Roger Leloup’s second Yoko Tsuno adventure, L’Orgue du Diable, was published in 1973, and marks a big step forward in the series.
The first episode was a fine pilot, but as most pilot episodes do, suffered from an excess of stuff crammed in the 46 pages of the volume: characters introductions, early incidents, first big adventure complete with subterranean world, space aliens and ultra-tech.
A few months later, L’Orgue du Diable (that was published in English as The Devil’s Organ, and as volume #8 in the series) is a much leaner, meaner beast…

On a cruise along the Rhine, where they plan to shoot a documentary on the local folklore, Yoko, Vic and Pol come to the rescue of a young woman, Ingrid, whose father – an expert in the restoration of ancient musical instruments – was the recent victim of a mysterious “accident”.
The adventure follows the parallel tracks of a standard criminal investigation, and an exploration of an ancient local legend, about a cursed organ used during the Inquisition. Both tracks lead to the mysterious Castle Katz, where the plot goes full gothic before the very grounded, somewhat tech-savvy, and pretty gruesome resolution.

Improvements, we said.
Firstly, the art is much better than in volume #1 – as Leloup moves away from the more cartoony Marcinelle style and on to the Ligne Claire style that will characterize the later episodes in the series. The characters are less caricature-like, Yoko has lost her pony-tail to acquire her signature bangs, and Leloup’s eye for big panoramic shots and detailed mechanical designs comes to the fore.

The writing is also better: the characters are more defined, Vic and Pol are thankfully out of the way for most of the action, and plot is tighter and clearer – a basic murder mystery, somewhat in the Nancy Drew/Three Investigators/Scooby Doo style, with enough science and technology dropped in to justify the presence of an engineer as the main character. Here we deal with hydraulics, organs, and the psycho-acoustics of ultra-low sounds. And yes, this is a comic book aimed at teenagers.

Both dialogues and descriptions are still pretty verbose, and here and there the lettering makes for hard reading, but this is a minor gripe.
We can spot the bad guy before the big reveal by noticing he’s the only one to use openly racist slurs against Yoko (something that already happened in #1). This is glaringly obvious for grown-up readers, but once again, for teenagers in the early ’70s was a subtle but strong message.

The lack of a truly science-fictional twist also helps the story – the magnetic trains and the supercomputer in #1 were fine and fun, but here the more grounded, mundane plot gives more room for the characters to act, and their actions are more believable.
We also get a few nice action set-pieces, to spice the story.

In the end, everything’s solved neatly and – in an unexpected twist – Yoko decides not to report to the police her findings: the crimes have been committed, the culprit’s dead, and a scandal would benefit no-one.

It looks like the Yoko Tsuno series is finally firing on all cylinders, as we set down and wait for the second book that will see the light in 1973 – a mystery dealing with Vulcan’s Forge…