It's easy to think Belgian comic art begins and ends with the usual passport stamps: Tintin, the Smurfs, Lucky Luke. But step into a new retrospective on Buck Danny, the fictional US fighter pilot, and you’re suddenly in a different tradition – one that is bolder, more technical and quietly innovative in how it treats the modern world.
The exhibition, Victor Hubinon: Rétrospective Buck Danny, now on at the Huberty & Breyne gallery’s Châtelain space, runs until 14 February 2026. It presents original artwork from the 40 albums produced by comic artist maestro Hubinon, along with his Buck Danny writer Jean-Michel Charlier.
Seen at full size – far larger than the printed page – Hubinon’s images read less like vintage strip pages and more like storyboards for a film that never existed.
Images from the Victor Hubinon: Rétrospective Buck Danny exhibition.
Hubinon began drawing Buck Danny at 22, just out of Liège Arts Academy, and continued until his death at 55. "Buck Danny was his first series and his last," says Michèle Hubinon, the artist’s daughter.
The exhibition follows his albums over the years and his evolving style. "From the first pages, you see a drawing style that's still a little clumsy: he's young, heavily influenced by American comics of the time – especially Milton Caniff," she says. "And then, very quickly, he finds his own style, asserts it, and develops it over the years."
What made Buck Danny distinctive – and, in its way, daring – was its commitment to realism as a narrative engine. The series debuted in Spirou magazine in January 1947, in an era when weekly Franco-Belgian comics were still defining their identities.
Images from the Victor Hubinon: Rétrospective Buck Danny exhibition.
From the start, the strip fused adventure with a documentary sense of the present: military aviation procedures, credible jargon, and aircraft rendered with almost obsessive accuracy.
That accuracy was not just a stylistic tic. Michèle Hubinon, who was born on the same day in 1954 as Charlier's son, describes her father as a "stationary traveller" who worked "almost exclusively from documentation," often supplied by Charlier, who would visit air bases, gather information on site, and bring back photos and technical details.
"At the time, there was obviously no internet, nor easily accessible videos. And some information was even classified, especially concerning military aircraft. So you had to be inventive and very rigorous," she says.
Images from the Victor Hubinon: Rétrospective Buck Danny exhibition.
Hubinon built model planes and boats to solve problems of volume, viewpoint and above all shadows, which he treated as sacred. He even took letters from readers pointing out potential technical errors seriously, constantly refining what realism could mean on a drawn page.
He also had an original storytelling style, inspired by movies. "He said that comics were very close to cinema: there's the point of view, the framing, the lighting," says Michèle Hubinon. "In his panels, each frame can correspond to a different angle: high angle, low angle, profile, faces cropped by the frame. Everything is conceived as a mise-en-scène. He sought to convey movement through drawing, sometimes by breaking down an action, including in aerial scenes with airplanes."
The result was a comic strip hero who felt unusually modern: Buck Danny did not float in a timeless gag universe. The series evolved into a kind of pop-cultural flight log, tracking the era’s anxieties and fascinations – from the Cold War to the space race – while keeping one foot in plausible hardware and geopolitical atmosphere.
Huberty & Breyne have been building a quiet case for this broader, heritage-rich Belgian canon (after Morris in 2023 and Jean Roba in 2024). The Buck Danny exhibition is a reminder that Belgian comics also produced grand realist epics – cinematic, technically literate, and relentlessly ambitious.
Images from the Victor Hubinon: Rétrospective Buck Danny exhibition.
