Valerian and Laureline

Valerian is an agent of the Spatio-Temporal Service of Galaxity, the capital of a future Terran empire, and his job is to stop anyone tampering with history. Laureline is a young woman he meets in eleventh-century France (she rescues him, as it happens), who proves to be smarter, braver and a much better agent than he is. The series quietly admits this within a few books, and in 2007 finally renamed itself in her honour.

This is the sort of cheerfully inventive space opera that happily sends its heroes into the ruins of flooded New York one week and to a bureaucratic alien planet the next. Many readers have noticed how much Star Wars looks like it, and Mézières was among them. Luc Besson finally filmed it in 2017 as Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a film whose design was far better received than its casting.