An amnesiac is washed on shore near a small village, where a kindly doctor nurses him back to health. After he recovers he discovers he’s the target in a massive complot and may be involved in the murder of the US president. His name? Not Jason Bourne.
I’m not saying that Jaan van Hamme and William Vance looked a bit too closely at Robert ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980) for their adventure spy thriller series XIII (1984) but it wouldn’t be the first comic inspired by a popular novel or movie, eh? It’s practically a tradition to take something popular and create your own twist on it and van Hamme and Vance certainly did. Over the course of twenty albums they set up and then unravelled the mystery of XIII’s true identity, his role in the murder of the president, the conspiracy behind this murder and once that was all resolved, dove into the older history of him and his family.
Hugely popular in Europe, the series survived the departure of its writer, van Hamme, who felt he had done everything he wanted with it and its artist, Vance, forced to retire from it due to medical problems. It spawned not only a spinoff series, but also a computer game and a French television adaptation. For me, it was one of the few European comics I kept reading when I was obsessed with superheroes for a couple of years.
Both van Hamme and Vance were well established when they started XIII. The first had already had been succesfull with the fantasy viking series Thorgal, drawn by Polish cartoonist Grzegorsz Rosinski and had also written the critically acclaimed Histoire sans héros (Adventure without Heroes), drawn by Dany, as well as more mainstream fare like the short lived Arlequin, also with Dany, which was the first series I read of him.
William Vance had broken through as the artist on the Bob Morane series of sci-fi thrillers as wellas Bruno Brazil, a more harder edged crime and spy thriller series which ran in Tintin. His passion however lay more with historical series. Westerns like Ringo, medieval series like Ramiro and Roderic but especially Age of Sail series like Howard Flynn and Bruce J. Hawker, his pet project. Sort of ironic then that his most well known series is a hard boiled modern thriller. But honestly, while he’s never a bad artist, his work on XIII is a cut above most of his older work.
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