I discovered Druillet’s fabulous bande dessinee in the Shakespeare and Co Bookshop on a visit to Paris in 1969 with the writer Chris Robbins and my wife Jenny. I’d seen some American underground comics in the UK, but this was comic-strip art raised to the level of fine art – printed on coated art paper, published in hard-back, and containing Druillet’s personal mix of sci-fi, fantasy, counter-culture life-styles, hippie mores, op-art, pop-art, and Escher-like comic-strip framing. Druillet’s counter-culture hero, Lone Sloane, wanders through inter-galactic hyper-space like Godard’s Lemmy Caution (in Alphaville), Jean claude Forest’s Barbarella (1962-1964) and Guy Peelaert’s Jodelle (1966).