Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

It was a long time ago, but I think it happened quickly.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return - my library app has a slight disagreement with itself as to the subtitle, so you may also see The Comeback some places - was published in French by Dargaud in 2000, the same year as the first volume. This version took a lot longer: it was translated by Mercedes Claire Gillion and lettered by Sylvain Dumas for a 2018 e-book-only Europe Comics edition, which is, I think, still the only way this book is available in the English language.

Like the first book, it was written by the prolific Lewis Trondheim and drawn by the energetic Manu Larcenet. It follows directly from the first book; you could click my link above to get a precis of the story if you want or need that. Or, if you prefer to remain ignorant of the plot details of the first book, stop reading now.

Elementary-schoolers Martina and Gildas learned in the first Cosmonauts that their seemingly-paranoid worries were correct: everyone around them was an alien and/or robot (mostly robots made to look like humans by aliens). They were, they were told, clones of the "survivors" of the crash of a human spaceship on this alien world, and were being raised in a close simulacrum of their original lives on Earth by the kindly aliens of the planet Mawis.

Now, they know the truth...but they're still kids, and need to grow up. So all of the robots around them admit to being robots, but school goes on - with some changes, such as the "Exterminating Stinky Aliens" class taught by Professor Vatter.

But, like so many stories told to children, they learn early in this book that what they were told is true...but not complete.

There are nasty aliens: the Meskimek. A Meskimek ship is approaching, and will destroy all life on Mawis. The Mawissians, unfortunately, venerate life so much that they are physically incapable of fighting back.

So the only people on the planet capable of violence are the cloned members of the human crew: Gildas and Martina. Who are maybe eight or nine years old.

But are they the only survivors of that crash? Are there more secrets of their past yet to be discovered?

Well, of course. It would be a short book if the stinky aliens just swept in and killed everybody.

This one is more action-oriented than the first book, as there's a hostile Mekimek fleet chasing our heroes' spaceship nearly continuously for the back three-quarters of the story. This is popular fiction, so of course they survive, learn the truth, and save their friends - and, since it's arguably a book for kids, they also learn some lessons along the way. (Although I should note that European comics "for kids" have a substantially higher amount of violence - very cartoony violence, all zap-rays and explosions, admittedly - than some readers may be comfortable handing to their little Taylors and Liams.)

Larcenet has a very distinctive style here, with lots of often-small panels to get all the action in and people with weird but very readable faces. This is zany but has an undercurrent of real emotion, as I've come to expect from Trondheim. This is a fun, goofy soft-SF comics series, and I'm happy to note that there's still one more to go.