Review by Roy Boyd

In Vostok, Do You Read Me? Colonel Buck Danny – think James Bond meets Maverick from Top Gun – takes a journey to the freezing Antarctic to extreme-cold test a fighter plane. He’s accompanied, as always, by his friends Captain Sonny Tuckson and Major Jerry Tumbler. The latter sounds like a manoeuvre a pilot would undertake, or something one would say after falling down stairs, as in “I just took a major jerry tumbler down the stairs!”

Needless to say, things don’t go entirely as planned. Back from Defcon One, Lady X leads a team of deadly mercenaries, while treacherous Russian scientists and the outbreak of a deadly plague are just some of the things our brave heroes have to contend with. To complicate matters further, Buck falls in love, something he apparently doesn’t do often. This despite all the women in Buck’s world – and there aren’t many – being drop-dead gorgeous, an accusation which can probably be fairly levelled at most comics.

The plot of something buried deep in the ice reappearing to bite an unsuspecting humanity on the ass is a staple bordering on a cliché, one that features in one of the X-Files movies, and John Carpenter’s The Thing. However, writer Frédéric Zumbiehl’s handling of the plot has less sci-fi than those inspirations. The story, originally published in 2018, is eerily prescient when it explores the notion of a deadly pandemic, which, in the wake of Covid-19, seems a lot less science-fictional than it once did.

There aren’t many dogfights in this book, though it contains more than its fair share of crash landings and imaginative aerial action, all drawn with some aplomb by Gil Formosa. The plot is handled well, even if it’s often clunky in its execution. This is particularly true of the dialogue, which has far too many exclamation marks and sentences no one is ever likely to utter, least of all in the middle of a battle being fought at supersonic speeds. This volume, like previous ones, includes a fair number of footnotes, which range from the largely pointless (we probably all know who Bear Grylls is, though foreign readers may not) to the purely technical. Some of them, it must be said, are genuinely interesting.

This adventure is the first part of a trilogy, which continues in Operation Vektor.