Largo Winch v2: “Takeover Bid” and “Business Blues”

It dawned on me with this second volume in the series that Largo Winch is capitalism’s James Bond.

He gets involved in worldwide adventures, meets a beautiful new woman or two in every outing, and can out-fight and out-smart just about anyone. There are car chases, gunfights, backstabbings, and hand-to-hand combat. The first volume even had a secret island lair!

All that’s missing is a cunning villain leading an opposing organization to — wait, that’s this book!

Let’s talk “Largo Winch” volume 2, titled “Takeover Bid”.

C.R.E.D.I.T.S.

What’s Going On?

Fenico — the Fenimore Insurance Company — is an American holding company with 100 different businesses under its umbrella. They appear to be making aggressive moves towards The W Group. They’ve poached a top executive. They’re buying W Group shares. Is this an attempt to take over The W Group? Could they possibly buy up enough shares to get there?

Some in The W Group, though, see this as the perfect opportunity to make an aggressive counter-maneuver that would lead to them taking over Fenico. Turn the tables! The opportunity is big enough to drive a truck through, which is something that worries Largo. Why would they leave themselves open to this?

Nevertheless, he trusts in his top executives to know what they’re doing and lets them do it.

Then, things get very very tricky. As you might imagine with a book like “Largo Winch,” nothing goes according to plan. Watching everyone tap-dance their way through the story looking for an angle to be the winner is the fun of the book. Desperate people do desperate things. The kinds of people who plot hostile takeover bids often have long-range planning to account for some twists and turns along the way.

There’s also another subplot in the book about someone with strong skills with a bow and arrow taking out super-rich men at an alarming rate. Is this ecoterrorist someone who should worry Largo?

And, of course, Largo meets a beautiful woman at an event and the two quickly hit it off.

Just as a counter-balance, a gold-digging older woman arranges to make it look like she and Largo are an item. It’s a subplot that would feel like comic relief if it weren’t so close to the kind of real-world things people have been known to claim and sue over.

Once you have deep pockets, you’re a target for every lawyer with a client that has an angle. Plus, she’s so silly it’s hard to take her seriously. She’s pure comic relief.

Oh, and the tax man shows up to dispute Largo’s assumed safety from the taxes on his inheritance as outlined in the first book.7

It’s a lot in one book, but it keeps things constantly moving and keeps the reader on guard with every page. You really do never know what might be happening next.

The Craziest Ending of All

This book is another great example of cranking up the level of drama and craziness as the story goes along. For as much as this book is about the financial moves of two super-rich companies against each other, in the end it all boils down to Largo Winch speeding to make a meeting in time to sign some papers to get a deal done.

That includes a motorcycle chase through New York City against armed motorcyclists, a perilous trip up a window washer’s platform, and the most satisfying entrance to a legal meeting I’ve ever seen. (It ranks right up there for me with Thor’s “Ultron. We would have words with thee.“)

All of this is after his breaking-and-entering of a castle under the cover of night’s darkness.

“Largo Winch” is a series routed in real-world economics for the sake of pushing characters into the kinds of crazy situations that could only occur in a novel/movie/comic book.

I’m game for that.

Largo Winch as Period Piece/Product of Its Time

I should have made the James Bond comparison earlier. This is the text on the back of the first volume:

“No family, no connections, anti-establishment, womanizer, wanderer, iconoclast, and fighter.”

Yup, sounds like Bond to me!

The thing that stands out the most about this book from reading it in 2021 is that we live in a different world today. To give it the size that it has, The W Group needs to be an international conglomerate, eating up more than 200 smaller companies. It’s the largest company in the world and is worth $10 billion.

Apple is worth a trillion dollars today. There are Silicon Valley start-ups that are valued at a billion after a year of work. Some go public eventually and are immediately valued in the tens of billions of dollars.

There are times in reading “Largo Winch” that I think it’s quaint that all these people are so impressed at The W Group’s largesse at a $10 billion valuation.

The important distinction to make between The W Group and your typical Silicon Valley VC-funded unicorn is that The W Group has multiple companies making real-world products and actual profits. Silicon Valley companies are valued at their future potential, and all that “wealth” is on paper, not in reality. Most of them aren’t even profitable.

The second thing to point out that’s of particular interest in this book is that cell phones and the internet don’t exist. The steps of the takeover bid we’ll be talking about in this book are reliant on calls being made at the right time and papers being signed by a given deadline.

The big action finale of this book is all about Largo racing to get to a meeting so he can sign some papers that, these days, would likely be a form on the internet and maybe a phone call for verification. I doubt even Jean Van Hamme could milk too much drama out of Large Winch signing a PDF on his iPad from anywhere in the world.

If this book were created today, I have a feeling The W Group would look more like an Alphabet, where it’s a collection of separate entities, mostly living in the world of technology and the internet. We’d likely have to make some of the drama be about hackers and cyber security.

I think I prefer this more grounded, real-world approach.

The third thing is the state of international politics. Without spoiling things for this book, there are a couple of foreign powers at play in a part of this plot. There might be some names you aren’t familiar with at all. Heck, it’s been thirty years; I had to stretch my memory just a tad. But they’re names and countries that were in the nightly news all the time back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was slightly surreal to hear those names again for me. For others, it might mean a trip down Wikipedia lane.

Don’t worry — you can understand the book without any of their backstories. It’s just an interesting bit of verisimilitude that’s very of its time.

The Drama of Business

The genius of Van Hamme in “Largo Winch” is in the way he dramatizes big business and makes it as important and as pulse-pounding as a car chase through city streets. We’ll see that repeatedly throughout the series. Van Hamme always constructs his stories to give readers both halves.

Anyone can write a pulse-pounding action sequence, but it takes a writer of significant skill to be able to concoct the business dealings that Van Hamme comes up with here. He can explain it to the reader through dialogue in an easy-to-digest fashion.

He can make that dialogue so entertaining that the book doesn’t come to a standstill while he infodumps on the reader. You know what he’s doing but you don’t want to miss a word of it. Everything doesn’t stop. It just gets more interesting.

Even at the height of exposition, Largo’s able to be either contrarian or snarky. He’s a set of fresh eyes in a board room filled with career businessmen who speak a different language. He’s a good point of view for the reader, too. As outsiders, our concerns and our curiosities can be effectively carried by Largo Winch in an entertaining fashion.

Local Color

I was born and raised in the New York City media market. I’m not in a suburb of the city, per se. I’m about a half-hour away on a clear traffic day. Buses and trains leading into the city have always been not too far away.

So it’s always funny to see a book like this that has copious editor’s notes defining local terms. In the first book, for example, Nero calls for a flight out of LaGuardia, which the note at the bottom of the panel helpfully defines as “one of the New York airports.” (There are three: LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark.)

Well, duh. But of the three big local airports, that one is maybe the least well-known overseas, I’d guess. It’s the only one that doesn’t do international flights. So the note is helpful, but it’s just weird that some bit of knowledge that I take for granted shows up like that.

In this book, it gets even crazier, particularly in the chase scenes at the end of this book. Francq definitely took a lot of photos of the area. His meticulous detail on every bit of signage along the major roads and highways of the area was a lot of fun to see.

Plus, you have to keep in mind that he drew this book around 1990 or so. There was no Google search. He probably took a trip to America and photographed these locations. He’s running off his own pictures here.

Here’s a quick moment of Largo speeding through what I think is the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

What really caught my attention, though, is the billboard above the tunnel. New York area locals will immediately recognize it, and I’m sure a lot of sports junkies will, too. It’s a billboard ad for local radio station 660 AM WFAN. Yes, that’s a real station. It was the first ’round the clock all-sports radio station.

I’m not sure whether Francq’s sign showing it as “56 AM” was an honest mistake or a purposeful attempt to fictionalize the sign a bit. It looks like the sign is showing generic people holding baseballs, but that might also be the station’s stars, Don Imus in the morning up front and Mike and the Mad Dog in the afternoons behind him.

I’m feeling some nostalgia for the talk radio of my youth here now. It’s just a fun bonus for the book.

By the way, Getty Images has some great stock images of Philippe Francq. They are not in any way in the budget of this site (starting at $175), but click on that link to take a look at the man in good lighting conditions.

Inconsistent Art Additions

I mentioned in my review of Largo Winch v1 that Cinebook did some extra drawing work in the series to cover up the topless women that appear in the book from time to time.

It happens in this book again, but it gets really obvious. I didn’t even see it in the first book when I first read it a long time ago. This book, though, covers the women up in a half-hearted fashion. Bras appear and disappear.

It’s almost funny.

Here’s Largo Winch’s latest lady, as seen the next morning in her robe and (visible especially in the first panel) shirt:

Here she is a few panels later as the robe has slipped past her shoulders and her shirt has suddenly disappeared since it was never there in the first place:

This is panel from a trip to Times Square that Largo takes later in teh book. This is from the seedier days of the area when everything was more, er, adult-oriented than it is today:

That tube top/strapless bra the woman is wearing wouldn’t quite shock the crowd, mostly because it is also drawn on in the English edition. There’s no sign of it in the previous panel, where the arm holes come down far enough that it would otherwise be visible.

The French edition, needless to say, shows it all. Take my word for it. I did my research. 😉

Does this impact the book at all? Does it destroy the story? No. Was it even necessary in the first place? Probably not. It fits in more realistically, perhaps, but we’ve all consumed comics, tv shows, and movies where people wear more clothes than they might otherwise in certain scenes.

It’s a fun little footnote to follow for the sake of a few chuckles, but it’s not really a problem.

It’s not like the English edition is removing criticism of China so it would be allowed in that country or anything…

It’s just a nipple or two (implied or visible).

Recommended?

Yes.

This one is even better than the first book. With the origin story out of the way, this feels like Largo’s first true adventure, and it has everything I can ask for.

Most notably, it has a crazy action/chase scene as well as all the backdoor business dealings. Van Hamme knows his way around business financials, and it’s even more impressive that he can present it in an interesting way.

Francq’s art might be a little stiff for some, but I think its realism is a strength for a book of this type. I couldn’t image someone drawing it any cartoonier.

The core of this story revolves around a tricky three- or four-party business deal with billions of dollars trading back and forth. Get the gist of it when they explain it the first time, and then just nod your head and run with whatever the characters tell you along the way.

It’s worth a read.

Buy It Now

• Izneo
• Amazon (print)
• Amazing (digital)

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