“Yoko Tsuno” is a Franco-Belgian comic created
by Roger Leloup, who worked with both Hergé (the man behind Tintin) and Peyo
(who created the Smurfs). Personally, I feel too old for this rather obvious
fifth-grader material, in which a bunch of super-precocious teenagers and kids
save the world by a combination of martial arts, space age technology and sheer
cleverness.
The story is unrealistic, not because of the scyfy elements, but rather because
the larger-than-life characters are placed in a perfectly normal universe,
complete with annoying reporters, currency fluctuations and expensive airline
tickets! The adults are mildly surprised, but never shocked, by Yoko's advanced
scientific expertise or the fact that blue-skinned aliens live beneath the
ocean floor and occasionally surface in oversized space shuttles?!
OK, perhaps I don't have the right kind of imagination to really enjoy this,
but “The Forge of Vulcan” was boring, with pretty trivial action and too much
techno-stuff, as Yoko and her associates fight to save the world (or at least
Martinique) from a tsunami triggered by evil beings from another planet…
