http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2752452.html

This first album in the new sequence has two strands, the problems of a reconnaissance team on the planet known as Antares (not of course in orbit around Antares, just a star in roughly the same direction as seen from Earth), and the efforts of the Forward Enterprises corporation of New York to persuade Kim, the heroine of the first two series, to lead an expedition to find out what is going on. Kim has her own problems, having been impregnated by an alien being in the middle of the previous book and producing a little girl with fins and gills. By the end of this volume she has reluctantly agreed to return to space with her old comrades and her child, and we are braced for the next volume. ( )

I saw on Léo’s Wikipedia page that there were five books in the Antares series, so I waited until five had been published in English by Cinebook and then bought them… only to discover that the final episode ends on a cliff-hanger. Argh. The story continues on from Betelgeuse and features the same group of characters. Kim is having trouble settling on Earth – she doesn’t like that there’s so many people, and she doesn’t like her celebrity status. But when a multinational corporation sets up a colonisation mission to Antares and asks her to join it, she initially refuses. Eventually, she agrees, but en route she discovers that the mission was put together by a religious cult, and it’s one of those that treats women like chattel (the women must shave their heads and wear inflated coveralls to hide their figures so they don’t tempt the men, ffs). Once they land on Antares, things start to go wrong. The flora and fauna is lethal, the cultists have seized power, and the mysterious aliens from the earlier books are somehow involved. I do like this series of bandes dessinées but Léo portrays all his religious characters as complete misogynists and it feels a little one-note – especially when set against all the strong female characters in the series. ( )