Buck Danny

Buck Danny
Cover of the Dutch language edition of Mission: Apocalypse  (1983 Dupuis).
Created by	Jean-Michel Charlier and Victor Hubinon
Publication information
Publisher	Dupuis
Formats	Original material for the series has been published as a strip in the comics anthology(s) Spirou magazine.
Original language	French
Genre	War
Publication date	January 1947
Creative team
Writer(s)	Jean-Michel Charlier
Artist(s)	Victor Hubinon
Creator(s)	Jean-Michel Charlier and Victor Hubinon

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 Mixing historical references with fiction, Buck Danny is one of the most important 'classic' Franco-Belgian comic strips. 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, UFO's 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.

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.