In Review: Yoko Tsuno – The Three Suns Of Vinea

By Jeremy Briggs on September 14, 2016

Yoko Tsuno and her friends Vic and Pol return in The Three Suns Of Vinea, the eleventh of Cinebook’s translations of Roger Leloup’s tales of the young engineer. This follows on in the alien Vinean sub-series from The Curious Trio and The Forge Of Vulcan, and takes our modern day trio on an intergalactic expedition.

When their home world of Vinea was threatened with destruction by its suns, the blue skinned Vineans sent ships out into their M33 galaxy and beyond to find worlds on which to survive. Those who settled on Earth lived secretly underground until an attempt to come out of hiding in The Forge Of Vulcan went badly wrong and the remaining Vineans decided to try to return to their planet to see if it had survived.

Yoko’s Vinean friend Khany had agreed to say goodbye before she left and makes contact with Yoko, Vic and Paul and brings them into Earth orbit in her shuttle. However rather than a brief visit to see their home world from on high, the three friends are invited first to the Vinean space station in Saturnian orbit and then onwards as part of the Earth-based Vinean survey team reconnoitring the seemingly long abandoned planet of Vinea itself. There they find a small population subservient to an unseen Supreme Leader who the friends decide to investigate.

As a junior adventure series the Yoko Tsuno books tend to have straight-forward stories that progress in a logical manner which while exciting for younger readers can sometimes feel a little lacking for adult readers. Yet the scope of The Three Suns Of Vinea is epic taking our heroine on an intergalactic voyage where she spends over two months in a suspended animation capsule. There is a touch of the Dan Dare story “Voyage To Venus” here as the Earth-based explorers come across a barrier separating the two sides of the planet and discover inhabitants subservient to a totalitarian leader, however the reveal of the Supreme Leader in this books shows him to be very different to The Mekon.

Yet for all this I have a soft spot for the Yoko Tsuno books with their imaginative stories coupled with Roger Leloup’s engineering heavy ligne claire artwork and The Three Suns Of Vinea is probably the most impressive of all the Yoko books to date.

• There are more details of all the English language Yoko Tsuno books on the Cinebook website

• There are more details of the original French books on the official Yoko Tsuno website (in French)

• The downthetubes review of the other two Vinean Yoko Tsuno books, The Curious Trio and The Forge Of Vulcan, are here and here

Jeremy Briggs

News, reviews, interviews and features for print and on-line: Spaceship Away (since October 2005), Bear Alley (since February 2007), downthetubes (since June 2007), and Eagle Times (since October 2008). Plus DC Thomson’s The Art Of Ian Kennedy, Titan’s Dan Dare and Johnny Red reprints, Ilex’s War Comics: A Graphic History and 500 Essential Graphic Novels, and Print Media’s The Iron Moon and Strip magazine.