The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Buck Danny 1 – Night Of The Serpent

by Francis Bergese

Cinebook

Cinebook have been doing really well so far with the books I’ve seen, I’ve found something to like in all of them, but I suppose it was inevitable that eventually there’d be one that I just didn’t like – and Buck Danny is that one.

Sometimes a book can be really good and then pull off something so stupid in the final chapters that you feel somewhat cheated by the entire thing. Buck Danny sort of does that, but since I hadn’t really enjoyed it too much up to the ridiculous set of coincidences of the final chapters it just meant I was even more disappointed by it.

The story was simple enough and had potential; a downed pilot in North Korea, a rescue mission involving stealth fighters running interference whilst special forces effect the extraction. Buck Danny and his team have to travel from a Paris airshow to North Korea as the pilots tasked to run interference. The first 20 pages of this 48 page book are concerned with their long flight from Paris to Korea where they’ll discover what their mission is. Once in Korea, they’re quickly into the air and playing a dangerous game of hide and seek in their stealth fighters, allowing the Korean forces to see them for moments and then disappearing again. The idea being that this should cause enough confusion to allow the helicopters with the extraction teams to get close to the position of the downed pilots locator beacon.

(The best and the worst of Buck Danny – fantastic aircraft sequences – but the dialogue? “Dang it”? “Dirty Imperialist Lackey”?)

But whilst the story had potential, any excitement in the tale was lost by some terrible pacing and a real over dialogue-ing of page after page. I’m all for a bit of tech stuff, but panel after panel was laden down with detailed explaination after detailed explaination. And then there’s the style of the speech – some of the phrasing wouldn’t be out of place in some dodgy 1950s B movie – that just doesn’t work in a book laden with so much modern tech and situations. I suppose it’s always possible that something has been lost in the translation, but the Cinebook standard so far has been high and I have no reason to believe this is any different, so I’ll have to put the dialogue faults and the pacing down to the writing.

And then we get the final moments. Buck Danny’s plane was hit and had to return to base, but that doesn’t stop him joining the highly trained special forces extraction team and then being the only man put onto the ground to extract the downed pilot. On their way out they’re nearly captured by a female North Korean soldier, but wouldn’t you know it, she wants out of the country as well and suddenly, with this remarkable coincidence, all is okay with Buck’s world. He saves the pilot and gets out of North Korea just in time for a bit of back-slapping banter with his team. It wasn’t great up to this point, but the ending just failed for me on too many levels.

(More great aircraft action from Buck Danny. Sadly there’s just not enough in the book.)

It looks very much like an old fashioned US comic strip, very much in the style of Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon, but it’s very much a substandard reiteration. It’s pretty obvious that Bergese has a real love of drawing his aircraft because that’s the only time the artwork really comes alive, especially in the night flying sequences over Korea’s no fly zone where Bergese does a great job of colouring the panels so we see just enough detail to be able to follow the action yet still retain all of the terror of  night flying in combat. But even here, the art isn’t allowed to breathe enough and just as we’re settling in to enjoy some cool flying action, we cut away to yet another over-wordy descriptive piece telling us what we’ve just been reading.

It could have been much more, but I just can’t see why Cinebook reckon this substandard rehashing of 1950s US comic strips is the best they can offer us from the wealth of classic European comics out there. We’ve already had this sort of thing, done far better, many years ago. I don’t think we need it again.

Richard Bruton.