Euro Previews – More Brilliant Bond With A Boardroom In ‘Largo Winch Volume 20: The Golden Percentile’

The Van Hamme-less Largo Winch continues apace (would you expect any other speed?) with the concluding volume of the latest two-parter. Thrills galore from the board room Bond…

Another very late preview here, for which I can but apologise and point out the time of the year, travel, stuff, more stuff, that sort of thing. But anyway, these are all great looking books and I wouldn’t want you to miss them just because I messed up getting things sorted.

Okay, that said, time to go on to a preview of the wonderful Largo Winch.

The tagline to Largo Winch is gloriously simple –

No family, no connections, anti-establishment, womanizer, wanderer, iconoclast and fighter, he inherits at age 26 the W Group, which is worth $10 billion.

That’s all you really need to know of the backstory to this, or any other Largo Winch tale really. It’s hi-octane stuff, action-adventure with a foot in the boardroom, originally created by Jean Van Hamme and Phillippe Francq but, from volume 17, written by French thriller writer Eric Giacometti.

I absolutely loved all things Largo Winch, far more than Van Hamme’s other major creations, Thorgal and XIII, love the unashamed thrills it gives me and the wonderful escapism of it all. Thankfully, when I tentatively approached volumes 17 and 18 back in 2020, I found that Giacometti’s writing managed to keep things going perfectly well, pushing on with the formulaic feel to it all (a wonderfully formulaic feel that’s all part of the enjoyment).

With Francq’s exquisite artwork still here, it absolutely feels and looks so right, packed with all the detailing and beautiful backgrounds I’ve always come to expect in these volumes. Although, looking at the credits, it’s not all Francq here – I’ve never seen anyone credited with ‘creation of 3D scenery’ before, but Jean-Michel Ponzio’s work obviously allows Francq to get on with doing his (fabulous) thing and that’s just fine with me.

So, here we are with Volume 20, the second/concluding part of this latest two-parter that began with Volume 19’s The Edge Of Night, which, for reasons I cannot even fathom, I didn’t tell you about when it was published.

As is usual, The Edge of Night was all the set-up, the financial intrigue and the machinations of those who would do Winch and the W Group ill, a complex thing of controversies over child labour and environmental concerns of modern industrial processes.

In The Edge of Night we had Largo waking up in space, orbiting with one of his business rivals (who’s absolutely nothing like Elon Musk at all, oh no, not one bit) before we went back in time to find out just what machinations had put him in that precarious position.

Now, it’s the conclusion of it all, with Largo in the midst of new tech, environmentalism, and eco-terrorism, floating weightless 62 miles above the Earth in a spaceship taken over by eco-terrorists who’ve declared war on the rich. Yep, it opens with the sort of over the top brilliant action sequence that classic Bond’s used to be so good at and then it just keeps going. The Golden Percentile is all about the thrills, the chase, the action, the fighting, the climactic moments – and it’s really a rather fabulous thing all the way through.

My love of Largo Winch continues unabated.

Largo Winch Volume 20 – The Golden Percentile – by Philippe Francq & Eric Giacometti, colours by Bertrand Denoulet and Francq, creation of 3D scenery Jean-Michel Ponzio
Out now from Cinebook, originally published by Dupuis in 2023.

Now, time for that preview… Hell, you just need a soundtrack and you’ve got pure Bond opening scene right here…