Buck Danny is a Franco-Belgian comics series about a military flying ace and his two sidekicks serving (depending on the plots) in the United States Navy or the United States Air Force. The series is noted for its realism both in the drawings and the descriptions of air force procedures as part of the storyline. In particular the aircraft depicted are extremely accurate. Mixing historical references with fiction, Buck Danny is one of the most important 'classic' Franco-Belgian comic strips.Victor Hubinon (from the aeroplanete.net website, Retrieved on April 19, 2007) Starting in 1947, the first albums were set against the backdrop of World War II, but from 1954 onwards, the series started to play in 'the present' and has so ever since. Like this, the series reads as a chronology of military aviation as well as the events that were catching people's imagination at the time of publishing, ranging from the Korean War, the Cold War, UFOs, international terrorism and drug running, the space race, rogue atomic bombs, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and recently the conflicts in Sarajevo and Afghanistan. The series takes place in a floating timeline with the conflicts and aircraft changing through the times, although the main characters largely remain the same through the decades.
True to the Franco-Belgian tradition the adventures are first published as a series in a weekly comic magazine. After a complete story has run its course, it is bundled and published as a book. In the case of Buck Danny, the story appeared in Spirou magazine in weekly installments of one page per issue and from 1947 to 2008, 52 albums have been published by Spirou's parent company Dupuis editions. All are still in print today.
From 1947 to 1979, the first 40 albums were a collaboration between writer Jean-Michel Charlier and artist Victor Hubinon. After the death of the latter in 1979, the series took a hiatus of 4 years before Charlier continued for 4 more albums with artist Francis Bergèse. After Charlier's death in 1989, Bergèse tried one album with a scenario by Jacques de Douhet before writing his own stories. After 1996, 7 more stories appeared, combining realistic penmanship with continuously complex scenarios.
Bergèse announced his retirement after the publication of album 52. Hence since 2008, production of new material ceased. Officially however, the series is not 'dead' but simply on hiatus while the production company is looking for a new artist and writer. In May 2010 it was announced that Dupuis commissioned writer Frédéric Zumbiehl and artist Fabrice Lamy to continue the Buck Danny franchise. With the publication of album no. 53 in November 2013 it turned out that writer Frédéric Zumbiehl was still in charge but drawings are now made by Francis Winis. If the new team proves to be successful, this would be the third artist and fourth scenarist for the series.
Synopsis The comic series follows the exploits of the American military aviator Buck Danny over a period of time from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor up to the current day. Although the first two adventures starred Danny alone, in the third album he met up with his sidekicks Jerry 'Tumb' Tumbler and Sonny Tuckson and from there on all subsequent adventures were done as a trio.
When the first stories started appearing in 1947, their themes—the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway and General Chennault's Flying Tigers—were recent history, but after 9 albums, the series caught up with current times and from then on the adventures always played in 'the present'. Since then, the series consists of a chronological string of adventures: In the 10th album, which is something like a watershed for the series, the trio become test pilots and at the end of the album re-enlist into the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force promptly sends them to the Korean War where the trio battles spies and unmanned aircraft. After that they are somehow transferred to the Navy and for the next 55 years they will serve on the latest supercarriers, fly the latest jets and helicopters and witness the latest progress in aviation firsthand. Flying a SBD Dauntless on his first mission, Buck Danny has flown Sabres in Korea, Grumman Panthers, Cougars, Tigers and F14 Tomcats for the Navy. In his latest albums, under stewardship of Francis Bergèse, Buck Danny and his team fly the F-18 for the navy, but simultaneously serve as test pilots for the Air force's F-22 program.
Besides flying for the Navy and helping out the Air Force, several adventures feature Buck and his friends as test pilots for NASA, for instance flying the X-15 rocket-plane or finding rogue transmitters interfering with rocket testing at Cape Kennedy. In addition the trio regularly changes into civilian clothes to work directly for the U.S. government, posing as charter pilots, flight instructors or mercenaries to investigate, uncover and finally thwart, criminal activities all over the world.
Realism has always been a trademark of Buck Danny, especially when it comes to depicting the aircraft and the procedures and jargon used by the air force. Often, despite the heroics of Danny, Tumbler or Tuckson, the aircraft and carriers drawn are the real heroes. Helping with this is the fact that, contrary to American comic books, Belgian magazines were letter-sized like regular news magazines (technically they were in A4 paper format). Consequently, the resulting albums are letter-sized hard- or softcovers as well, considerably larger than American comics or Japanese Manga. Also they are printed on top-quality paper rather than pulp. All this gives the artist more opportunity to add detail to his drawings.
Realism also is reflected in the grim atmosphere of the books. Especially the Cold War albums are slowly built-up mysteries where the heroes are constantly under the threat of attack by an unseen enemy. Sabotage, often with deadly results is a common feature in more than one album and several supporting characters are shot, ambushed, blown up by booby-traps or otherwise die violent deaths. Often Buck and his teammates escape more by luck than by their own cunning and the feeling that they could have died lingers deep through the following pages.
The realism of the stories playing in the present even goes so far that there are over the 53 stories no prequels nor flashback nor secrets from Buck's past as a plot device. Each new stories follows the other chronologically, although some time may have elapsed between one adventure and another. An exception to that are a couple of short stories drawn by Francis Bergèse included in the large collection books, but not distributed in the official list of albums.
As is traditional in the Franco-Belgian comic business, the size of a published comic album is limited to 40-45 pages. Adventures that run longer are either distributed as 40-page chapters of a saga or designed to form independent stories within a longer arc. In the case of Buck Danny, 53 albums form 31 distinct stories: 16 albums are stand-alone adventures, 11 stories are spread out over two albums, 4 stories even use 3 albums. However, especially after the 10th album, the albums of a multi-story arc are laid out as closed chapters with a distinctive ending point, often a cliffhanger at the end of the album and a short recap at the beginning of the next album.
Publication history
The Pacific War: 1947–1948 Shortly after the end of World War II, Brussels was for a few years the hotbed of the emerging comic industry. As such editor Georges Troisfontaines owned an agency called 'World Press' which he modeled after the American comic strip syndicates. Part of his staff were the artist Victor Hubinon and Jean-Michel Charlier, who quickly became a talented writer. Soon, Troisfontaines proposed that the two work together. They first collaborated on L'Agonie du Bismark (The Agony of the Bismark), a war account serialized in Spirou magazine in 1946.
Seeing the success of American pilot strips, Troisfontaines suggested to Hubinon and Charlier that they should produce a series about an American pilot just as well and even came up with the name Buck Danny. Keeping in line with their war account stories, the two came up with a semi-historical account of a young engineer working in Hawaii at the beginning of the war. Firsthand witnessing the Attack on Pearl Harbor, Buck Danny enlists in the Navy as a pilot and has a series of adventures serving on the aircraft carrier against the backdrop of the Battle of the Coral Sea. The story was serialized in weekly installments in Spirou magazine from January 2, 1947, onwards. After the story ran its course, it was gathered and published in book form in 1948. By that time Hubinon and Charlier were already working on a second part, keeping the same formula but this time having Buck Danny live through his adventures against the Battle of Midway.
The storyline of these two albums consists of a string of smaller adventures of Buck Danny as a pilot and the real life events of the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. In the fictionalized adventures, Buck Danny flies attack missions, engages in dogfights, gets shot down, escapes, returns to his carrier in a stolen Japanese plane and even rescues a hostage. At the end of each album, Buck Danny takes a back seat as his carrier readies for battle and in the description of the historical battle, individual historical pilots, commanders and raids are described in detail. As to the artwork, the pages are laid out classically in 4 'strips' of 3 to 4 panels each, although on occasion, two strips combine to a large shot. Panels often include inserts describing aircraft, carrier procedures, historical figures or maps of the area.
Two years is an incredibly short span to draw two 40-page albums and so, although officially the series was owned by Victor Hubinon and Jean-Michel Charlier, everyone at 'World Press' contributed to the albums in various degrees. As a consequence, the artwork is sometimes sketchy and the realism, especially in the aircraft depicted is certainly not up to par with later albums.
While working on the first Buck Danny albums, they also produced Tarawa Atoll Sanglant ('Tarawa, Bloody Atoll'), a historical account published in Belgium from the end of 1948 to the end of 1949 in the bi-weekly magazine Moustique. Like the Bismark account, this story retells the Battle of Tarawa in the Pacific Campaign. (The story was reprinted in Spirou in 1980 and subsequently republished in two 40-page books as a part of the Buck Danny series.)
Flying Tigers and desert pirates: 1950–1953 The series took a next step in 1950 with the publication of La revanche des fils du ciel (Revenge of the Sons of the Sky) in which Buck Danny is sent to China to become a commander for the Flying Tigers. In China Buck meets up with his teammates Tumbler and Tuckson and by the end of the first Chinese adventure, the three become an inseparable team.
During 1951 and 1952, three more adventures follow in which Buck and his companions team up with Susan Holmes, an army nurse who'd previously had a small role in one of the adventures of the Midway album. During a Japanese attack on their city, the trio and Holmes are separated from their base and over the next albums they are chased all through Asia by the traitor Mo Choung Young on behalf of a semi-fictional Black Dragon Society (which owes more to American pulp fiction than to historical accuracy).
Again in 1952 and 1953, three more adventures followed. The war having ended, Danny, Tumbler and Tuckson reunite and go to fly for a dubious airline in the Near East. Quickly they are involved in a hornets' nest of gun-runners, opium smugglers and palace revolutions.