published in January 2010. It is one of publisher Dargaud's top five best-selling comics series. Various attempts were made from the late 1970s onwards to adapt Valérian for film or television and an animated series, entitled Time Jam: Valerian & Laureline, made its debut in 2007. Work in film and television Mézières was always as interested in the cinema as he was in drawing. In 1957, he began work with Jean Giraud on creating an animated Western. Dissatisfied with the results, the project was abandoned after 45 seconds of animation had been completed. The same year he shot a short, ten-minute, 8 mm film, La vie d'un Rêve (Life is a Dream), with Pierre Christin. The success of Valérian led to Mézières becoming involved in several, mainly science fiction, film and television projects. The first of these was Billet Doux (Love Letter), a 1984 television series starring Pierre Mondy as a comic strip editor for which Mézières mocked up comic book covers and characters. Also in 1984 he produced designs for director Jeremy Kagan who was attempting to adapt René Barjavel's novel La Nuit des temps (The Ice People). Due to difficulties experienced by the film's Iranian producer as a result of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the film was never made. Some of Mézières' production art was published in Les Extras de Mézières. 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. This was to be the first major German-Soviet co-production. Mézières travelled to Moscow to join the production team and also to Uzbekistan where it was proposed to shoot the film. Travelling from there to Munich, he produced several concept drawings and paintings over a three-month period before the project was suspended due to funding difficulties. At this point Mézières left the production and returned to France. Filming was eventually scheduled to begin in April 1986 in Kyiv and Mézières re-joined the production, creating storyboards for some scenes. However, at this time the Chernobyl disaster occurred only 100 km from Kyiv and production was again halted. The film was eventually finished in 1989, but Mézières' concepts were barely used. Again, many of Mézières' designs were later published in Les Extras de Mézières. In December 1991, Mézières was approached by director Luc Besson, a lifelong fan of