Scans_Daily

Many years ago in that strange era called the 1970's, when still a fairly small icon_uk, I saw a strange book, a large picture book in a language I couldn't read (Much like some of the Tintin, Lucky Luke and Asterix books I'd seen visiting friends have in their possession, but I'd seen those in English too), which featured a Japanese girl as the main character in a science fiction based ser. The book was called "Les Trois Soleils de Vinéa" and as I grew up and learned to read the language I always meant to go back and read more of the books, because I enjoyed that one.

I didn't find any English ones until relatively recently, because for the most part they were first translated from 2007 onwards, and even then not even close to all of them.

I got hold of this book ages ago to scan for here, but I forgot about it until seeing a tumblr post mention the series.

By the second book we're into time travel and antimatter... this is NOT a series that aims low!






Welcome to the world of Yoko Tsuno

To establish a few things

The series, by artist/writer Roger Leloup, started publication in 1970, in the pages of Spirou, the French/Belgian magazine perhaps best known for it's titular character. And I believe it runs there still! (Which is quite the achievement) There have been 26 volumes in total, the most recent coming out in 2011.

Yoko is the main character, and the focus of all stories,. She is, and this was something pretty much groundbreaking for it's time, never mind (alas) today, an electrical engineer by profession, and a very good one. She is, at a guess, in her early 20's, but I can't find any actual age specified, which isn' really surprising in this genre, how old are Tintin or Asterix, for example.

She is Japanese by birth and was raised in Japan, but now lives in Belgium full time, when not travelling the world (and other dimensions) in the pursuit of her adventures. She is smart, logical and practical (electrical enigineering doesn't really lend itself to whimsy), but is prepared to accept the bizarre, based on the assumption that everything is ultimately explicable, to this end whilst fascinated by the events involving everything from suspended animation, space travel, time travel and other dimensions she is not dimissive of them, they happen, they can be explained, accept it, add it to your world view and move on, otherwise what's the point of learning about them in the first place.

She has the usual range of useful skills one might assocate with the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys of this world; she's a diver, a pilot, and a black belt in aikido, basically the usual skill set to allow her to get from A to B as the plot requires and deal with obstacles in her way.

She also has the requisite curiosity for her role and a talent for making friends, which is always a handy one for her sort of lifestyle, where she can be in any part of the world at any time. She does tend to rely too much on the honour of other people, which means she can be a tad naive about trust but there are worse flaws in the world.

She is usually assisted by two male sidekicks; Vic and Pol. Vic is more serious one, dark haired and a former director of TV programs and may well be secretly in love with Yoko, Pol is more the comedy relief (And is about the only character to be drawn in a slightly more cartoonish style), a rather lazy, cynical and grumpy, but ultimately good natured sort.

She also counts amongts her friends some ruly exotic types;  Khany, an alien from the planet Vinéa (and her twin sister Khany, but who due to be left in suspended animation for longer, appears young enough to be Khany's daughter and they find it easier to think of each other like that) and Monya, who you will meet in this story.

Yoko eventually adopts a daughter of her own, a Chinese orphan named "Rosée du matin", who appears in later stories (From 1986 onwards)

This story starts in...





Oh, and if I didn't mention it before, the art is absolutely beautiful!











And I'll leave it on that rather fun cliffhanger, just because I feel evil! :) and to encourage you to seek out the books.

The story then proceeds to involve both past and present, as travel along the time spiral to the past (to World War is required to prevent the disaster in the future. It also includes the Japanese actions in World War II, which

I include these last two panels to highlight just why I love the ligne-claire style of art so much... this one for the landscape shot...



And this one for the fact that when Leloup draws a particle accellerator, he actually draws one.



Having seen more than one actual particle accellerator in my life I can confirm that that's pretty much what they look like, concrete corridors with heavy duty, but rather dull looking hardware. I respect that level of research from Leloup, it also tends to highlight the truly exotic technology and beings which he does produce for the more sci-fi aspects.

But all in all, I can recommend the books if you want something a little different from the investigative journalist school of heroines (Not that there's anything wrong with those of crouse, but some variety is nice, and a heroine who is a scientist/engineer is actually pretty cool)