The City of Shifting Waters

Galaxity, metropolis of the future and capital of the Terran Empire. New York, 1986, deluged with water, devastated by a cataclysm of nuclear origin. Between the two of them, Valérian and Laureline, projected into a city of perdition, controlled by gangster musicians and haunted by strange robots. The 28th Century Terran Empire, a world seemingly at peace, where space-time travel is commonplace and so is the Spatio-Temporal Agents Service, patrolling history and the universe to safeguard the Earth and the Empire. Two of the service’s greatest agents are Valerian and Laureline, spirited, brave and always at the heart of any trouble going.

In "The City of Shifting Waters" the Galaxity’s only serious criminal Xombul has escaped, stolen a spatio-temporal ship and has headed back to 1986 New York, a crucial time in the Empire’s history, the start of the forgotten era, the time of both the great cataclysm that wiped away the existing civilization and also the time where space-time travel was invented, an era that saw mankind’s greatest calamity and the technology appear that would eventually save it and allow the current Empire to exist.

The adventures of Valerian and Laureline is something of a classic French comic book (or bande dessinée) and one of the top selling titles in Darguard’s history, with it’s influence everywhere in modern science fiction. 

"The City of Shifting Waters" by Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin is not the greatest science-fiction comic book  - but it is the beginning of what is one of the most influential, entertaining and long-lasting sci-fi comic books.

Pierre Christin was born at Saint-Mandé in 1938. After graduating from the Sorbonne, Christin pursued graduate studies in political science at SciencesPo and became a professor of French literature at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. His first comics story, Le Rhum du Punch, illustrated by his childhood friend Jean-Claude Mézières, was published in 1966 in Pilote magazine. Christin returned to France the following year to join the faculty of the University of Bordeaux. That year he again collaborated with Mézières to create the science-fiction series Valérian and Laureline for Pilote. The first episode was Les Mauvais Rêves (Bad Dreams).

"The City of Shifting Waters" is the first full-length adventure of Valerian and Laureline, agents of Galaxity, roaming the endless infinities of the universe. Published originally in the late ’60s, it would be followed by another 20 in the next 40 years. Cinebook has started the ball rolling. 

Read that fantastic Sci-Fi comics here....

City of Shifting 
Waters (Xtnd)