YMMV / Valérian

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The final volume gives a far more positive perspective to the Mad Scientist Xombul who was the Big Bad of the earliest stories. He is literally the only person in Galaxity who understands what Valerian and Laureline have gone through on their adventures, and their final encounter is a friendly one.
• Breakout Character: Laureline was only supposed to be in the first story, but the creators and readers liked her so much that she was promoted to co-protagonist.
• Fridge Logic: in "Sur Les Frontieres", rogue Earthling Jal rapes Kistna, a member of an alien race endowed with almost god-like powers... which she doesn't use to defend herself.
• Les Yay: Na'Zultra, the villain of The Circles of Power stops trying to kill Valérian and Laureline upon discovering that Laureline is an attractive young woman and instead has her kidnapped, and tries to persuade her to join her organization in rather flirty tones. At the end of the comic Valérian admits that he found Na'Zultra rather attractive, and Laureline laughs that he wouldn't have been her type.
• Seasonal Rot: At some point after "The Wrath of Hypsis" the series starts getting worse and worse. Valérian & Laureline has always had it's share of political commentary and satire, but by the 1990s they have pretty much taken over the series. Instead of portraying cool and otherworldly aliens liked it used to do (remember, this is a series that actually produced its own bestiary), Mézières and Christin start making them into thinly veiled humans. For example, in the last few books we get to see alien gangsters who dress up like Mafiosos and speak Italian, an octopus creature who inexplicably wears a British gentleman's suit, and even a space alien version of Corto Maltese! What's worse, Christin seems to have lost his capability of writing coherently: the plots of the last few albums mostly just have various things happening in succession with little overall rhyme or reason. On top of that, Mézières' art gets more and more cartoonish towards the end of the series. He's still able to draw breathtaking cosmic visions if he wants to (the Wolochs, for example), but many of the supporting alien characters have turned into caricatures of their former selves.
  • Interestingly, "The Rage of Hypsis" was the last story originally serialised in Pilote magazine, where the series got its start in 1967. Correlation? In any case, the Complete Collection edition by Cinebook collects three volumes apiece, with Hypsis being the last one collected in Volume 4. The post-Pilote stories can thus be avoided without any overlap between either era.

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