Review by Roy Boyd
Flight of the Spectre is the latest in a very long line of Buck Danny books (over forty volumes, though you’ll probably have to learn French if you want to read them all). Frédéric Zumbiehl had only recently taken over writing duties, and for this title we’re introduced to a new artist, Gil Formosa.
This story begins, just like Tintin’s The Blue Lotus, with a ‘false flag’ operation carried out by the Japanese. (The more things change…) A shady cabal of ultra-nationalist Japanese want to overthrow the government and seize back their country’s divine destiny. To that end, they intend to provoke a war between China, their enemy of old, and the USA. They use a top-secret stealth plane (the Spectre of the title) to attack and shoot down one of their own country’s planes. The Spectre is piloted by Buck’s nemesis, Lady X, someone who clearly does her shopping in the S&M section of Army Navy Stores.
Previous reviews of Buck Danny have mentioned ships, vehicles and planes being accurate down to the last rivet. This isn’t a figure of speech or hyperbole. Every single rivet is actually drawn. Every. Single. One. This level of detail isn’t always a good thing. Comic art is often impressionistic and stylised, and photo-realism isn’t usually the point, otherwise photo-stories would be more popular than they are.
Formosa was probably chosen more for his facility with military aircraft and vehicles than his talents for drawing people. His people are not bad, they’re just a bit flat. Getting hung up on technical details doesn’t just affect the art, it often fatally slows the action scenes, which are exciting and well executed. One can’t help but think that the writer could jettison some details in favour of smoother storytelling.
The latter stages of the book move the action to the ground, with the humans doing a bit more and the vehicles taking a back seat somewhat (though not entirely, as we still have a car chase).
The plot doesn’t hold many surprises (think Top Gun meets James Bond with a sprinkling of Batman Begins) but still manages to deliver an exciting, fast-paced story hampered by the creators’ insistence on stopping to deliver mini-lectures on equipment. The story concludes in Defcon One.
Buck and his aviator chums seem to have stepped out of another era, which is hardly surprising considering the series has been running since the 1940s. While wanting to avoid sexist assumptions, it’s probably fair to say this will be enjoyed most by young boys. And those young boys may well go on to read the books of Tom Clancy, another – very successful – writer who never met a technical detail he didn’t like.
