Betlegeuse Book 2: The Caves

Betlegeuse Book 2: The Caves, by Leo, Cinebook

CURIOUS THIS collection. The first 25 pages or so are all basically about lead character Kim and her fellow travellers trying to find their way out of some caves and facing ever more absurd alien beasts along the way – I’ll accept that there’s a tragedy along the way, but for the most part visually it feels like creator Leo’s just looking for an excuse to draw some creatures he’s made up.

Once the group eventually get out into the fresh Betelgeusian air matters continue in a tick-box approach for how to write an adventure strip except Mai Lan and her Ium panda-like friends now enter the picture too.

The Iums take Mai Lan and Kim to yet another cave where within it we find the Iums live in symbiotic nature with a strange gigantic creature whose form inhabits the cracks between the cave. The girls separate but on remeeting Mai Lan reveals she’s been fed the little blue pastels that Kim had received back in Leo's earlier Alderban series that make her near immortal, and so the giant creature is revealed to be a mantris, but so did another creature appear to be earlier in this book. A mystery arises but as to its nature we can only presume it will be revealed in the next, and presumably final, book. There’s a lot to conclude.

I’m not convinced the book needed 48 pages to unfold its events.

As a stand-alone collection this isn’t the best one to get into this series with. But then, with a trio of them, the middle book always has a bridging factor between beginning and end.

Leo’s work has a landscape approach – not only do his visuals tend towards that manner but his stories stretch out in an ancient epic tradition; they’re traditional in that sense despite their science fiction dressing, but it’s the socialist morality of his actual themes that give him his voice, not quite unique in European comics but certainly distinctively his.

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