[Free Exhibition] Retrospective Buck Danny – Victor HUBINON

Retrospective Buck Danny – Victor HUBINON

Authors: Martin Gillet & Benoît Denet

Retrospective Buck Danny – Victor HUBINON – Free Exhibition runs until February 14th 2026, in Brussels, Châtelain. The next guided tour is on January 31st at 3 pm.

Aviation, a vast subject… who hasn’t been intrigued, captivated by the stories of Buck Danny, both by the thrilling adventures and the precise details of the flying machines depicted?

The gallery offers us (free of charge! Rare these days) the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the original comic strips, capturing the key moments of the action…

“As part of its series of heritage exhibitions – rather than commercial ones – dedicated each year to the great figures of Belgian comic books, following Morris in 2023 and Jean Roba in 2024, Huberty & Breyne is offering a retrospective at the end of 2025 devoted to another of the giants of the ninth art: Victor Hubinon.”

“Celebrating the artist’s career, the gallery is unveiling an exceptional selection of original works from Buck Danny, taken from the 40 albums by the Charlier-Hubinon duo. Three originals per album will be on display, including – for the first time – nearly thirty covers”.

Excerpt from the guided tour led by Charles-Louis Detournay:

“The pieces here are genuine museum pieces, which normally never leave their families’ safes. Being able to have them with us for two months gives me a unique opportunity to enjoy them, or, I don’t know, to go back and look at these different items again.

As I said, the covers were designed by Victor Hubinon, all of them here, except for the first one, which is not here. And since the trial run, I think, we’ve adopted a uniform theme, which is to arrive and put the adventures of Buck Danny in the banner. And you’ll see that each time, the author, Victor Hubinon, has redrawn his banner.

It was unusual to have characters in the foreground, and the aeroplane doesn’t even need to be there because when you see the looks on Sonny and Buck’s faces, you realize that something dramatic is about to happen, something that is intensely dramatic for them. So, with a cover like this, we want to dive into the adventure and read every page. We can see how precisely the aircraft carrier is drawn in the background, and I mention this here because it shows the documentary aspect, of course, and because later on, we will see other aircraft carriers that are also present but will be more faded because there is an evolution in Victor Hubinon’s work in the way he depicts the ship.

It is worth noting that the details, the way Hubinon arrives, can change planes, to arrive, and effectively break the monotony of his framing. He does not hesitate to use much more significant dives in order to achieve this and maintain the temperature. One of Hubinon’s great strengths is also his willingness, when necessary, to leave empty spaces and white space.

An artist who has to arrive, show off, especially someone like him, who is a master of realism, will sometimes tend to fill, fill, fill his page, but when a page is too full, you can’t see anything anymore. The fact of arriving, of daring, of leaving space, at a certain moment, here, he thinks about colour, and the fact that we are going to have a large colourful checkerboard that will impose itself on the reader’s gaze, effectively, shows that he is really thinking in colour, and that he is thinking about the narration of his story, and that he is going to take care, effectively, the reader’s surprise, which is the surprise conveyed by Buck. Buck is surprised, the reader is surprised, we weren’t surprised.

So, there’s something that has always surprised me about Buck Danny. For me, it was the back covers. Because each album had a different back cover.

One of the other rare series that came along and did that was Gilles Jourdan. It was Tillieux, in fact, who came along and changed the back cover. But that means he understood that the back cover was the space where he had the most freedom to really draw the reader in.

I used to look at the back cover before looking at the front cover. Because each time, we had a different idea and a different project to work on. After a while, for the reissues, we went back to a sequence that we had supported a little.

So, you might say, basically, that’s how it is. But during the first 20 albums or so, we find ourselves with covers and back covers that are different for each album. Until we have two, I think it’s for the Blue Angels, two different back covers.

And so, we put ourselves in the sailor’s shoes, imagining ourselves seeing an officer returning with his family, seeing the sailors who are there, accompanied by their fiancées or whatever, seeing the ship, the immeasurable size of this vessel that is over 300 metres long, and all that in a single panel. It’s almost like a long opening sequence, I would say, three minutes of a film that was very popular at the time, to be able to set all that up in a single, simple image. I won’t go back over the breakdown of the theft”.

The next guided tour is on January 31st at 3 pm.

Thank you to Huberty & Breyne for the warm welcome and Mr Charles-Louis Detournay’s guided tour.

So what are you waiting for? Last chance to take part in Charles-Louis Detournay’s guided tour on January 31st, 2026, at 3 pm.

Source: Huberty & Breyne – For your convenience and reference: the press file.