Comic Book / Yoko Tsuno

Yoko Tsuno (1970-) is a French-Belgian comic book series by Roger Leloup. The title character is a young Japanese woman of multiple talents, initially trained as an electrician but also skilled in airplane piloting, martial arts (karate, aikido, kyudo), computer programming, etc. She's fluent in many foreign languages: English (required learning in technology fields), French (she's living there...), German (...or close by), Cantonese (her grandmother was from there) and more (most, through sleep learning improved by future technologies). Her adventures usually involve scientific or technological elements, and regularly go into outright Science Fiction, with the recurring presence of a humanoid alien race, the Vineans.

Her sidekicks are two Westerners, Vic Video and Pol Pitron, and she is the adoptive mother of a Chinese girl, Morning Dew.

A novel, L'écume de l'aube (The Foam of the Dawn), tells the story of Yoko's childhood, her family, friends and relationships up to her first adventure outside Japan. The main story arc is about the the Foam of the Dawn, a diamond-colored pearl envisioned by Yoko's grandfather. He tried to create the pearl all his life, but never succeeded and as a result, his cultured pearl business failed and his family was nearly torn apart. Yoko believed in him and convinced him to try one more time.

The books are being translated in English by Cinebook. The first translations were done out of order (e.g. beginning with On the Edge of Life, which was the seventh book in the series), but the more recent ones (starting with The Curious Trio) follow the original order.

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Yoko Tsuno contains examples of:

• Aborted Arc:
  • Khany stated that 13 ships left Vinea when the planet was endangered 2 millions years ago. So far, the fate of only two ships have been revealed (including Khany's). Leloup says he's no longer interested in pursuing the other ships' fate as he feels he'll just be repeating the same story over and over.
  • At the beginning of Kifa's Exiles, Queen Hegora asks Yoko to ask a new program for her from Gobol that would allow her to become Yoko's friend. No mention of this is ever made again.
• AB Negative: Ingrid has a rare blood type which is the same as Magda. This kicks off the plot to save the little girl.
• The Ace: Yoko has a long and impressive list of skills she excels in: martial arts, fluent in many languages, pilot of several types of aircraft. Her profession is in electronics, but she has taken computer programming. She works for a TV studio, but has also worked as a secretary and a model. And that's not even counting her mastery of Vinean vehicles and technologies, nor her experience in time traveling.
• Action Girl: Yoko is a skilled martial artist and (later) equally skilled pilot and does not hesitate to jump into action whenever it presents itself.
• Action Mom: Yoko becomes this after adopting Morning Dew.
• After the End: Monya comes from a post-apocalyptic future in which the use of an antimatter weapon called the Contraction Bomb has rendered Earth uninhabitable. In fact, she travels back in time precisely to prevent that weapon being invented.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • In Curious Trio, the accumulation of residual energy from the Vineans' computer system gave rise to the spontaneous development of an evil AI.
  • Inverted in The Three Suns of Vinea, where the despotic AI ruling the entire planet Vinea turns out to be a living brain's pattern that got stuck in a mental amplifier after its owner died and has been kept running for millenia.
  • Queen Hegora is another example. She's an android created to be a leader and a mother to a generation of Vinean children. She became a dictator.
  • Averted with Akar and Akina.
• Aliens Are Bastards:
  • In the Dark Ages, one small faction of Vineans used humans as slaves.
  • Karpan wasn't the only human-hating Vinean. In Khany's Secret, there are several other Vineans who share his views and are quietly hiding their true nature, waiting for the right time to strike and take over the Earth.
• Almighty Janitor: Aoki may be a simple gardener, but he's also a WWII veteran pilot. He's trained in ninjitsu and other martial arts. He taught everything he knows to Yoko.
• Ambiguously Bi: Yoko has a lot of female friends, with whom she shares a very close bond (especially Khany and Ingrid). But she also is in some sort of relationship with Vic, and has shown attraction to a male Vinean once revealed to be an android.
• Ambiguously Brown: Monya. She conveniently passes for Malaysian, but she isn't.
• Anachronism Stew: A bunch of pteranodons showed up in The Morning of the World during a Stable Time Loop. No explanations were ever provided to why and how they existed... in 1350 AD!
• An Aesop: The Titans is full of this:
  • You should not judge someone by his appearance.
  • The weak must not be culled from the strong.
  • Everyone is precious no matter how beneath they may seem.
  • Beings from different species must work together to create a world where they can all live in peace.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Vinea in the past went through a Planetary/Total extinction apocalypse. Most of the stories about Vinea involve picking up the pieces.
  • Class 6 in Earth's case. In the far future, Earth is rendered lifeless because of an antimatter bomb dropped by a warring faction. It destroyed the Earth's crust over 40 km, causing magma to spill all over the planet and melting entire continents. Yoko and Monya travel back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Vic doesn't believe Monya is a time traveller from the future. And that's coming from a guy who met two different species of aliens and travelled to another galaxy more than once.
• Arms Dealer: Both Kazuky and Sakamoto. Kazuky is more of the corporate type, while Sakamoto is more of the smuggler type.
• Artificial Limbs:
  • The Vineans use them as replacements for lost limbs.
  • All Titans (big sentient insectoids) have cybernetics and equipment grafted to their bodies.
• Art Evolution: In the first few albums the characters are drawn much more cartoonishly, which is particularly evident with Pol and Poky.
  • Actually, Pol was the last to change, while Yoko and Vic get an overhaul rather early in the comics.
  • It changes again in The Astrologer of Bruges where Yoko is noticeably older.
  • Characters tend to be less detailed in the later books.
• Author Avatar: Leloup said that Yoko is a stand-in for him, as she gets to do stuff he always wanted to do, especially flying various aircraft.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • When visiting the planet of Ixo, a team of Vineans deploy a vehicle that uses an energy beam to reshape the terrain so it will facilitate the passing of other ground vehicles. It's multi-crewed and the process is slow. Khany calls it a waste of time and energy. She and Yoko simply use air vehicles to fly ahead.
  • The Vineans of Ixo can transport energy and oxygen on a light beam to their space city, built on a shattered star. However, to send the beam that far, they must first reflect it on a gigantic mirror made of ice. The mirror must be concave and flawless, as any imperfection will cause the beam to fire off course. Preparation of the mirror takes two years and they are many injuries, radiation and deaths as the working conditions are horrible (Ixo is a waste dump). To top it all, Ixo is an orbiting moon and only come face to face with the space city every 5 years, meaning there's only a small window of opportunity to send the beam. All that could be resolved if those Vineans have access to more spaceships.
• Backstory: Yoko's youth is explored in the novel L'écume de l'aube (The Foam of the Dawn).
• Badass Driver: Both Yoko and Vic. In 3rd album, a car with thugs pushed Yoko's car into a ravine. Yoko hit the brakes but Vic shouted at her to accelerate and they both steer the wheel back onto the road. They narrowly avoid a plunge to their death.
• Bald of Evil:
  • Gobol, the evil and exiled Vinean scientist, is bald and doesn't have any hair on his head.
  • The Marquis de Torcello is missing a lot of hair and is a very evil individual.
• Batman Gambit: Yoko uses this against her enemies.
• Beard of Evil: Karpan, Karl Moebius, Helmut and Mike all have beards and commit acts of evil.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Xunk's life was saved by Yoko, therefore, he comes to believe that not all humans (and Vineans) are bad. He later choose to help Yoko and Khany escape, even if it means turning his back on his kind.
• Big Brother Is Watching: A heroic example. Peter Hertzel is at the head of a powerful company that has access to all databases in the world. He uses all this information for the good of mankind rather than profit. He knows everything about Yoko, including her secret mission with MI6 and it wouldn't be surprising if he knows about her Vinean friends too.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Averted with the Titans, who are a race of giant insectoid aliens, but do possess individuality and redeeming qualities.
• Big Damn Heroes: Yoko and Khany's ship is shot down by the Supreme Guide, piloting another craft. They survive the crash, but the enemy craft is still after them. Before it can take aim, it's blown up by Vynka and Vic's ship.
• Big Eater: Pol, also the Team Chef.
• Big Good: Peter Hertzel may be this. He is very wealthy, powerful and has contacts with many organizations and agencies. He explains to Yoko that his goal is to preserve world peace, which is why he hired her and her friends to counter a band of crooks who ran off with Wotan's Fire.
• Bigger Stick: When criminals got ahold of Wotan's fire, a lightning powered Death Ray, Professor Zimmer worked with Yoko and her friends to stop them by building a deadlier one. According to the professor, it's five times more powerful. Their ray has no trouble punching through the criminals' one.
• Blow You Away: The Titans have weapons that shoot air. They are far from harmless and are actually quite deadly.
• Body Backup Drive: Queen Hegora has multiple backup copies of her android body. They are all eventually destroyed, save for one who is imprisoned in a block of crystal.
• Body Double: Margaret, in The Prey and the Shadow, is blackmailed into becoming this for the local Ophelia, Cecilia. When Yoko finds out, Margaret begs her for help since she's too scared to openly rebel against Sir William, but wants to get free and help Cecilia.
  • Ito Kazuky has a lookalike serving as a decoy. However, the decoy is revealed to be even more ruthless than Kazuky and a little crazy.
• Bold Inflation: Happens quite a lot on key elements of the story.
• Bound and Gagged: Yoko fell victim of this once.
• A Boy and His X: A girl (Morning Dew) and her Dragon (technically a genetically engineered giant lizard). Despite his gigantic size, Morning Dew isn't afraid of him. She feeds him and plays with him without any harm coming to her. This causes her to become the target of an unscrupulous businessman who wants to use her as bait to capture the Dragon.
• Breakout Character: Yoko was originally envisioned as the #3 character of the trio, behind Vic and Pol, and the first thirteen pages of the first book were drawn that way. Then the publisher suggested Leloup try his hand at small character stories to begin with, and he started with the least important of the three... who promptly made #5 in overall character polls that year. Vic and Pol were demoted to sidekicks, Yoko promoted to star of the series, and the rest is history.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In a very unique instance, at the end of On the Edge of Life, Yoko warns the reader that if they ever see a girl who reminds them of Magda in Rothenburg they shouldn't approach her.
• Broken Aesop: Yoko goes back in time to save a young child from being murdered, saying her death was unjust because she was used as a political tool. Once in the past, she saved the girl, but her actions also caused the death of several peasants.
• Butt-Monkey: Pol, to a T. If something bad happens to someone, it will be to him. Granted, there are a lot of times where he brings it on himself through his behaviour.
• Character Development:
  • Yoko started out as fairly high-strung and willing to engage in violence when not absolutely necessary. She mellowed out in later years.
  • Pol can be aggressive enough for the whole trio.
  • Vynka, one of Khany's aides, is distrustful of the trio. However, over the course of the series, he has a change of heart and is now on friendly terms with them.
• Children Are Innocent: Played straight with Poky and Morning Dew; subverted with Sin-yi, who is more of a Spoiled Brat. But then, she grew up as the child bride of a Tang dynasty Chinese emperor.
• Christmas Episode: One story of Electronic Adventures takes place during Christmas and involves Yoko finding a job for an impoverished father after befriending his daughter.
• Collapsing Lair: Webbs' mountaintop lab in The Time Spiral collapses when all the antimatter it contained detonates to destroy the alien creature.
• Combat Tentacles: The alien creature use its tentacles to ransack the research lab in The Time Spiral. They were actually its nerves which it also uses to control the lab.
• Comic-Book Time: Yoko and her friends haven't aged since the 70's, aside from an occasional Art Evolution, despite the fact that the world around them constantly changes and evolves. In his eyes, Leloup says that Yoko will always be 20 years old.
• The Commissioner Gordon: Commissioner Lebrun who showed up in a handful of shorts.
• Cool Helmet: The ones used by Ingrid's father and Karl are definitively cool looking. They look futuristic, despite being made in medieval times. Their purpose it to protect the wearers from the disrupting sounds of the Devil's organ.
• Cool Plane: The series has no shortage of cool airplanes. Many of them are real life airplanes: Zero, F-5, F-16, MIG-21, Boeing 747, Seawind 3000 just to name a few. That's not counting the ones invented for the series. The Humming Bird is the most notable one. It's a small light aircraft used for reconnaissance.
• Cool Starship: Comes in various shapes and sizes, all used by the Vineans. Later in the series, Yoko has her own personal ship, the Ryu.
• Couch Gag: The title of the story on the book cover is always decorated with a head of Yoko. If the story involves the Vineans, she is wearing a helmet from her space suit.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Ito Kazuky, a wealthy Japanese arms dealer. He's very powerful and has a hand in many financial ventures. Kazuky doesn't hesitate to resort to dirty tactics and cheating to get what he wants.
• Creator Thumbprint:
  • Leloup is very fond of vehicles, airplanes in particular. Many are seen the series, either operated by Yoko or someone else.
  • He also loves insects, to the point where Vineans have many motifs patterned after them:
    • The Vineans cryo-pods are stored in a beehive-like pattern.
    • Robots and space vehicles have a insect-like designs.
    • One Vinean wore a helmet that vaguely looks like an ant's head.
    • While not Vineans, the Titans are giant intelligent insectoids that walk upright.
  • Flashes of energy floating are also a common occurrence.
• Cryonics Failure: The Supreme Guide in The Three Suns of Vinea, to a point.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Poor Zhou-Chong. He actually thought he could poison a dragon and steal his pearl. Said dragon is two-headed, is mechanical and is of alien origin. Unsurprisingly, Zhou-Chong is fried into oblivion and the dragon didn't even break a sweat.
• Damsel in Distress: Poor Ingrid. Sometimes, even Yoko would need rescuing after being hit with the Distress Ball.

• Darker and Edgier: Saturn's Gemini has an overall darker tone than the previous entries. Yoko and Khany's relationship is much more antagonistic than in the rest of the series, and is not entirely patched up by the end. Also, the robots being considered as a second-class citizens by the Vineans is made much more explicit and becomes a point of disagreement between Yoko and Khany, and Poky expresses the desire to get rid of all robots when she's grown up (to Mina's pained surprise), which marks the first time any Vinean or child expressed such an extreme opinion in the series.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Vic, often Pol as well.
  • Leloup stated that one of the reasons behind the creation of Emilia was to give her all the snark he could not have Yoko say.
• Death by Origin Story: Monya's father and Leyton. We only see them in flashbacks and they are already dead when the story kicks in.
• Death Is Cheap: Downplayed. Queen Hegora is an android. She has several backup bodies, but they come in very limited quantities.
• Death of a Child: Doctor Schulz's young daughter was killed during a bombing in World War 2 or so everyone thinks.
• Death Ray: Wotan's Fire, which dealt with a device that channels electric energy into a powerful beam weapon.
• Deceptively Human Robots:
  • The Archangels and Queen Hegora are Vineans androids with human mannerisms.
  • Koshi is Earth's most sophisticated android and passes as a human in a kendo armor. He doesn't have a face however: beneath the mask is a set of cameras and sensors.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Myrka is a Bad Boss to her workers and hostile toward Yoko. However, after seeing that Yoko, her friends and the Vineans genuinely want to help them, she became less abrasive and more cooperative.
• Demoted to Extra: In more recent issues, Vic, Pol, Morning Dew are barely present and sometimes they don't even get any lines.
• Disintegrator Ray: Used by the Vineans and various Mecha-Mooks.
• Disney Death: Myna, a small robot, is hit by an eraser beam, which wipes out her programming, memories and personality. All this is restored with a backup made before the mission began.
• Disney Villain Death: More than a few of Yoko's enemies meet their demise from a fall.
• Distressed Dude: Vic and Pol sometimes need Yoko to rescue them, especially in The Seventh Code.
• Dragon Ascendant: Karpan is working for the Coordinator in The Curious Trio but returns as the main villain in The Forge of Vulcan.
• Dub Name Change:
  • Vic Video and Pol Pitron are renamed as Vic Van Steen and Pol Paris in the English translation. This is apparently with Leloup's accord, as he regretted having given them Punny Names in the first place (not that this mattered much, as their family names were only used a handful of times in the whole series).
  • In the Dutch translation, Vic Video and Pol Pitron are renamed Ben Beeld and Paul Pola.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • As stated in Art Evolution, Curious Trio and the short stories in Electronic Adventures have a more cartoonish artstyle and tone and overal lack the signature Scenery Porn. Yoko also initially always wore the same clothes. Two of the short stories were also co-written by Roger Leloup and Maurice Tillieux while later Leloup remained the sole author of the series.
  • In Electronic Adventures, Yoko's father was named "Susuki Tsuno". Later, his name was changed to "Seiki Tsuno".
  • Electronic Adventures has some Ship Tease between Yoko and Pol while later it's Vic who's her Implied Love Interest.
  • Yoko is much more impulsive and short-tempered in her first adventures, and does not hesitate to use force. She becomes more composed later on, goes out of her way to avoid using lethal force against any sentient creature, and always tries to offer the villains a peaceful solution. Even her martial arts come more rarely into play.
• Elegant Classical Musician: Ingrid, who is a professional pipe organ player.
• Evil Plan: Ito Kazuky's company created a disintegration chamber. With the end of the Cold War, countries are desperate to get rid of their stockpile of nukes. However, the machine doesn't eliminate the radiation. Nonetheless, Kazuky advertises that his machine is fully functional. When countries deliver him the warheads for disposal, he secretly keeps them intact and well hidden. Presumably, he's going to resell them to the black market.
• Expy: Vic and Pol are expies of Jacky and Célestin from the now defunct French-Belgian comic book Jacky et Célestin.
  • According to Roger Leloup, Yoko is an expy of Japanese actress Yoko Tani.
• Failure Knight: Yoko's old guardian Aoki, from Daughter of The Wind. He was a pilot from World War II who didn't get to die honourably in a kamikaze attack and could never get over it. He got his wish through an Heroic Sacrifice.
• Fainting: Yoko ends up like this in almost every album. She either gets neck chopped, knocked on the head, gassed, drugged, chloroformed, shot at point blank range etc. — the poor girl even faints a couple of times!
• Faking the Dead: Dr. Haley saw his colleague Dr. Briggs pour a poison in his beer. Haley didn't drink his cup and pretended to die moments later. Briggs, overconfident his plan worked, didn't bother to check the body thoroughly.
• Fanservice:
  • In On the Edge of Life Yoko arrives in Rothenburg wearing an ultra short red micro-mini dress.
  • In Wotan's Fire, Yoko showed up in bikini on a oil tanker. The crewmen were only too happy to welcome her aboard.
  • In the The Rhine Gold, we can see her wearing nothing but a towel after taking a shower.
  • In the Gate of Souls, she lost some of her spacesuit's equipment, forcing her to wear a worn-out, skimpier uniform.
• Fantastic Caste System: All Titans look largely the same except for different coloring and cybernetics.
  • The green ones are warriors, explorers and gatherers.
  • The purple ones are scientists and technicians. They mostly stay inside the colony.
  • The Great Migrator is the leader of the hive and is hooked to a command console at the heart of the colony ship.
• Fantastic Racism: Karpan sees humans as inferior and wants to wipe them out or enslave them.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The Vineans' ships.
  • The mechanism behind them^note Physics becomes Newtonian if a region of space is devoid of light, as explained in The Three Suns of Vinea, is original but also a definite example of Artistic License – Physics.
  • Later on, Yoko's starship the Ryu can do it as well. Strangely enough, while The Three Suns of Vinea took care in explaining that it was not possible to travel faster than light in normal space, the Ryu seems to do it without special precautions. Possibly justified in that it's from a technology much more recent than the 2 million-years old one of the Vineans.
• Fiery Red Head: Emilia, especially in her debut.
• Financial Abuse: Poor, poor Cecilia. If only she knew that her uncle and stepfather William not only killed her mother, but is planning to kill her for her inheritance
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Monya comes from the far future, Mieke from Renaissance-era Bruges, Sin-Yi from Tang China, Magda from the 1940's, Bonnie from the 30's. They all adapt rather well to modern life, although Mieke had some trouble at first when encountering Vinean technology.
• Friend to All Children: Pol is an awesome babysitter. With a rocket launcher.
  • Yoko as well, though less in an "awesome babysitter" way and more in a "take every child under her wing" way (most obviously with Morning Dew).
• Foreshadowing: The Cannon of Kra ends with Yoko musing on the possibility to have children, and Pol suggesting Dawn as the name of her would-be daughter (referencing the Rising Sun flag). Comes the next book, The Dragon of Hong Kong, where Yoko adopts a Chinese girl named Morning Dew.
• Freudian Trio: Yoko (Superego), Vic (Ego), Pol (Id).
• Fungus Humongous: Inside the Earth's crust, Yoko and Khany walk through a forest of giant mushrooms.
• Gambit Roulette: Used by Gobol to trick Myna into bringing Hegora's personal ship.
• Genre Blindness:
  • The Supreme Guide of Vinea is the tyrannical ruler of the planet, having ruled for more than 2 million years unchallenged. Still, it never occurred to him to install outer defenses on his pyramid. When the exiled Vineans return to the planet and have ships running, they make quick work of him. And seriously, keeping non-loyal robots under his service is just begging for trouble.
  • Queen Hegora suffers from a severe case of this. Maybe because no one has ever challenged her rule or maybe Yoko thinks too much out of the box for her to handle. Rather than killing Yoko right on the spot, she sets her to fight to the death against a sea creature. Yoko breaks the mental connection between Hegora and the creature who turns on the queen. Much later, the queen keeps Yoko hostage in a submarine, but doesn't restraint her. Yoko (rather easily) sabotages the submarine and causes it to crash. Being an android, Hegora kept several copies of herself should anything happen to her. The copies are guarded by a robot named Tryak. However, the robot is sentient and has grown to dislike the queen for her tyrannical ways. When Yoko comes into the picture, Tryak sees a chance to get rid of the queen.
• Genre Roulette: Although almost all stories feature at least one science-fiction element (sometimes downplayed), the genre can vary strongly from one story to another. The Vineans stories are usually Space Opera or Planetary Romance, and the Monya stories involve the various Time Travel genres, but the other stories set on Earth can be techno-thrillers, crime or spy stories, etc.
• Giant Flyer: The oversized pteranodons in The Morning of the World.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Queen Hegora is the tyrannical ruler of an underwater Vinean city.
• Gold Digger: Mieke is looking for a rich man to be her husband so she can escape her very harsh life. She ends up with Pol and they both fall in love.
• Gone Horribly Right: In the far future, two factions were waging war on Earth. One of them was losing and unleashed an antimatter bomb on their enemy. It worked well alright, blowing a 1000 km wide hole in Earth's crust. Lava spilled all over the planet, turning it into a red globe of magma with poisonous gas. Humanity was now extinct along with all fauna and flora. The only way to undo this is through time travel.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Some of the bad guys who don't suffer Disney Villain Death encounter this fate. Of particular note is Count Pavkine falling on a plane's propeller in The Hex of the Amethyst while fighting Yoko.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Myna and her kind were small robots programmed to educate and protect Vinean children. The Vineans got rid of them because they became too intelligent.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • In Daughter of the Wind, Kazuky's men came to apprehend Yoko and Aoki. She challenged them into taking them in her father's lab. The guards let her go since they reasoned they'll more of them once they reach the lab. Yoko and Aoki turn on the typhoon-making machine while the guards simply watch them. Then, they remove the safeties on the machine, which caused a turbulence that caught the guards by surprise. Yoko and Aoki take advantage of this to make their escape. Had the guards arrested them right away, they'll wouldn't had gotten away.
  • In Wotan's Fire, Yoko is captured. Rather than restraining her or knocking her out, the guard holds her at gunpoint while she stands next to a barrier. Yoko attached her safety harness on the barrier, using her hands in the back while still facing the guard. The guard saw her doing something suspicious and even called her out, but doesn't intervene. Predictably, Yoko knocked him out easily and made her escape.
• Guile Hero: Yoko can be VERY cunning when she wants to.
• Happily Adopted:
  • Morning Dew has quickly grown attached to Yoko, even before she was adopted by her.
  • After saving the future, Monya can't return to her original timeline. She's adopted by Yoko's cousin Izumi and lives in Indonesia.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • When a typhoon-making missile goes out of control, a gigantic hurricane was heading toward the Japanese coast. Kazuky refused to intervene as the blame will rest on Yoko's father. One of Kazuky's men was outraged because millions of lives were at stake, so he switched sides to help Yoko.
  • Kurt was ready to steal the computer memory tapes and let Magda die, but he has a change of heart after accidentally shooting Yoko and seeing her blood on the floor.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Karl assassinated Ingrid's father because the latter has discovered the former's evil plans. Karl planned to drive his rich uncle insane with the Devil's organ, so he can inherit his wealth.
  • Leyton discovered that an alien creature was responsible for the discovery of antimatter and it controlled the base with its tentacles (which actually were its nerves). It killed him by crushing him to death.
• The Hermit: Even in the far away planet of Vinea you can find one in a cave. Yoko and Khany meet a crazy old Vinean hag who dresses in rags. She's also out of touch with any form of technology and she keeps rambling about an unseen god from the sea.
• Heroic BSoD: Yoko had one when Aoki died and destroyed a typhoon. She was in shock and flying her aircraft blindly in a radioactive cloud. Vic shook her off just in time by radioing her to wake up and set the controls straight.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Aoki plunged his airplane with a bomb inside a typhoon to destroy it.
  • Xunk shielded Yoko and Khany knowing the Titans would fire their weapon on them. The shot badly injured him, although he carried Yoko and Khany far enough for them to escape and died soon afterwards.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners:
  • Played straight at first with Pol and Vic, Yoko's two male sidekicks. Later averted, as Yoko and Vic develop a (mostly tacit) romantic relationship.
  • Later reinforced. Leloup said that he doesn't want to develop the relationship with Vic... readers who are in love with Yoko would be jealous!
• Hidden Elf Village: The Vineans have been hiding in their underground facilities beneath the Earth for 400,000 years. Like Elves, Vineans are cold and uninterested in human civilizations. At least until mankind's technological advancements got them worried and they start making plans for their future.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Webbs feed the alien creature with loads of antimatter. It grows enormously in size and gains multiple tentacles (which are actually its nerves) to control the facility. When Webbs finally decides to cut off the antimatter, the creature kills Webbs with its tentacles.
  • The creature is destroyed when it ingests detonators that trigger the antimatter it had consumed, turning it into an antimatter bomb.
• Holiday in Cambodia: The fictional country of "Kampong" between Thailand and Malaysia.
• Hollywood Cyborg: Ethera has her body rebuilt after a crash.
• Hologram: Found in The Prey and the Ghost. The model is actually Margaret, Cecilia's Body Double, and it motivates her to beg Yoko for help.
• Honest Corporate Executive: Peter Hertzel is a powerful German businessman. He uses his wealth and influence to help Yoko on two occasions to fight off arms dealers.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Yoko's Fatal Flaw.
  • When Vic held Kazuky at gunpoint, the latter defiantly replied that the Japanese would rather die than submit themselves to Vic's race.
• Hot-Blooded: Yoko, sometimes. Pol, too.
• Human Aliens: The Vineans have blue skin and somewhat sharper traits, but apart from that are indistinguishable from humans. This incredible coincidence is never explained, since they come from the Triangulum galaxy and already looked like that two million years ago, before Homo sapiens had even evolved on Earth.
  • In one album, Yoko could even disguise herself as a Vinean. It worked because the super-advanced Vineans only use b/w monitors.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The Titans, giant sentient insectoids, believe that humans, and by extension, Vineans, are horrible monsters. They came to that conclusion when they discovered a box of insect collection that Yoko has brought from Earth. Khany tried to rationally explain that insects on Earth are a pest and never gain sentience. Clearly, the Titans were not impressed by her statement.
• Human Popsicle:
  • The Vineans routinely use suspended animation to deal with long-distance space travel, or to keep survivors from the cataclysm that nearly destroyed their planet stowed away until further notice. The technology isn't cryogenic however, it's called "magnetic sleep".
  • In On the Edge of Life, this is also how Magda, a little girl from 1945, has been kept alive until the 1970s despite suffering from critical wounds and a rare chronic condition.
  • Apparently, in the future, mankind will freeze convicted murderers as part of their sentence. This is what happened to Standford.
• Human Sacrifice: Narki is being sacrificed because she helped Monya steal a sacred golden statue. However, after the statue has been returned, a volcano erupts and Narki believed she angered the gods, so she volunteers to jump into the volcano to appease the gods.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: An offshot of warmongering Vineans can pop vehicles out of their pockets in the same way as computer files are decompressed. Most Vineans however don't have access to that technology.
• The Idealist: Yoko is very much this. She is very trustful toward strangers and is willing to help them when needed. However, she doesn't hesitate to defend herself when attacked and is smart enough to deal with an enemy appropriately when required.
• Identical Stranger: Cecilia and Margaret in The Prey and the Ghost.
• Improbable Age: Word of God is that Yoko is "fresh out of adolescence", which would make her in her early twenties. Yet she is a skilled engineer and jet pilot, speaks at least 4 or 5 languages, and is a martial arts expert, among other things.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Morning Dew's appearance is based off Leloup's adopted daughter when she was younger.
• Innocent Flower Girl: Mieke, is innocent, and a flower girl.
• Insectoid Aliens: The Titans are giant grasshopper-like aliens that walk upward and come from an unknown galaxy. Their bodies are laced with titanium to withstand the stronger gravity on Vinea. The Titans are also highly technologically advanced and their bodies are grafted with equipment and cybernetics.
• Insect Queen: The Great Migrator. Although she's never referred to as a queen, she act as the Titans' leader.
• Instant Sedation: Yoko was given a dose of chloroform and immediately fell unconscious. Amusingly, once she's dumped in a pit and lands on a net, she instantly awakens.
• In-Series Nickname: The name "Titans" was coined by Vic to identify the insectoid aliens. The true name of their species was never reavealed.
• It's All About Me: Webbs wants the knowledge of antimatter to make himself rich and famous. He ignores Monya's warnings about its dangers and the catastrophic results it will bring to the world.
• It's Personal: When Yoko see that her father is being humiliated by Kazuky, she vowed to make him pay. It's downplayed however, as Yoko resorts to sabotaging Kazuky's missiles rather than attacking him directly.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Yoko's mother, Masako, was very beautiful in her youth.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Mirka is detestable and treats her workers poorly. And yet, she's one of the rare Vineans who refuse to believe that their space city is the product of their leaders' divine powers, but rather, the hard work and sacrifice of the working class.
• Karmic Death: Villains have a tendency to bring doom upon their own heads:
  • Karl assassinated Ingrid's father and disguised it as a suicide by dumping his body on train tracks. In the end, Karl is killed by a train on these very same tracks. To make it even more karmic, Yoko and Karl's uncle agree to cover up the truth by saying he was insane prior to his death.
  • Karpan cut off the air from a vast chamber and vented toxic gas to kill Yoko and her friends, even if it means killing his own workers who are stationed in the same room. It's one of his men that saved Yoko by ramming their vehicle into the control center, causing Karpan to fall into the magma below.
  • Zarfa kicked Poky at the bottom of a giant concave mirror. Poky was unharmed and it was revealed later that she and Pol played around and hid a treasure (unbeknownst to them, it was giant balls of acid) in a machine that Zarfa ends up commandeering. Combined with his stubbornness, the machine malfunctioned and ends up killing him.
  • No longer needing it, Webbs plans on destroying the creature that gave him knowledge of antimatter. The creature kills him, as it no longer needs him to sustain itself.
  • Sir William plans to drive his daughter-in-law, Cecilia, insane and trick her into killing herself. Instead, he fell to his death in the very same pit he intended Cecilia to fall into.
  • Dr. Briggs blackmails Kazuky for a large sum of money. Instead, Briggs is killed in a disintegration chamber made of gold.
  • Kazuky's double blew up the airplane where Minako's father was a passenger. Minako repays him by blowing up the boat he's on.
  • Prince Wang incites angry peasants to kill Sin Yin. When Yoko intervenes, the villagers turn on the prince and slaughter him.
• Karma Houdini: In The Morning of the World, Mike betrays Monya and sets on fire the house she's staying in. Monya, Yoko and her friends escape with the Translator. However, Mike is never seen again and doesn't face justice for his crime.
• Last of His Kind: In 39th century, Monya is the last remaining human alive as everyone else died in a war. Once she traveled back in time to fix this, the apocalypse is avoided.
• Latex Space Suit: The environment suits, called Vinean outfits, are very tight-fitting despite not being quite latex. For space sorties, they use bulkier space suits fitted on top of a layer of body socks made out of rubber.
• Limited Wardrobe:
  • Changed over time. In her early adventures, Yoko would almost always wear the same outfit, a short red dress over a black catsuit. On the cover of The Edge of Life, Yoko can be seen wearing a red mini dress. Later on, Leloup became fond of depicting her in more varied outfits, and her wardrobe has increased in size accordingly. Pol was the last to leave his yellow pullover behind. He often wears a yellow shirt though.
  • Vic and Pol also have the same clothes on for a long time. Like Yoko, they eventually got new clothes, but only after Yoko.
• Long Game: Sir Williams murdered his wife (and former sister-in-law) while Cecilia was just a child. He waited until Cecilia became an adult before trying to kill her. All these murders would've allowed him to inherit their fortune.
• Long-Runners: Yoko Tsuno has been around since 1970 and is still being written today by Leloup.
• Loophole Abuse: In 1350, human sacrifices are forbidden in Bali. However, nothing can stop someone from voluntarily sacrificing himself, especially if the person has been drugged. Poor Narki becomes the victim of this.
• Lost Aesop: In The Celestial Barge, Yoko's friends wonder why she doesn't take Morning Dew with them in their time travel. Yoko replies that she doesn't want to risk losing her in the past. Except Yoko forgot she already brought her time-traveling with her in two other stories, not to mention twice in another galaxy.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Khany discovers that her father (and Poky's) is still alive, after having a Brain Uploading millions of years ago.
• Mad Scientist: The series has no shortage of evil scientists who are out for personal gain.
  • Hideki Minai and Webbs: Both discovered anti-matter and wanted to profit from it, for war and wealth respectively while ignoring its consequences.
  • Gobol: Vinean robot genius who wanted to crash his space city in Vinea.
  • Isora: Vinean scientist who researched soul transfers and wanted to reincarnate herself in her own daughter.
• Magnetic Hero: Yoko seems to have a knack to make most female character she encounters yearn to become her friend, even when they begin as antagonists.
• Magical Particle Accelerator: One Vinean ship was powered by a particle accelerator. The cylinder-shaped device was very small compared to CERN's design, but still large enough to stick out of the ship.
• Malevolent Masked Men: The mysterious masked figure that tried to kill Yoko in the Rhine Gold conspiracy.
• Martial Pacifist: Yoko grows into one. She deplores unnecessary violence and will go out of her way to try and spare villains' lives. This doesn't prevent her from kicking ass here and there.
• The Masquerade: What the Power Trio stumbles into in The Prey and the Ghost.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In The Celestial Barge, Yoko decides to go back in time because she thought she heard a heart of a child executed a thousands years ago still beating in an urn. In the past she manages to save the child and ends up tricking people into thinking her heart can be heard beating by hiding a recorder in the urn. Yoko is then left to wonder whether what she thought she heard in the present was the recorder working again after a thousand years or something else...
• Meaningful Name:
  • Vic's last name is "Video" and he works in a TV studio.
  • Xunk's name means "weak" in his alien language. By his own admission, Xunk consumes too much energy for his colony's mission and has become a liability.
• Meet Cute: Pol & Mieke. She's a flower girl from 16th century Bruges; he's a time-traveller from the early 21st century posing as a "lord"; she follows him back to modern times.
• Mind Reading: The Titans. The alien creature from The Time Spiral uses a variation of this trope to feed information directly in people's brains.
• Missing Child: For Christmas, Yoko wants to surprise a little girl's family by offering a contract to the jobless father. Except, to get the contract, Yoko has to ride across town with the little girl in tow and didn't notify her parents beforehand. Needless to say, her parents are worried, although the story ends on a happy note.
• Missing Mom:
  • Magda's mother died during WWII.
  • Lady Mary from The Prey and the Ghost, who's death is very important to the plot.Actually, her murder.
  • Monya. Her mother placed her in a shuttle on the way to her father's secret base, while the space station they lived is destroyed.
  • Emilia's mother is also dead when Emilia makes her debut.
• More Hypnotizable Than He Thinks: Pol Pitron.
• Mugged for Disguise: Yoko and a Buddhist monk knock out one of Kazuky's ninjas. Yoko then takes the ninja's uniform and disguise herself as one of Kazuky's men.
• Murphy's Bullet: In "Devil's Organ", an old man goes ballistic trying to shoot a bat with a carbine and the bullet hits several corners before hitting Vic Video, Yoko's partner. Fortunately, Vic's head is merely grazed by the bullet (which missed him for mere millimeters), but Yoko almost goes into an Unstoppable Rage at that, grabbing the weapon and pointing at the maddened old man.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Kurt was one of the doctors who worked on saving Magda, a little girl who's in suspended animation since WWII. Kurt wanted to steal the reanimation program and when Yoko stopped him, he was willing to kill Magda to have it. In the struggle, he accidentally shot Yoko. When Kurt saw the blood, he was horrified by what he did and no longer wishes to harm Magda.
• My Greatest Failure: Aoki is a failed kamikaze. He took off on a mission to crash his air fighter on an American ship during World War II. However, he never found his target and when he made his return, his plane ran out of fuel and crashed on the shores of Japan where Yoko's granfather rescued him. By the time Aoki recovered, Japan had surrendered and he never forgave himself for this.
• Naïve Everygirl: Mieke.
• Narrating the Obvious: The series is bad about it. Captions often describe what plainly happens on panel such as when Yoko enters a building.
• The Needs of the Many: The Titans' civilization revolves around this, being sentient insectoids. One of them, Xunk, is afflicted with radiation. While there is a cure, administrating it will jeopardizetheir mission, so the colony would rather let him die.
• Ninja: In Daughter of the Wind, Kazuky has a bunch of ninjas (or more precisely ninja reenactors) on his payroll. Yoko apparently got some ninja training herself when she was still a teenager (in the novel The Foam of the Dawn).
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Monya traveling back in time and meddling with the locals causes Narki to be sacrificed to demons.
• No Body Left Behind:
  • Anyone who travels through time in Monya's Time Machine must wear a special belt that act as a bio-regulator. Without it, the subject will be disintegrated and return to his original timeline in a pile of ashes. This is what happened to the Marquis de Torcello.
  • Dr. Briggs tries to blackmail Kazuky. He's killed in a disintegration chamber, leaving no body behind. The only thing left of him is his gold tooth, the only substance that can't be destroyed by the machine.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Ingrid Hallberg is based on pianist Ingrid Haebler.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: Between Yoko and Vic. Leloup doesn't want their relationship to go any deeper. It doesn't stop them from having a good amount of Ship Tease though.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: Poky undergoes a strange case of this: she seems to be around 5 years old when the series begins, slowly ages up to look around 10 by The Archangels of Vinea, then reverts back to be around 6 and stays that way once Morning Dew is introduced so that both girls remain the same age. The other characters never age much due to Comic-Book Time.
• No Name Given:
  • The name of Monya's father is never revealed.
  • The name of Kazuky's Body Double was never shown.
• Not What It Looks Like: How Vic, Pol and Yoko met the first time. Late at night, Vic and Pol saw someone using a crane to commit a break-in in an office building. They intervene and found out the robber named Yoko was hired to test the office's new security system.
• Nuke 'em: The Vineans drop a thermal bomb on the Titans' territory after they left. They also used their own version of nukes against a space city that came too close to their planet. When Ito Kazuky's hurricane-making missile goes out of control, Yoko and Aoki deliver a powerful nuke that ends with Aoki's heroic sacrifice.
• Orcus on His Throne: Gobol stays on top of a sinister tower and gives orders to his robots to do his bidding. Justified, since his immortality is tied to a gigantic unmovable machine.
• Official Couple: Pol and Mieke.
• The Ojou: Cecilia from The Prey and the Shadow. She's also a Lonely Rich Kid, kept isolated and prisoner in her own Scottish castle.
  • Yoko is this too. The Tsuno family has a pretty nice Japanese Big Fancy House in Okinawa, after all.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: The Devil's Organ.
• Omniglot: Yoko speaks Japanese, English, Cantonese, French, German, and Javanese. With Monya's memory-inducing machine, she learns Old French and ancient Balinese.
• One-Hour Work Week: Yoko is an electrical engineer while Vic and Pol work for television yet they are always free to go on adventures and take extended vacations on Vinea.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The Titans was a nickname coined by Vic. The real name of the species was never revealed.
• Only One Name: The Vineans seem to only have one name. They don't use titles or ranks either.
• The Ophelia: Cecilia, again. Subverted, though: she's actually sane, but her Evil Uncle wants people to think she's a nutjob so he can set her up for an "accidental" death... by making the desperately lonely Cecilia believe she can be reunited with her mom's spirit.
  • Ingrid is introduced as a prospective one in The Devil's Organ, as she's seen crying and unresponsive during a cruise to the Rhin. Subverted again: she not only was in an Heroic BSOD after her father's death... but she was completely drugged as the Big Bad/her dad's killer wants her out of the way. Said Big Bad pushes poor Ingrid into the river, but Yoko and her friends save her and she soon recovers.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Especially in the latest books:
  • In The Dragon of Hong Kong, an evil eastern dragon is terrorising the city. It's revealed to actually be a robot piloted by a Corrupt Corporate Executive, and is ultimately destroyed in the last battle by another false dragon, a genetically engineered giant lizard.
  • In The Pagoda of the Mists, the plot in centred on a legendary dragon inhabiting a mountain, eventually revealed to be a giant alien robot that closely resembles a dragon.
  • In The Servant of Lucifer, an offshot of the Vineans have created robot dragons in order to impress Middle Age monks they wanted to enslave.
• Our Souls Are Different: In The Gate of Souls, there is some Phlebotinium that removes souls from people and transfers them into other people or stores them in robots. It is not very clear what the soul actually is (and Leloup confirms he intended it that way, to avoid theological debates), as the soulless people seem to be functioning normally, but are eager to recover their souls, while people implanted with the souls of others seem to gain their knowledge and skills. Yoko reacts violently when a device attempts to probe her soul.
• Out of Focus:
  • As the series moves on over time, Vic and Pol receive less and less focus. The stories are always centered around Yoko and the guest star of the day, usually a new female character. Things got worse for them now that Emilia has become the new regular co-star alongside Yoko.
  • Yoko herself becomes the victim of this in Angels and Falcons. Yoko only shows up several pages in while Emilia is the one who drives the plot. Halfway in the album, Emilia and the newcomer Dinah take the center stage, leaving Yoko in the dust.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Monya wearing her bikini top OVER her shirt, sporting giant headphones on her head and wearing shoes (everyone else is barefoot), while waiting in line with Balinese girls dressed in their native 1350 costumes. The guards don't notice a thing despite being warned to look out for her.
• Parental Abandonment: Before her introduction in the series, Morning Dew's parents died because of a typhoon.
• Phenotype Stereotype:
  • Ingrid, being German, of course has long blond hair tied into cinnamon rolls.
  • Being Scottish, Cecilia is obviously a redhead. Thankfully, she's no Violent Glaswegian. Her Identical Stranger Margaret is a redhead... and actually Australian.
• The Power of Friendship: One of the central themes of the series. Yoko meets new people in every story and becomes friend with them.
• Powered Armor: A disgruntled tech assistant wears an experimental exosuit and disguises himself as an apeman to get revenge.
• The Professor: Yoko's father, Seiki Tsuno, is an experienced scientist who built a weapon capable to cause tsunamis (and to stop them), and devoted a bit too much of his life to science at the expense of his daughter.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Almost all of the technology the Vineans abandoned on their home planet still works after two millions years and a solar cataclysm. They seem to be using automated repair systems but still.
• Refusal of the Call: When Yoko accidentally runs into Kazuky, she refuses to get involved in his schemes because the businessman caused Aoki's death. Kazuky then offers her a huge amount of money. Yoko changes her mind, not because of the money, but because Kazuky must be very desperate to resort to this and she now wants to know what he's really up to.
• Red Herring: When reading the first pages of the On The Edge of Life, we get the impression that the mysterious cloaked stranger is Magda, a girl widely believed to have died 30 years earlier. The truth is something else. The stranger is actually her cousin, Eva, while the real Magda is in suspended animation since WWII.
• Relationship Upgrade: Yoko and Vic, after being Just Friends for years, began developing romantic feelings for one another in the more recent episodes.
  • However, recent stories show them sleeping in separate bedrooms.
  • Interestingly, Yoko and Pol have much more screen time together than Yoko and Vic.
• Retcon: Yoko's father was named "Susuki Tsuno" in Electronic Adventures. Leloup changed it to "Seiki Tsuno" in The Daughter of the Wind when he realized that "Susuki" isn't a proper Japanese first name. He forgot to correct one speech bubble in latter printings.
• Rich Bitch: Countess Olga in The Rhine Gold, before having Heel–Face Turn at the end of the story, thanks to Yoko.
• Rich Suitor, Poor Suitor: What kicked off the conflict in The Prey And the Ghost was how, 20 years ago, Cecilia's mother Mary chose her rich suitor Brian over her poor suitor Mac Nab. It didn't help that Mac Nab was a yandere rumored to be into the occult, or that he showed up at the wedding and predicted they wouldn't be happy. Which did happen... but not because of Mac Nab himself.
• Riddle for the Ages: In The Pagoda of the Mists, the two-headed dragon left, but not before destroying something hidden within the pagoda. It's never revealed what was destroyed and Yoko herself never found out.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Myna, Akina and Akhar all seem to understand and experience emotions just as any living being (Akhar in particular seems strangely interested in Yoko...). Angela is so human(child)-like that Yoko feels maternal toward her.
• Robot War: Gobol and its Mecha-Mooks versus the Exiles.
• Sad Clown: Pol. Well, his surname "Pitron" comes from the French word for "clown"... He's also the author's stand-in.
• Scars Are Forever: Yoko has a scar on her right shoulder caused by a shard of window glass. She healed the wound with futuristic cell regeneration technology, but it left a scar.
• Scenery Porn: Leloup loves drawing backgrounds with all the details he can. And he's VERY good at that.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the 16th century, when Mieke is arrested by the Inquisition, her uncle Mathias quickly leaves the city and guards plunder his house.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • In the The Pagoda of the Mists, Yoko mention that her paternal grandmother told her a Chinese fable when she was little. However, the novel, The Foam of Dawn, states that Yoko was born after her grandmother's death, so the two couldn't possibly have met.
  • In The Temple of Immortals, Khany states that she took the decision to close the portal to Vinea. In Saturn's Gemini, she says the decision was taken by the government on Vinea.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • In The Time Spiral, Monya travels back in time to stop a scientist named Webbs from discovering antimatter. In the far future, a warring faction will use it against an enemy and destroy the Earth's crust. This causes molten magma to cover the planet, melt entire continents and extinguish all life on Earth.
  • Before her, Leyton and Standford traveled through time to do the same, but their mission ended in failure. Leyton died and Standford had other plans.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Yoko dolls up in elegant dresses more than once. I.e.: in The Devil's Organ, she even wears a kimono, leaving everyone starstruck. And in The Prey And the Shadow, Cecilia lends her one of her mother's gowns, which has Yoko almost squealing in wonder at how pretty her wardrobe is. And once it's all cleared up and the Power Trio stays a little longer in the castle, she gives Yoko some more.
• Ship Tease:
  • Yoko and Vic at the end of Wotan's Fire, while the two of them are alone on a sailboard, discussing about tenderness and friendship.
  • They get another moment in Saturn's Gemini when Vic says he will protect Yoko from nightmares (Emilia has a thought bubble showing she's not surprised by his offer), and is shown later to have been sleeping with one arm around her shoulder (they are sleeping seated and under the effect of a Vinean machine, but still).
• Shout-Out:
  • Pol refers to the Devil's organ as a Gaffophone.
  • In The Prey and the Ghost, which takes place in Scotland, Yoko introduces herself as "Tsuno. Yoko Tsuno".
  • Emilia references Star Wars when encountering the Vineans.
  • Khany's Secret contains multiple references to War of the Worlds, including a cannon to send a spaceship from Mars to Earth and Vineans robots looking like the tripods.
• Shown Their Work:
  • All vehicles are drawn accurately with attention to details.
  • The city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber is very accurately represented in The Edge of Life (although one can guess that the secret underground laboratory does not exist in real life).
• Skeptic No Longer: Colonel Toshio has a hard time believing that Yoko is his grand-niece from the future, since his niece is currently just 13 years old. After asking his niece by phone what name she'll give if she has a daughter, she replied "Yoko". This was enough to convince him.
• Shrines and Temples: In Daughter of the Wind, Yoko seeks help in the Buddhist temple she used to pray in as a child.
• Shorttank:
  • Yoko is a grown-up version.
  • Emilia, the latest supporting cast member Yoko has accrued, is a traditional teen Shorttank.
• Significant Anagram: Leloup says Vinea is an anagram of the moisture cream "Nivea". The Vineans have blue skin because Nivea's containers were blue at the time.
• Slipping a Mickey: Happens quite often to Yoko and her friends when they are guests of unsavory characters.
• Smug Snake: Ito Kazuky, Karl Moebius, Sir William and the Doctor.
• Space Elves: The Vineans don't have pointy ears, but have many traits that resemble Elves. They are vastly technology superior to humans. They are cold and prefer logic, even though they are capable of emotions. The populace is composed mainly of technicians and scientists. Entertainment, art, culture is non-existent and their children are conditioned for working at very young age.
• Space Suits Are SCUBA Gear: The Vineans' space suits have very visible air tubes connected to the helmet. Khany's fails in the first story after a rough deceleration. In a later story, Poky yanks out one of her own tubes to give air to Yoko.
• Spanner in the Works: Yoko and her guys often end up derailing more than one Evil Plan. And more than once they're contacted by a person in trouble and help them derail some more evil plans, like in The Prey and the Ghost where Margaret asks them to help her get out of Sir William's gambits and save Cecilia.
• Spectacular Spinning: Monya's time machine spins on itself like a top whenever it travel through time (or it simply gets engulfed into twirling light, according to the captions).
• Spin-Off: Yoko Tsuno is actually a Spin-Off of another French-Belgian comic book called 'Jacky et Célestin' written by Leloup. Yoko made her debut in one story and Leloup liked her so much that he decided to set a new series around her. Jacky and Célestin became Expy of Vic and Pol.
• Spoiler Cover: A lot of the covers feature a scene that happens relatively late in the story. In some cases, it does not spoil much because of lack of context, but in others, it can spoil part of the mysteries the characters face early on:
  • The Servant of Lucifer. Think this adventure is another Time Travel in the Dark Ages? Nope, it's about Vineans since they're on the cover along with robotic dragons.
  • Yoko spends some time wondering who the mysterious diminutive inhabitants of the crater in Message for Eternity can be. Could they be the baboons appearing on the cover?
  • The first half of The Edge of Life includes hints of various fantastical elements, such as vampires or people seemingly unaged after decades, and also a doctor possibly driven mad by the death of his daughter. The cover features a futuristic medical lab and a young girl in what appears to be a Suspended Animation bubble...
  • The cover of The Curse of the Amethyst features a scene that takes place in the last pages of the book, although it reveals nothing about the plot.
• Stable Time Loop: Invoked in The Astrologer of Bruges and The Morning of the World; Yoko goes back in time because she's seen evidence she went already. In Angels and Hawks, she takes care to set up the exact events that caused Emilia to go back in time in the first place to make sure she eventually does (and saves the lives of two innocent children). In fact, apart from Monya changing the future in Time's Spiral, this seems to be how time travel works in Yoko's universe, along with You Already Changed the Past.
• Stalker with a Crush: Mac Nab from The Prey and the Shadow was one for Cecilia's Missing Mom, Lady Mary. He went as far as having an altar dedicated to Lady Mary in his house, including a mannequin built in her likeness and dressed up in her wedding dress (which, according to him, was delivered by someone else after Mary's death). This mannequin is vital to derail Sir William's cruel Evil Plan and save Cecilia's life, though.
• Starfish Aliens: The unnamed alien entity in The Time Spiral looks like a giant jellyfish.
• Stay in the Kitchen:
  • Thao, a rebel from Kampong, has a dim view of Yoko because of her gender. In the end, he concedes that Yoko is a better rebel than he. He claims that she is the only woman he has ever bowed to.
  • Lord Zhou-Chong, the imperial herbalist, sees women as nothing but lowly servants. When Yoko dares to speak to him, he punishes her into submission. And rather than doing the dirty deed himself, he has one of his henchman do the whipping.
• Strong Family Resemblance:
  • Khany looks exactly like her mother Synda. When Poky grows into adulthood, she will probably look like her mother and sister as well.
  • Same goes for Eva, the daughter of Anna Schulz. Magda, her cousin and niece respectively, also resembles them both.
• Take a Third Option: After the defeat of queen Hegora, Khany invites the people of the underwater city to live on the surface with the other Vineans, as the city will no longer function without the queen. The undersea Vineans reject the offer, as this will mean that they lost the war against the surface Vineans. It will lead to resentment and eventually, to war. Yoko becomes a compromise as she becomes the new queen. Because her fate is now linked to the underwater city, it will function once more and the two Vinean factions will remain separate.
• Taking the Bullet: Myna shields Yoko from an erasing beam. She gets better, since being a robot, her memories can be copied back into her circuits.
• Taking You with Me: The evil queen Hegora has bound the abyssal city to her. Should her heart stop, the city will power down and will die with her.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Vic, to a degree.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Dr. Briggs tries to kill his colleague Dr. Haley by pouring poison in his beer. Unfortunately for Briggs, Haley saw him doing it without being noticed.
• Tap on the Head: Martial arts move often used to knock Yoko unconscious (The Rhine Gold). OTOH, Yoko uses it too, like in Daughter of the Wind when she quickly applies one to Kazuky's mook. (Justified Trope: Yoko is an Aikidoka and the neck chop is a rather common Aikido move, named yonkomen)
• Technology Porn: Leloup enjoys drawing vehicles (he was responsible for drawing most of the planes in Tintin after all). Hence, almost every book features a new vehicle or large device that gets detailed renditions.
• The Plague: The Astrologer of Bruges.
• The Teetotaler: Yoko in contrast to Pol. She did share a glass of vodka with countess Olga however.
• The X of Y: Almost all of the original books titles follow this pattern (the English translations tend to change this to Y's X).
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Yoko is VERY reluctant to kill a sentient being, even when threatened. She does kill a few people accidentally though, and sometimes her friends are the ones giving the killing blow.
• Those Two Guys: Vic and Pol. Before meeting Yoko, they work together, Vic being a TV producer and Pol a cameraman. They are often seen together with Yoko.
• Time Abyss: Khany, Poky and several Vineans are actually 2.4 millions years old, courtesy of cryogenic sleep.
• Time Travel:
  • Monya's time machine, invented/completed in space after Earth was destroyed — to undo said destruction — is used on several occasions even after the initial story introducing it is resolved.
  • Also used by a Vinean colony that settled on massive rock formations orbiting giant stars. They periodically travel to the future to avoid the frequent hazardous storms and quakes. Yoko's ship the Ryu is also capable of travelling in time.
  • The Hex of Amethyst has Malcom Hendry inventing a time machine in the '30 and gets stranded in the '70.
  • A time machine was apparently responsible for bringing the androids and cyborgs in Saturn's Gemini to the present day.
• Title Drop: Almost every adventure has this trope invoked by someone, most of the time by Yoko.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • The Vineans over the course of the series. While they were always mostly aloof toward the humans (except of course for Khany and a few other like Vynka, or Karpan on the other side of the spectrum), the latest books have them becoming openly distrustful of them, if not outright hostile. In Khany's Secret, it is revealed that a fraction of them actually wan to wipe out all humans. In Temple of the Immortals, it has become so bad that Khany decides to sever all ties with Vinea by sealing the gateway connecting the solar system with the planet.
  • Khany herself is hit by this in Saturn's Gemini. Although her intentions are ultimately proven to be benevolent, she is noticeably more antagonistic and secretive toward Yoko and Akina than she ever was in the previous stories. In comparison, simply hiding something from Yoko had brought her to tears in Khany's Secret.
• Translation Convention: Apart from a few words in German, characters are always interacting in French (English in the translations), no matter if they are actually talking in English, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese... There is also little to no indication of the language being spoken, apart from an occasional comment, such as a Japanese person offering to speak English for the benefit of Yoko's friends, Yoko explaining to a befuddled Pol that Morning Dew only speaks Chinese, or Yoko asking Emilia to stop snarking in Russian. Averted in Saturn's Gemini for the first time in the entire series, when an alien's speech is rendered as Wingdinglish.
• Translator Microbes: The Vineans have universal translators headsets that enable them to understand other languages, so it's necessary for both participants in a conversation to wear one. They also have telepathic transmitters headsets that perform the same function in addition to allowing telepathic communication, which proves useful for communicating with creatures not using speech, like the Titans.
• Twin Desynch: Khany and Poky were young twins when they were placed into suspended animation. They were awoken at different dates, resulting Khany being an adult and Poky remaining a child.
  • A variation occurs in The Three Suns of Vinea: Poky and Khany's mother Sindah is found in stasis, having entered it when she was Khany's current age. As a result, mother and daughter now have the same biological age.
• Two Guys and a Girl: The Curious Trio: Vic and Pol (two guys) and Yoko (a girl). Things change when Morning Dew and Mieke join the cast.
• Tyke Bomb:
  • Before Khany's return to her home planet, there was power struggle between the Supreme Guide and some Vineans. The latter fled underwater and swore vengeance. They built an armada of spaceships and put their children in stasis who were to become the next generation's army.
  • Before his death, Karpan had a young Vinean specifically engineered with a preprogram mission on her mind: eradicate all life on Earth.
• Under the Sea: The Archangels of Vinea is almost entirely set in a subaquatic environment.
• Underwater Base: Queen Hegora's base in The Archangels of Vinea. Also, Ito Kazuky has set up a secret missile launching complex on the very wreck of battleship Yamato.
• Unobtainium: Gobol uses a rare material called "vinadium". Its blue radiation, when refined and filtered, prevent his cells from aging and gives him energy-like attacks.
• The Voiceless: Koshi never speaks: he's a robot incapable of speech, although he can communicate with a keyboard and a computer.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Dina is briefly seeing being sick after a bumpy plane flight, courtesy of Emilia.
• We Can Rule Together. In The Prey and the Ghost, Sir William's co-conspirator, the mysterious doctor, tells Margaret as he holds her hostage that she should join his agenda and backstab Sir William, lest he kill her with poison. Margaret tearfully says no, and right then Vic and Yoko pull a Big Damn Heroes and save her.
• Weather-Control Machine: Used by Vineans to create a habitable environment, since their home planet has a synchronous rotation. Though arguably it is more of a weather BARRIER than a weather control in the traditional sense.
• Weapon of Mass Destruction: In Daughter of the Wind, Yoko's father has invented a weapon that creates localized typhoons. His opponent goes one further, and creates a full-sized cyclone. Which then has to be destroyed by nuclear weapons before it sweeps over Japan...
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Stanford. While we get a bit of his backstory, we never get to know his true plans for the time machine and the antimatter. Justified because of Leloup is more interested in developing relations between Yoko and her friends than the villains.
• Wham Episode: The Temple of Immortals drop a massive bombshell. Khany revealed that several Vineans who returned to their home planet have trouble adapting to their new life and many are dying. The Vinean Council strongly considered wiping out the humans and taking over the Earth as a viable solution, at least until Yoko and Khany destroyed the bioweapon in the previous album, Khany's Secret. A rift has now grown between Vinea and the Vineans led by Khany on Earth. She believes drastic measures must be taken. First, permanently disable the intergalactic shuttle tube to prevent any invasions. Second, Khany will be taking her people deeper into the Earth's crust, because mankind's frequent warfare and constant polluting will become a threat to them in the future. Yoko (and the fans) will never see Vinea ever again.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Some stories play with the concept, done almost straight in The Titans.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Wotan's Fire has a cannon powered by lightning energy. The Vineans' defense laser cannon in their homeworld's north pole.
• Weirdness Magnet: Yoko has run into aliens, time travellers, dinosaurs, immortals, secret service agencies just to name a few.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Monya is very mature and intelligent despite being 14 years old. This may have to do with the knowledge uploaded into her brain at ayoung age or 14 years old is just the norm for a young adult in the 39th century.
• Would Hurt a Child: Some villains in the series will harm children without a second thought. As a rule of thumb, anyone who hurt a child will end up dead before the end of the album. As a subversion, Kurt is the only to live so far. He planned on hurting Magda, but made a Heel–Face Turn before he could do so.
• Yandere: Mac Nab from The Prey And the Ghost is an adult, male example. He also subverts it by, despite still obsessively loving the dead Mary, remaining focused enough to join Yoko's plan so they can save Cecilia and punish Sir William.
• Yamato Nadeshiko: Yoko's mother, Masako. Justified, since Yoko is from a traditional Japanese family an the comic itself started in The '70s.
  • Invoked in The Devil's Organ, when Yoko shows up in a kimono and shocks her companions and hosts.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Because of Margaret's likeness to Sir William's stepdaughter Cecilia, she was used in conspiracy to kill Cecilia. After killing her, Sir William plan to kill Maragaret as well. Thankfully, Yoko prevents both murders.
  • A mysterious creature has transfered knowledge of antimatter to professor Webbs' mind. Webbs in turn uses his newfound knowledge to build a particle accelerator and feed the creature with the antimatter it needs to grow. The creature then grows to a substantial size and begins controlling the facility. Webbs finally shuts off the particle accelerator and decides to destroy it. He will then use the knowledge of the antimatter to make himself rich and famous. However, the trope work both ways. Before the creature can be destroyed, it reactivates the particle accelerator and kills Webbs, as it no longer needs him to feed itself.
• You Killed My Father: Minako Watanabe avenges her father's death by killing her father's killer, Kazuky's double. She blew up his boat with C4.

The novel L'écume de l'aube (The Foam of the Dawn) contains examples of:

• Air-Vent Passageway: Yoko escapes her cell by entering the house's air ventilation system.
• Arranged Marriage: Both Yoko and Shinji's parents wanted their children to hook up when they got older. Yoko didn't mind since she loved Shinji. However, Shinji loved Akina. When this is revealed years later, this caused quite a commotion for everyone.
• Betty and Veronica: Akina as the Betty and Yoko as the Veronica.
• Big Fancy House: Yoko's house is described as bigger than their neighbors and close to the sea.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Yoko has been vying for Shinji since she was at least 8 years old. She lost him to Akina.
• Coming of Age: The whole story is this for Yoko.
• Continuity Nod: Many. Most of them are related to Daughter of the Wind and The Dragon of Hong Kong:
  • Onoué buying a servant from Hong Kong and marrying her after falling in love with her.
  • Yoko's house where most of the novel take place.
  • Seiki's lab.
  • The Buddha temple.
  • Yoko and Aoki meeting for the first time.
  • A businessman interested in financing Seiki's research. He is only hinted, but readers will recognize him as Ito Kazuky.
  • In the Exiles of Kifa, the AI of the Ryu is called Akina, which is named after Yoko's rival.
• Corporal Punishment: When under 5 years old, Yoko was disciplined for her bad behavior.
• Defrosting Ice King: After the death of his wife, Onoué isolated himself completely. He lived in a pavilion in his son's backyard and cut all contact with the rest of the world. It's only five years later when he meet his granddaughter Yoko for the first time that he starts reconnecting with his family.
• Good Parents: Yoko's parents are very good to her. Although they are portrayed as traditional Japanese parents, they are slightly less conservative than the norm.
• The Hero: Shinji acts this way, being the leader of Yoko's band of friends. He protects the weak children, like Akina, from other rival bands of children.
• Honor Before Reason / What You Are in the Dark : After successfully stealing the pearl back from madam Kwan and Wai, Yoko was griped with guilt. Seeing how the pearl made Wai happy and how Yoko had lied to the boy, she couldn't bear it anymore and confessed the whole truth to madam Kwan.
• How We Got Here: The novel opens in the present day where Yoko takes a plane from Japan to Hong Kong. She thinks of all the events that led to this trip. The story then shifts to her grandfather's life, Yoko's childhood through her adulthood. The story returns to the present day when the plane lands in Hong Kong and continues with madam Kwan.
• Idiot Ball: Yoko's diamond pearl was stolen because of her father Seiki. He knew the pearl was unique and highly valuable. Fearing a burglar might steal it, he had a local jeweler make a copy... but he neither warned Yoko, nor checked if the original that was returned to him was genuine. The theft would go unnoticed for many years.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Between Yoko and Aoki.
• Irony: By trying to protect the Foam of Dawn from an eventual burglar, Seiki caused it to be stolen. He commissioned a fake pearl from a jeweler and planted it in Yoko's jewel box while the Foam of Dawn was locked inside the family's safe. Unfortunately for him, the jeweler gave him two fake pearls and kept Foam of Dawn to himself. In trying to fool thieves, Seiki was himself fooled by one.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: After seeing that Shinji loves Akina, Yoko painfully decides to let the pair be together.
• Jerkass: Hiromi. She constantly criticizes everyone and blames her father for her unhappiness.
• Karma Houdini: Fearing getting caught for stealing the diamond-pearl back in Japan, Mr. Chu leaves Hong Kong after emptying his bank accounts and is never seen again.
• The Lancer: Yoko to Shinji.
• The Load: Akina, by her own admission.
• Love Triangle: Between Yoko, Shinji and Akina.
• Memento MacGuffin: The Foam of the Dawn is a diamond-colored pearl created by Yoko's grandfather and given to her. While it's unique and highly valuable, it represents Yoko's childhood memories and her close relationship with the patriarch. When it gets stolen, Yoko goes on her very first adventure to find it.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: Yoko's detestable aunt Hiromi. She's Seiki's older sister and a widow. She has a very strained relationship with her father Onoué because of the family's money problems. When she comes visiting, she's complaining to everyone about how the world is mistreating her and how her life is difficult. Hiromi doesn't have any redeeming qualities beside that.
• Secret Relationship: Shinji and Akina. No one knows when it started, but Yoko is 17 when it gets discovered.
• Secret-Keeper: Seiki becomes this after the funeral urn incident.
• The Smart Guy: Nagayo. He wears glasses and his parents are architects. When Yoko's band of friends disband, Nagayo's parents assign him a private teacher for his weekend studies.
• Tagalong Kid: Yoshio's young brother, Kiotaka. It doesn't last long however, as Yoko's friends part ways.
• Time Skip: The novel takes place between different parts of Yoko's past. Time skips are therefore inevitable between chapters:
  • Onoué's past, his wife, his children and eventually, Yoko's birth.
  • Yoko is 5 years old and meets her grandfather for the first time.
  • Yoko is 8 years old. We see her at school with her friends. She wants her grandfather to try, once again, to create the diamond pearl, the Foam of Dawn. She also meets Aoki for the first time.
  • Yoko is 14 years old. The diamond pearl is successfully created. A few months later, Onoué passes away; Yoko is devastated.
  • Yoko is 17 years old. Her childhood crush doesn't love her and loves Yoko's friend Akina instead. Yoko leaves to study electronics in Tokyo.
  • Yoko is 20 years old. She continues her studies and she finds out the Foam of Dawn has been stolen. Yoko is determined to get it back and goes on her very first adventure.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Yoko as the more adventurous one and Akina as the more feminine one.
• Two Girls and a Guy: After Yoko's band of friends broke away, it's only one guy and two girls: Shinji, Yoko and Akina.
• The Unreveal: To get pearls out of oysters, a piece of nacre has to be inserted inside of them. To produce a diamond pearl, Onoué had to experiment with different kind of materials. He had done so for decades and sank all of his money into the research. When he finally succeeded for Yoko's sake, the specific piece of material is never revealed to readers.
• The Unseen: Mr. Chu. He started this whole mess by stealing the Foam of Dawn and is never confronted by Yoko once.

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