“Twenty Years Later” by Dany and Van Hamme (volume 2 of 2)

Twenty years after the plane crash, the survivors of the flight start dying mysteriously coincidental deaths. And that’s when the French police and Israeli intelligence jump in.

Previously…

This is volume 2 (of 2) of an untitled series.  I reviewed the first volume, “Story Without a Hero“, earlier:

The Back Story

I didn’t realize this when I reviewed the first book, but these two books really were done 20 years apart.  Thanks to JC in the earlier comments thread and a little further research, I learned that the first book was serialized back in the late 1970s, so maybe I shouldn’t have been impressed that Dany was able to capture the fashion of the era so well.

In 1997, Dany and writer Jean Van Hamme paired up again to tell a second story about the same people.  The story takes place in 1997, at the same time Van Hamme was writing the book.

And it’s about the Van Hamme-iest Van Hamme book I’ve ever read, but with arguably the best art Van Hamme has ever had to grace one of his stories. (This might be excepting that volume of “XIII” that Moebius draw…)

Twenty Years

It’s a wildly different story from the first book.  “Story Without Heroes” is a perfectly self-contained survival tale.  A plane crashes in the remote jungle, a handful of people survive, and how will they get out?  Can they survive their own base instincts and not kill each other, give up, or make bad decisions?

I’m not going to give you major spoilers on this book, which already puts me behind the eight ball, but some glancing minor spoilers to help set up the story might leak through.  Skip ahead to the next section if you’re sensitive to that.

In “Twenty Years Later”, some of the plane’s survivors are coincidentally showing up dead.  Or is it a coincidence?  One of them gets swept up, instead, into a global search for the key item that will end this madness and keep the remaining survivors alive.

This is his story.

And, yes, it’s a good story. It makes good use of events of the day, plus some geopolitical stuff, some National Geographic reference, local politics, the power of the drug cartels, and so much more.

Most importantly, it’s more focused than the first part.  You even have a singular protagonist. Well, he’s the lead character, at least.  He mostly gets pulled into this adventure unwillingly and it takes him half the book before he buys into it and starts to act like the leader he normally is.

Clearly, a Van Hamme Story

Jean Van Hamme is a recovering novelist who became a comic book writer.  He’s best known for “XIII” and “Largo Winch.”

If you’ve read those, you know many of his novelistic tendencies never went away.  He can be wordy.  He can write some of the densest info dump dialogue pages in comics.  This book is no exception.

See what I mean there?

He’s the only one who gets away with it for me.  That kind of stuff usually turns me away instantly, but Van Hamme has a way of doing it that keeps my interest.  I know the talky scenes have a purpose, and they always build up to something.  It’s not that Van Hamme’s dialogue has a noticeable style to it the way, say, Brian Bendis’ might, but it does explain complicated things — from global politics to international economics — in an easily digestable way.  I imagine that’s a skill he learned while writing novels, or it’s just the skill that makes him successful as a novelist.

Beyond just that, this is a globe-trotting thriller story, as our main characters travel from South America to Asia to Africa and back to Europe.  There is spycraft and covert military operations and long-festering wounds in the psyche of a nation at stake here.

No, Largo Winch doesn’t make an appearance in this book, but it does feel an awful lot like one of this stories.  Except, this one is shorter. It’s only 66 pages, not 96.

The Art of Dany

Dany’s art on this book is a little more serious than on “Story Without a Hero.”   He’s moved away from the cartooning of 1977 to a more lifelike rendition in this book.  It reminds me a bit of Neal Adams’ 70s work.  So while his style has shifted, his reference decade hasn’t.  I supposed you could compare him at times to Brent Anderson, too, if you want something more modern.  (Though Anderson’s career started 30 years ago, so how modern am I talking here?)

It works well, though.  This is a travelogue story.  Dany can draw the city streets well, but then he excels at drawing all the dense foliage of the jungles and the small huts and the river beds and the helicopters and everything else Van Hamme throws at him.  That includes the action bits.  While they’re few and far between, they’re very clear, even when the action contains a major twist or turn in it.

Crazy Question

Wait, it’s been 20 years again.

Looks like Dany is still drawing.  He’s working on one of the “Lanfeust” titles.

I know Van Hamme is slowing down, but he’s still writing.

We need another story set 20 years after the last!  There aren’t many characters left, and only one will still be young enough to carry anything with too much action, but it would still be fun to see.

There aren’t too many projects like that, aside from that “Seven Up” movie series…

Recommended?

Yes.  The two books in this series are wildly different, and I know now that the first was never written with the second in mind.  It’s clear that this is a plot that was constructed around what they had left after the first book.  It’s an impressive feat to write it that way, but I suppose 20 additional years of experience in writing helped Van Hamme.

It won’t be for everyone and many will have a problem with the volume of dialogue in spots, but I ate it right up.  It’s the kind of story I’d expect from Van Hamme, and I think he pulls it off with Dany very strongly.

— 2018.057 —

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