The series focuses on the adventures of the dark-haired Valérian, a spatio-temporal agent, and his redheaded female colleague, Laureline, as they travel the universe through space and time.

Christin's scripts are noted for their humour, complexity and strongly humanist and left-wing liberal political ideas while Mézières's art is characterized by its vivid depictions of the alien worlds and species Valérian and Laureline encounter on their adventures.

The series is considered a landmark in European comics and pop culture,[1] and influenced other media as well; traces of its concepts, storylines and designs can be found in science fiction films such as Star Wars and The Fifth Element.

[6] However, since the end of the story The Wrath of Hypsis (Les Foudres d'Hypsis), in which Galaxity disappears from space-time as a result of a temporal paradox, the pair have become freelance trouble-shooters travelling through space and time offering their services to anyone willing to hire them while also searching for their lost home.

However, thanks to Pierre Christin's interest in politics, sociology, and ethnology, as the series progressed the situations typically arose from misunderstandings or ideological differences between various groups that could be resolved through reason and perseverance.

[8] The core theme of the stories is an optimistic liberal humanism: the adventures are not about defeating enemies but about exploring, facing challenges, and celebrating diversity.

[8] Thus, according to the academic John Dean, Christin "as a rule works into his narratives political, environmental and feminist concerns – thereby showing social ills are universal, no matter on what planet you land".

[10] Other themes include: These themes are underpinned by the vivid drawings of Jean-Claude Mézières, whose "visually stunning backgrounds: complex architecture, futuristic machines, otherworldly landscapes and odd-looking aliens",[9] are what John Dean calls "staples of Mézières' seeming boundless visual inventiveness",[9] resulting in what the artist Pepo Pérez likens to "National Geographic, but on a cosmic scale".

In the early stories, Laureline generally sits in the background while Valérian saves the day in whatever situation the pair have found themselves, but her position changes as the series develops.

Later, when acting as independent agents, it is Laureline who questions the ethics of some of the jobs they are forced to take to make ends meet, notably in The Living Weapons (Les Armes Vivantes).

For example, she attracts the attention of the Emperor of Valsennar in World Without Stars and, dressed in leather gear and boots, she manipulates Crocbattler and Rackalust in Brooklyn Station, Terminus Cosmos and regularly charms the Shingouz when negotiating with them for information.

[8] The decision to work in the science fiction genre was also influenced by the political climate in France at the time; Mézières and Christin saw Valérian as a "backdoor" means to react against the prevailing doctrine of Gaullism.

[12] There had been French science fiction comics before Valérian such as Kline's Kaza the Martian (a childhood favourite of Mézières),[12] Roger Lecureux and Raymond Poivet's Les Pionniers de l'Espérance (The Pioneers of Hope) (which Christin found tired and repetitive)[8] and Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella.

[19][20] Mézières and Christin were also heavily influenced by literary science fiction such as that by Isaac Asimov (especially The End of Eternity),[11] Jack Vance (especially The Blue World),[12] and John Brunner.

[21] Christin has also cited the whodunit genre—notably novels by Georges Simenon and Ed McBain—as an influence on Valérian since they taught him, as a writer, that all characters in a narrative must be seen to have motivations.

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

[24] Sometimes the impact of Valérian has gone 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 Ambassador of the Shadows.

[28] As a riposte, Mézières 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.

When the project stalled and Besson moved on to work on the film Léon in 1994, Mézières returned to Valérian for the album The Circles of Power (Les Cercles du Pouvoir).

[31] Mézières sent a copy of the album to Besson who was inspired to change the background of Korben Dallas, the lead character of The Fifth Element, from a worker in a rocketship factory to that of a taxi driver who flies his cab around a Rubanis-inspired futuristic New York City.

[37] The encyclopedia of the alien creatures found in the Valérian universe Les Habitants du Ciel: Atlas Cosmique de Valérian et Laureline (The Inhabitants of the Sky: The Cosmic Atlas of Valerian and Laureline) received a special mention by the jury at the 1992 Angoulême International Comics Festival in the Prix Jeunesse 9–12 ans (Youth Prize 9–12 years) category.

The second Valérian story, The City of Shifting Waters (La Cité des Eaux Mouvantes), was the first to be collected in graphic novel album format by Dargaud.

Seven short stories were also published in the digest-sized Super Pocket Pilote in 1969 and 1970 and later collected in Across the Pathways of Space (Par Les Chemins De l’Espace) in 1997.

[43][44] Ambassador of the Shadows was later republished in English in album format as were World Without Stars, Welcome to Alflolol and Heroes of the Equinox by the short-lived Dargaud-USA and Dargaud-Canada between 1981 and 1984 and in the United Kingdom by Hodder-Dargaud in 1984 and 1985.

[43] Heroes of the Equinox was republished in July 1996 in black and white by Fantasy Flight Publishing (an offshoot of Fantasy Flight Games) in two issues as standard American sized comic-books as part of an unsuccessful attempt to translate and print several European comic book series including Spirou et Fantasio and Lucky Luke.

[45] In November 2004, iBooks published Valérian: The New Future Trilogy, collecting the albums On the Frontiers, The Living Weapons and The Circles of Power in one volume reduced to standard American graphic novel size.

[49] Many of the Valérian stories have, be it in part or in whole as a series, been translated from their original French into several other languages besides English, including German (as Valerian und Veronique), Dutch (as Ravian: Tijd/ruimte-agent), the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish) (as Linda og/och Valentin), Finnish (as Valerian ja Laureline and previously as Avaruusagentti Valerianin seikkailuja), Spanish, Portuguese (as Valérian, agente espácio-temporal), Serbian (as Valerijan), Italian, Turkish, Polish, Indonesian and Standard Chinese.

In 1991, Dargaud Films financed the production of a three-minute pilot, directed by Bernard Deyriès and animated by Studio 32 in Paris and Luxembourg, but nothing came of this venture.

Valerian and Laureline, our two young heroes, seem to be the only representatives of the human race in the unsafe galaxy where the nightmarish Vlagos are conspiring to control the world.

Sent out on an assignment by the head of STS (the Spatial-Temporal Service), Valerian and Laureline discover the existence of a time-portal, a mysterious phenomenon, which may hold the key to the recovery of Earth.