It’s 1975,and the fifth Yoko Tsuno adventure hits the shelves: after the collection of shorts the previous year, it’s again a full 46 page story, called Message pour l’éternité; it will appear as the tenth volume in English, as Message for Eternity.

The story is possibly the most tech-oriented so far, and Roger Leloup gives us a whole cotalog of planes, drawn in the most accurate way. We get gliders, helicopters, stratospheric jets, Russian Mig 21…
And then a car chase, an international mystery, espionage, intrigue, a “lost world” situation of sorts…

Following a fortuitous landing while flying her glider, Yoko is hired by a mysterious British gentleman: for ten thousand dollars (quite a figure, in ’75), she will fly an experimental glider in a strange crater at the Russian-Afghan border. Apparently this is the site of the crash of a Hadley Heracles plane in the 1930s. The plane was carrying some secret documents, and Yoko will have ti recover them.

But of course there are enemy agents trying to track the wreckage, and once found, the Heracles will turn out to hold more secrets than expected.
Including an army of baboons.
Ne, really, it does make sense.

Once again, the comic has some very verbose expository passages, but by now Yoko and Leloup have found their pace, and the story delivers perfectly.
The tech is spot-on, and quite up-to-date for 1975 – indeed one of the best bits of reading this in the 70s was seeing on the page what we often had just seen in the science & technology segment of the TV news.
The James Bond plot is lightweight (this is still a comic for young teenagers), but it hits all the required plot points.

We also get a better glimpse at the main protagonist. Yoko is stranded in the mysterious crater for the last ten pages, and we get the opportunity to see her resourceful, determined self, as she used the stuff at hand to craft herself a way out.

A joy for kids that in the 70s were into James Bond movies, adventure yarns, and ultra-cool planes and other aircraft. By volume 5, we were all hooked.