Returning to France, Mézières teamed up with his childhood friend, Pierre Christin, to create Valérian and Laureline, the popular, long-running science fiction comics series for which he is best known and which has proved to be influential to many science fiction and fantasy films, including Star Wars.

Mézières has also worked as a conceptual designer on several motion picture projects – most notably the 1997 Luc Besson film, The Fifth Element – as well as continuing to work as an illustrator for newspapers, magazines and in advertising.

Mézières has received international recognition through a number of prestigious awards, most notably the 1984 Grand Prix de la ville d ' Angoulême award.

The success of Valérian, however, has led to Mézières becoming involved in a number of, mainly science fiction, film and television projects.

At the same time as he has been working on Valérian and various film and television projects, Mézières has worked extensively producing illustrations and comic strips for magazines and newspapers such as Pilote, Métal Hurlant and Le Monde, covers for books, art for advertising campaigns, etc.

Mézières ' influence has been noticed in such strips as Dani Futuro by Víctor Mora and Carlos Gimenéz and Gigantik by Mora and José Maria Cardona.

Sometimes this 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 the Valérian album Ambassador of the Shadows.

Outside of comics, Mézières ' art has been particularly influential on science fiction and fantasy film.

Mézières has also noticed similarities between some of the sets in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian and the planet seen in Birds of the Master and between some of the production sketches for the alien fighters in the 1996 film Independence Day and Valérian and Laureline's astroship.

Mézières had been fascinated by the American Old West since he was a little boy through exposure to Western genre films starring the likes of Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster and James Stewart and comics such as Lucky Luke and Jerry Spring.

When war again broke out between Francis I and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, Bayard, with 1000 men, held Mézières, which had been declared untenable, against an army of 35, 000, and after six weeks, compelled the imperial generals to raise the siege.

In spring 1667 51, 000 French soldiers, who had been raised in 4 days, deployed between Mézières and the sea.

Another commune, Le Theux, had already been included into Mézières in 1965.

Mézières returned to the production and was amused to discover that the occupation of Korben Dallas, the film's main protagonist, had been changed from a worker in a rocket-ship factory to that of a taxi driver – obviously inspired by Mézières ' drawings for the film and by The Circles of Power.

In 2001, Mézières was approached by the city of Lille, which had been designated European Capital of Culture in 2004, to produce something for the celebrations.

In October 1985, Mézières was contacted by the German director Peter Fleischmann who proposed to adapt Russians Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 1964 novel Hard to Be a God into a film.

In December 1991, Mézières was approached by director Luc Besson, a lifelong fan of Valérian, who wanted Mézières to work on designs for a science fiction film called Zaltman Bléros.

In 1783, after leaving Mézières, he was, on the death of É. Bézout, appointed examiner of naval candidates.

* In 1894 he started construction work on a former military site in the Faubourg Saint-Julian at Mézières, to build a new factory, which would become known as La Macérienne.

Answering an advertisement in Le Figaro after his discharge from the army, Mézières was employed by the publishing house Hachette as an illustrator on a series of books titled Histoire des Civilizations ( History of Civilization ).

To make ends meet, Mézières produced some illustrations for a small advertising agency in Salt Lake City and for a Mormon children's magazine called Children's Friend as well as selling some photographs he had taken while working on the ranch in Montana.

Mézières experiences in the United States have provided the inspiration for several magazine articles published in Pilote, Tintin Magazine and GEO as well as two books – Olivier chez les cow-boys ( Olivier with the Cowboys ), a children's book written by Pierre Christin with photographs and illustrations by Mézières about a visit Christin's son Olivier paid to the ranch Mézières worked on in Utah and Adieu, rêve américain ... ( Farewell, American dreams ...), again written by Christin with photographs and illustrations by Mézières, a nostalgic look back at their time in the United States.

This would be the first serialised strip that Mézières would work on.

Meeting up with Mézières one day, Christin suggested that they work on creating a comic strip together.

Valérian and Laureline, Jean-Claude Mézières ' most famous creations. Drawing on influences from literary science fiction, Mézières and Christin devised the character of Valérian, a spatio-temporal agent from the 28th century employed by Galaxity, the capital of the future Earth, to protect space and time from interference.

Mézières ' style on Valérian remained fairly consistent until 1980's Métro Châtelet, Direction Cassiopeia which mixed the space-opera with scenes set on contemporary Earth.

This album made use of some of the concepts Mézières had worked on for Zaltman Bléros and featured a character, S ' Traks, who drove a flying taxi around a great metropolis on the planet Rubanis.

Mézières was also involved at one point in giving hands-on courses on the production of comic strips at the University of Paris, Vincennes.

Mézières ' arrival on the French comics scene with Valérian was contemporaneous with the debuts of other notable French science fiction strips including Luc Orient by Greg and Eddy Paape and Lone Sloane by Philippe Druillet.

This story was the series ' first full-blown attempt at space opera and it set out for the first time the two main signature elements of Valérian: the use of science fiction as a political allegory and Mézières ' meticulously detailed depictions of alien worlds.

* Valérian and Laureline by Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin

** Special mention: Valérian and Laureline: Les habitants du ciel by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières

* A homage to this painting appears in the final panel of On the False Earths, the seventh volume of Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin's long-running comic book series Valérian and Laureline.

* Jean-Claude Mézières: Valérian and Laureline ( 1967-1985 )

That year he again collaborated with Mézières to create the science-fiction series Valérian and Laureline for Pilote.

Neither Mézières nor Christin had any interest in making Valérian into a clean-cut hero of the type that appeared in French comics of the time.

Jean-Pierre Andrevon best sums up Mézières ' style at this time in his 1970 review of the story where he describes Valérian as a " kind of Lucky Luke of space-time ".

L ' Empire des Mille Planètes ( Empire of a Thousand Planets ) premiered in Pilote in 1969 and marked a further development for the Valérian series and for Mézières art.

The follow-up story World Without Stars saw the final evolution of Mézières ' art into the style that would become prevalent in the Valerian stories of the 1970s and 1980s with the first realistic renderings of Valérian and Laureline as opposed to the caricatures of the earlier stories.

Valérian is Mézières ' best known work, translated into at least thirteen languages, and continues to this day, although the last album L ' Ouvre Temps was published in January 2010.

Mézières returned to Valérian for the album The Circles of Power, published in 1994.