In Review: Buck Danny - Ghost Squadron

After a gap of over two years Cinebook return to US military pilot Colonel Buck Danny in Francis Bergese's Ghost Squadron, originally published in France in 1996 as L'Escadrille Fantôme, the 46th Buck Danny album.

Colonel Buck Danny and his squadron are flying F/A-18 Hornet attack fighters from the carrier USS Eisenhower as part of the NATO Operation Deny Flight no-fly mission over Bosnia in 1995. Operating under strict 'no attack' orders, their planes are sometimes targeted by Serb ground forces and, when Lt Cindy McPherson's Hornet is hit, Danny's colleague Captain Sonny Tuckson attacks and destroys the missile battery that hit her.

As punishment, Tuck is reassigned to a secret squadron of F-16 Fighting Falcons commanded by Danny that are due to launch a bombing strike on Serb positions, however their secrecy is threatened when a unidentified MiG-29 Fulcrum is spotted near the base.

Cinebook's previous Buck Danny title, The Secrets Of The Black Sea, was set during Russia's Glasnost period while this one moves on slightly to the war in the former Yugoslavia and the Serb forces siege of Sarajevo in 1995. As both writer and artist, Francis Bergese weaves a story that is a fictional precursor to the real Operation Deliberate Force that effectively ended the Bosnian war by bombing the Serbs to the peace table.

Danny's secret mission in unmarked F-16s places his men in jeopardy of being attacked not just by the Serb ground forces and the mysterious MiG-29 squadron, but by their own side as well and Bergese provides a battle royale as a massive dog fight breaks out between the F-16s, the MiG-29s and the Eisenhower's F/A-18s, with a few RAF Tornado F3s and French Air Force Mirage 2000s thrown in for good measure. It is somewhat amusing that in a book written and illustrated by a Frenchman the only fighters in the battle that do not have at least one of their number shot down are the French Mirages.

Francis Bergese's artwork is always impressive when is comes to the aircraft. Indeed the US Navy squadron that Danny and co begin the book with is Strike Fighter Squadron 37 operating as part of Carrier Air Wing 3 and I can tell you that not because it is in the text, because it is not, but because all the information is there in his artwork. He even goes as far as making the one UK military registration that we can just about read on the RAF planes a genuine Tornado F3 registration number. That is the level of detail and accuracy that he works to in his artwork.

The storyline is perhaps less impressive, getting shoehorned into a real life situation with genuine military tactics makes for a solid, if somewhat uninspiring, plot. The addition towards the end of the mercenary pilot known as Lady X, a longtime Buck Danny adversary in the French books but never before seen in the Cinebook translations, lifts the book away from its real-world foundations and onto somewhat shakier ground.

If Bergese's writing was as good as his artwork then this would be a great book, as it is Buck Danny - Ghost Squadron is merely good but, given that it was the first book in the series that he had written as well as drawn, we can hope that further titles will improve as Bergese grew into the idea of being Buck Danny's writer as well as his artist.

• There are more details of the English language Buck Danny books on the Cinebook website. 

• There are more details (in English) of the French language Buck Danny books on the Dupois website.

• Cinebook will be selling their range of books including Buck Danny at Thought Bubble's Royal Armouries Hall in Leeds on the weekend of 17-18 November 2012.

In Review: Cinebook Recounts The Battle Of Britain

If you are looking at the cover of Cinebook Recounts The Battle Of Britain thinking that it looks a little familiar that is because this is the third time that it has been published in the UK. The first time was by Red Fox in 1995 while Cinebook themselves published it in 2008 - but in 1995 it was entitled Biggles And The Battle Of Britain while in 2008 it was Biggles Recounts The Battle Of Britain. With there being an issue between the original French publishers and the WE Johns estate over the character of Biggles, we should probably consider ourselves lucky that, since he is not actually a character in the story, it was relatively easy to retitle the book and avoid the issue.

First and foremost this is a history book, which relates the events of that summer 70 years ago when the Luftwaffe attempted to wrestle air superiority of the southern English skies from the Royal Air Force to allow an invasion fleet to sail from German occupied France. They were unsuccessful and Hitler moved on to open up a second front against the Russians instead.

Written by Bernard Asso and illustrated by Francis Bergese, the book relates the story of the battle in 22 pages which is then followed by 20 pages entitled The Bombing Of Germany (1943 - 1945). Asso tells the story briefly but succinctly including many of the characters from both the British and German sides to humanise the story although in translation from French to English Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory looses part of his rank which also happens to German Grand Admiral Raeder who's surname is also mis-spelt.

Unfortunately, it is not the only issue since the problems begin right in the first panel in which we are told that the British Expeditionary Corps were evacuated from Dunkirk - it was the British Expeditionary Force. This tends to show that the original French version has been translated too literally into English without checking the correct British terms so, for instance, the twin engined Messerschmidt Bf110 fighters are described as "bi-motor".

For a fictional story the odd instance of this can be forgiven: however, in a factual book such terms should be correct and all too often in the Battle of Britain story they are not. The other mistake in that first panel is one that Cinebook have made before in Biggles - Spitfire Parade, referring to the British World War 2 military who fought for King George VI as 'her majesty's forces'. The lack of knowledge of RAF terms also seen in Spitfire Parade is also evident here, with inaccuracies as to how squadrons and groups are numbered.

As with Spitfire Parade, this book really needed a proof reader familiar with the subject.

The second half of the book is given over to the allied bombing campaign in Europe in the later stages of the war. This does not suffer in translation the same way as the Battle Of Britain section does, perhaps because it has fewer specific terms in the text, but it does get the Cinebook censorship treatment on the "good girl" art that adorned the aircraft. Strangely, this is a little inconsistent with the female figures only being removed in close shots while if the same aircraft is smaller in the next panel the figure remains.

Yet for all these issues Bergese's artwork remains a delight. His aircraft are accurate and detailed, even down to the mud splatters from the Hurricane tail wheels appearing on their rear fuselages, and he is as good at illustrating bombers as he is with fighters, be they German, British or American.

This is a reissue of one of the earliest Cinebook publications, which may explain away a little of the dodgy translation but for those into their aircraft then it must be bought to see Bergese's excellent artwork.

• There are more details of the Cinebook Recounts series on the Cinebook website.

• There are more details of the original French Biggles Raconte series on the International Biggles Association website.