MÉZIÈRES

JEAN-CLAUDE MÉZIÈRES VALÉRIAN Welcome to Alflolol (T.4), Dargaud 1972 Original plate n° 11, prepublished in Pilote n° 636 of January 13, 1972 India ink on paper 39.6 × 47.3 cm (15.59 × 18.62 in.) This plate is remarkable on several levels. First of all, it is one of Valerian's first political albums evoking the planet Alfolol, shamelessly plundered by the Earthlings to the detriment of an indigenous, civilised and generous people. An album with spiritual accents (without the mysticism that we'll find later in Jodorowsky's work) but also ecologist before the letter, and this at the beginning of the 1970s! Then because everything is organized around a central sphere that reverberates in all the squares, while another axis is established by a succession of fields and counter-fields, accentuated by the effects of shadow and light. Impeccable mastery on the part of a draughtsman who is only at his fourth album!