The comic series follows the exploits of the American military aviator Buck Danny over a period of time from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor up to the current day.

In his latest albums, under stewardship of Francis Bergèse, Buck Danny and his team fly the F-18 for the navy, but simultaneously serve as test pilots for the Air force's F-22 program.

In addition the trio regularly changes into civilian clothes to work directly for the U.S. government, posing as charter pilots, flight instructors or mercenaries to investigate, uncover and finally thwart, criminal activities all over the world.

Firsthand witnessing the Attack on Pearl Harbor, Buck Danny enlists in the Navy as a pilot and has a series of adventures serving on the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown against the backdrop of the Battle of the Coral Sea.

In the fictionalized adventures, Buck Danny flies attack missions, engages in dogfights, gets shot down, escapes, returns to his carrier in a stolen Japanese plane and even rescues a hostage.

The series took a next step in 1950 with the publication of La revanche des fils du ciel (Revenge of the Sons of the Sky) in which Buck Danny is sent to China to become a commander for the Flying Tigers.

During a Japanese attack on their city, the trio and Holmes are separated from their base and over the next albums they are chased all through Asia by the traitor Mo Choung Young on behalf of a semi-fictional Black Dragon Society (which owes more to American pulp fiction than to historical accuracy).

Although playing in completely different times and countries, the 'Black Dragon' and 'Desert Pirates' cycles are unique in that they no longer have a historic event as an anchor and instead focus on a series of adventures, often having nothing to do with flying at all.

Buck Danny never battled the Soviet Bloc military either: the adversaries of the Cold War Years were invariably criminal organizations, most of them employing or headed by Lady X.

When (usually fictional) foreign countries are involved, they are either headed by megalomaniacal small-time dictators, or by a puppet government installed to give credibility to the pirates or drug lords financing them.

He finally found an artist in the person of Francis Bergèse, who had previously drawn a string of aircraft-related strips with mixed success and openly admitted he started drawing comics because he grew up reading Buck Danny.

Although Charlier left behind scenario directions for all but the last pages of this book, it was decided that, with no clue on the second album and the conclusion of the story, work on Buck Danny would be stopped, this time for good.

In terms of plot, the albums follow the typical cold war Buck Danny layout of either a mysterious criminal organization threatening world peace (in the Mission Apocalypse albums a terrorist organization steals two nuclear bombs to wipe out a summit of world leaders), international espionage aimed at America's military secrets (in The Aggressors a Russian defector may not be what he seems to be) and cold war U.S. air power (in The Blackbirds Buck is assigned a covert mission on a U-2 spyplane).

There are changes however: Although the first scenes of Mission Apocalypse still play in the fictional Central-American state of Managuay, for the rest of the stories, cities and nations are openly called by name: The two stolen F14 fighters are flown by renegade pilots from Iran hired by Lady X, the summit the terrorists want to bomb is the real-life North–South Summit at Cancun, Mexico, and when marooned on a Caribbean islet, Buck and Sony are rescued by a destroyer that is openly Cuban.

Furthermore, where in earlier albums, 'terrorists' were solely motivated by greed or revenge, the terrorists of the 'Apocalypse' story have a distinct left wing radical ideology reminiscent of the Baader Meinhoff or Red Brigade groups.

The album is at the same time a complete departure from the Charlier-Hubinon series as well as a logical development of their work: Playing in the new political realities of the 1990s, in particular the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Iron Curtain: Set in 1991, after Buck Danny 'loses' his aircraft carrier in a war game exercise, he is sent on a diplomatic mission to be an observer on the Soviet Union's latest aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov and arrives there just in time to be a pawn in the attempted 1991 August Coup.

There is enough technical detail however in the realistic depiction of the various Soviet aircraft, helicopters and ships, especially the Kuznetsov and the A-90 Orlyonok ekranoplan which plays a key role in the later part of the adventure.

Various secondary personages and side plots are introduced in the first part only to be forgotten later on and after Buck Danny is saved, the final conclusion of the big event, the August 1991 coup is only mentioned in one panel.

However, whereas in 1989 Francis Bergèse clearly lacked the knowledge to produce a script that would live up to Charlier's standard, he since gained experience as a writer working on the Biggles albums.

Although the story was less controversial: the fight against cocaine traffickers, it still showed the U.S maintaining an uneasy alliance with a local dictator and dared to give a little background on WHY so many farmers in Managuay chose to cultivate coca rather than food crops.

Since the Vietnam War, for example, had been declared off-limits by French censors, Charlier wrote the "Return of the Flying Tigers" story arc to take place in the fictional country of Vien-tan.

By the 1960s, the series in fact alluded to racial tensions in the US as part of its story arcs, with Buck Danny taking a strong stance against discrimination and racism, such as in the album Les Anges bleus (The Blue Angels).

After Pearl Harbor Buck Danny enlists in the United States Navy, and soon finds his sidekicks Jerry 'Tumb' Tumbler and Sonny Tuckson, with the three quickly becoming inseparable friends.

When the mission goes wrong, they are trapped in the middle of the jungle and must dodge Japanese troops, hostile natives, Chinese pirates and various traitors to bring the plans back to the Flying Tigers.

Unemployed after the end of the war, Danny, Tumbler and Tuckson are hired by a shady airline company operating in the Middle-East, and find themselves swept up in a nest of intrigue involving Arab tribal politics, smuggle and the rush for oil.

The plot of "Pilots Demobilized" was inspired by the discovery and development of Persian Gulf oil in the aftermath of World War II, and the cutthroat competition that resulted between British and American companies on the one hand, and their surrogates among the local clans and dynasties on the other, sometimes leading to real bloodshed.

Charlier and Hubinon were especially inspired by the conflict in Abu Dhabi between the ruling Sheikh Shakbut, who favored British interests, and his brother Zayed, who was supported by the Saudi-American Aramco.

This provoked a negative reaction from many fans, who had enjoyed the six preceding novels and found the characters much more dull in the world of international trafficking and economic espionage than they had been as war heroes.

In the first, Danny and his wingmen provide defensive patrols over the military's newest ICBM test base in Alaska, and find themselves facing the spies of the mysterious Lady X.

With the United States politically unable to act, the admiral in charge of the carrier group defies the Pentagon's orders and decides to take down the operation himself.