https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2908882.html

I got properly hooked by this after reading Épisode 1, and ploughed enthusiastically through the rest of the sequence. I felt that Leo is on top of his game here, balancing the travails of the exploration party (led of course by Kim, who is the heroine of the entire story) with the story of the evil fundamentalist cultists who are trying to assert control over the entire colony and put women like Kim in their place. At the same time the sensawunda is maintained, with the last volume knitting together strands from the Aldébaran and Bételgeuse cycles to reach a pretty satisfying conclusion to Kim's story, all as ever gorgeously illustrated. ( )

I started reading Léo’s sf bandes dessinées at the tail end of 2013, starting with the Aldebaran series, after stumbling across them on Amazon and thinking they might be worth a go. They were. After the three books of the Aldebaran series (published as five books in the original French) came Betelgeuse in three volumes (also originally five books), and now Antares, which has stretched to six “episodes”. (There’s a further linked series, The Survivors, currently unfinished, with three volumes.) Anyway, in Aldebaran, Kim Keller, a native of the human colony on a world orbiting that star, finds herself involved with a group who have been granted immortality by the enigmatic alien Mantris. In Betelgeuse, she is recruited for a mission to discover why the colony on a world orbiting that star has suddenly gone silent, and so finds herself involved with another Mantris and a humanoid alien race. Finally, in Antares, Kim is asked to join an expedition to settle a planet orbiting… not Antares, which is a red giant, but GJ-1211, a main sequence star which is invisible from Earth against the brightness of Antares. The expedition is run by religious zealots, and they don’t get on at all with Kim – especially when it seems she’s tied into whatever’s going on. They’re pretty good these bandes dessinées – smart science fiction and well-drawn. Worth reading. ( )