However, the publication of Otages de l'Ultralum (1996) proved that Valérian (and Laureline) are still at the heart of Mézières’ work. |
   
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BibliographyPublished by Dargaud
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