Born in Paris and raised in nearby Saint-Mandé, he was introduced to drawing by his elder brother and influenced by comics artists such as Hergé, Andre Franquin and Morris and later by Jijé and Jack Davis.

A lifelong interest in the Wild West led him to travel to the United States in 1965 in search of adventure as a cowboy, an experience that would prove influential on his later work.

Mézières contributed as a conceptual designer on several motion picture projects, most notably the 1997 Luc Besson film, The Fifth Element, as well as continuing to work as an illustrator for newspapers, magazines and in advertising.

Raised in the Saint-Mandé area in the suburbs of Paris, Jean-Claude Mézières met his friend and frequent collaborator Pierre Christin at the age of two in an air-raid shelter during World War II.

[1][3] This was followed, at the age of sixteen, by La Grande Poursuite, a Western influenced by Tintin, Lucky Luke and Roy Rogers which he sent to Hergé in the hope of getting published.

With Giraud in particular, he developed a life-long friendship due to their shared interest in Westerns and science fiction (both men later worked together as production illustrators on Besson's The Fifth Element).

[1] At this time he also rekindled his friendship with Pierre Christin, who was coincidentally attending the high school next door to the Arts Appliqués, the pair bonding over a mutual interest in jazz and cinema.

[1] Following art college, Mézières entered military service, which at the time lasted twenty-eight months, including a tour of duty based in Tlemcen, Algeria, during the Algerian War, returning to France just fifteen days before the Algiers putsch.

[1][2] Mézières had been fascinated by the American Old West since he was a little boy through exposure to Western genre films starring the likes of Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster and James Stewart and comics such as Lucky Luke and Jerry Spring.

[4] When winter came and there was no work available on the ranches, he collaborated with Christin on a six-page strip called Le Rhum du Punch, a copy of which he sent to Jean Giraud who was by now writing and illustrating Blueberry for the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote.

[1][2] Drawing on influences from literary science fiction,[1] Mézières and Christin devised the character of Valérian, a spatio-temporal agent from the 28th century employed by Galaxity, the capital of the future Earth, to protect space and time from interference.

[12] Bad Dreams was followed by La Cité des Eaux Mouvantes (The City of Moving Waters) and its sequel Terre en Flammes (Earth in Flames) in 1968 and 1969 respectively.

[11][13] Jean-Pierre Andrevon best sums up Mézières' style at this time in his 1970 review of the story where he describes Valérian as a "kind of Lucky Luke of space-time".

[10] L'Empire des Mille Planètes (Empire of a Thousand Planets) premiered in Pilote in 1969 and marked a further development for the Valérian series and for Mézières art.

This story was the series' first full-blown attempt at space opera and it set out for the first time the two main signature elements of Valérian: the use of science fiction as a political allegory and Mézières' meticulously detailed depictions of alien worlds.

[1] Also in 1984 he produced designs for director Jeremy Kagan who was attempting to adapt René Barjavel's novel La Nuit des temps (The Ice People).

[1][16] In October 1985, Mézières was contacted by the German director Peter Fleischmann who proposed to adapt Russians Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 1964 novel Hard to Be a God into a film.

Along with his old friend Jean Giraud, who had also been approached by Besson, he began work producing concepts of buildings and vehicles for the futuristic New York depicted in the script.

This album made use of some of the concepts Mézières had worked on for Zaltman Bléros and featured a character, S'Traks, who drove a flying taxi around a great metropolis on the planet Rubanis.

The narrative comprises various documents related to the lost ship: comic strips, log books, even an investigative journalism account by a fictionalised Mézières and Christin.

Mézières undertook considerable research in putting together this book, visiting the ports of Liverpool, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Lübeck, Bordeaux, Bilbao and Genoa.

He created a series of futuristic arches, called Chemin des Etoiles (The Way of the Stars) along the Rue Faidherbe in the city, similar to those seen at the Port Abyss spaceport depicted in the Valérian album At the Edge of the Great Void which was first published the same year.

[11][22] The success of these strips eventually led to the creation of Métal Hurlant, the highly influential French comics magazine dedicated to science fiction.

[2][11] On occasion this went beyond mere influence – following a complaint by Mézières, the artist Angus McKie admitted that several panels of his strip So Beautiful and So Dangerous were copied from the Valérian album Ambassador of the Shadows.

In particular, several commentators, such as Kim Thompson,[24] Jean-Philippe Guerand[25] and the newspaper Libération,[26] have noted certain similarities between the Valérian albums and the Star Wars film series.

[27] As a riposte, he produced an illustration for Pilote magazine in 1983 depicting the Star Wars characters Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa meeting Valérian and Laureline in a bar surrounded by a bestiary of alien creatures typical of that seen in both series.