By Roger Leloup, coloured by Studio Leonardo, translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-84918-438-0 (Album PB)
In 1970, indomitable intellectual adventurer and “electronics engineer” Yoko Tsuno began her career in Le Journal de Spirou. She is still delighting readers and making new fans to this day in astounding, all-action, excessively accessible adventures which are amongst the most intoxicating, absorbing and broad-ranging comics thrillers ever created.
The globe-girdling, space-&-time-spanning episodic epics starring the Japanese investigator were devised by monumentally multi-talented Belgian maestro Roger Leloup, who began his own solo career after working as a studio assistant and technical artist on Herge’s timeless Adventures of Tintin.
Compellingly told, superbly imaginative and – no matter how implausible the premise of any individual yarn may appear – always firmly grounded in hyper-realistic settings underpinned by authentic, unshakably believable technology and scientific principles, Leloup’s illustrated escapades were at the vanguard of a wave of strips revolutionising European comics.
That long-overdue sea-change heralded the rise of competent, clever, brave and formidably capable female protagonists taking their rightful places as heroic ideals; elevating Continental comics in the process. Unsurprisingly, these endeavours are as engaging and empowering now as they ever were, and none more so than the trials and tribulations of Miss Tsuno.
Her very first outings (the still unavailable Hold-up en hi-fi, La belle et la bête and Cap 351) were mere introductory vignettes before the superbly competent wanderer and her valiant but less able male comrades Pol Paris and Vic Van Steen properly hit their stride with premier full-length saga Le trio de l’étrange in 1971 with Le Journal de Spirou’s May 13th edition…
Yoko’s journeys include explosive exploits in exotic corners of our world, time-travelling jaunts and sinister deep-space sagas – like this one – where our terrestrial trouble-shooters toil beside the disaster-prone alien colonists of planet Vinea. Their chief contact and most trusted ally is Khany: a competent, commanding single mother who combines parenting her toddler Poky with saving worlds, leading her people and averting continual cosmic catastrophe…
There are 29 European albums to date (with #30 due for release in September) but only 16 translated into English thus far. Today’s tale debuted in 1983 as Les archanges de Vinéa, chronologically Tsuno’s thirteenth exploit and sixth co-starring the Vineans: a thrilling tale of discovery and ancient undying tyranny and evil…
In their first outing, Yoko, Vic and frivolous Pol discovered a pocket of long-dormant aliens hibernating for eons in the depths of the Earth. After freeing them from robotic subjugation, the valiant humans occasionally helped the alien refugees (who had fled their own planet two million years previously) rebuild their lost sciences. Ultimately, the humans accompanied the Vineans as they returned to their own star system and presumed-dead homeworld. As the migrants gradually rebuilt their decadent and much-debased former civilisation and culture, the trio became regular guests…
On this excursion, the humans are again exploring another reclaimed region of the recovering planet. In the millions of years the Vineans slept in the depths of Earth, their primary civilisation collapsed, and the planet they have reclaimed is much-changed with isolated pockets of the former changed beyond recognition… and usually lethally hostile to their returned descendents…
We open as Yoko and little Poky accompany Khany to a desolate island and interview a strange old hermit who has been sheltering a child from the past. Khany’s cautious efforts reveal a young boy in a hibernation pod for countless ages, and that the entre rig has been until very recently, underwater…
As they further question the crazed old woman who lives in constant dread of The God’s wrath, an atmospheric disturbance occurs, leading them to a fantastic machine thunderously drawing air down into the depths of the sea. When they fly over to investigate further, Kany is lost…
By the time Yoko and Poky land, primitive raiders have boarded the edifice as it starts to sink. From nowhere, a serene and calmly confidant Vinean Adonis appears, saving Yoko from being blasted by the barbaric raiders. As he and Poky are arrested he joins the group but does not interfere.
The newcomers are equipped with makeshift breathing gear and share it with the captives, dropping into the depths just as the edifice was. The sea-dwellers also use huge turtle-like sea-beasts and her enigmatic saviour – easily keeping pace with the raiders – appears to be equally amphibious…
Unwelcome but unmolested, the stranger keeps pace as the war party passes a shattered sunken city, and encounters fierce marine monsters that have been tamed by electronic devices clamped to their heads. It is a technology clearly far beyond the understanding of Yoko’s captors, and gradually she learns of a bizarre truth: these sea-Vineans are low caste workers in a lost subterranean city of evil that has survived submerged for millennia, ruled by a capricious, cruel immortal Queen. Hegora has the powers of a god and is just as implacable…
However, her diffident saviour and guardian is one of twenty undying supermen: “Archangels” set apart from and uncaring of the plight of ordinary beings. As Yoko soon discovers, her acquaintance has a ruthless, timeless agenda of his own…
Her life constantly imperilled as she seeks hostage Khany, Yoko learns the horrific secret of the subsea City of the Abyss, and why the Archangels have battled Hegora for so long: possession and control of thousands of hibernating children. The endless struggle ends as Yoko tips a delicate balance, uncovering the incredible secrets of the City’s past and before long, a cold war resolves into a battle of wills and vastly opposing moralities. In the end it’s Yoko who triumphs to impose a new regime on the sunken citadel…
Gripping and visually spectacular, The Archangels of Vinea combines hard science with tense drama and a soupcon of social criticism: delivering another terse, action-packed, sci fi thriller, once again magnified into magnificence by the astonishingly compelling and staggeringly detailed draughtsmanship and storytelling of Leloup and the indomitable integrity of Yoko Tsuno.
Original edition © Dupuis, 1983 by Roger Leloup. All rights reserved. English translation 2019 © Cinebook Ltd.