Graphic novel of the month: The Children of Light by Jean Pleyers

The Zors are in deep trouble. A relatively insignificant alien civilisation from the constellation Ursa Major, they’ve come to realise their planet will soon – ie, in the next 100,000 years – be destroyed by an approaching supernova. So they’re upping sticks, all 2 billion of them, and making for a neighbouring galaxy in search of a new home. For transportation, they hollow out their moon “like a decorative ivory ball” and insert a 1,000km-long engine into its central axis, turning it into a planetary ship powered by a supercomputer resembling a spiny giant squid. Jeff Bezos, eat your heart out.

The adventures of the Zors are charted in The Children of Light by Belgian comics writer and artist Jean Pleyers. Originally serialised in the French magazine Métal Hurlant in the early 1980s, it’s now being published in a single volume, with an English translation by Luke Burns, thanks to the efforts of Tom Oldham of London’s Breakdown Press. A blazingly colourful work of madcap, intergalactic sci-fi, it has a retro charm – glass elevators, monorails, little green men – but also speaks to some of the preoccupations of our time. Among its many oddities is the fact that, according to its author, it’s a true story.

When Oldham contacted Pleyers, who is now in his 80s, he expressed delight about plans to rerelease the collection which, he wrote in an email, “remains timeless, especially since I was actually contacted by these aliens. They dictated this story to me telepathically in 1981.” Pleyers then furnished Oldham with details of the many encounters he’s had with UFOs over the years, several of which occurred in the vicinity of his Brussels tennis club.

Some readers may treat these claims, and the idea that real-life aliens sought out a Belgian cartoonist to channel their tales of woe, with a degree of scepticism. To which I say: open your mind! If we’re going to follow Elon Musk’s lead and become interplanetary, we’d do well to study the pitfalls faced by the wandering Zors.

The dangers lie within as well as without. In the opening pages, a Zorian engineer named Ylo, who has spent decades searching for a new planet to call home, is attacked by masked figures as he’s about to present his research. The dossier is stolen by an anarchist revolutionary group, the Troikas, who plan to zap the moon-ship’s supercomputer and seize the planet for themselves. On a grander scale, more powerful aliens known as the Gogs are interfering with the Zors’ progress for reasons that might not be entirely benign.

For all the feverish brilliance of Pleyers’ sci-fi visions – elaborate cityscapes, hulking spacecraft, psychedelically swirling galaxies – these aliens are rather conventional creations. The Zors are green-skinned humanoids with vaguely east Asian attire and religious practices. The Gogs, also humanoid, are distinguished by their Cheshire cat grins, while another alien race, the Lactarians, have exposed brains a la Mars Attacks!.

On a first read, all the flaws of Pleyers’s story jumped out at me. The breathless pace can be exhilarating but also a bit jerky, with too much exposition dumped into caption boxes. Dei ex machina – teleportation devices, actual gods – are deployed to resolve sticky plot points. Ylo’s story is compelling at first, but later he and other characters get a bit lost in the manic whirl of events.

But when I returned to it, knowing the broad arc of the story, the artistry of Pleyers’s vision came to the fore and I was able to marvel at the Gogs’ ship cruising through cobalt-blue space like some gnarly deep-sea creature, or the squid-like supercomputer plummeting through the vent at the heart of the Zorian moon – surely one of the greatest spectacles in comics. Pleyers’s draughtsmanship is always precise (he’s a devotee of Hergé) but his drawings quiver with energy which, with the great bursts of colour, makes the whole enterprise feel slightly radioactive.

There is humour here too. When the rebel faction make it to the promised land, they find it’s already inhabited by a species very like our own, who delight in nuking one another to smithereens. As the Zors gaze out of their spaceship in dismay, a voice among them casts doubt on the future of this fractious civilisation, which is unlikely to ever truly take flight in space. “The termites will outlive them,” it says.

The Children of Light by Jean Pleyers, translated by Luke Burns, is published by New York Review Comics (£27). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £24.30 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Illustrations by Jean Pleyers