Point Blanc: the Graphic Novel – an Alex Rider Adventure


By Anthony Horowitz, adapted by Antony Johnston, Kanako Damerum & Yuzuru Takasaki (Walker Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84428-112-1

If Americais the spiritual home of the superhero, Britainis Great because of our fictional heritage of super spies and consulting detectives. Our mainstream literary life is littered with cunning sleuths and stealthy investigators from Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Campion and Lord Peter Wimsey to the Scarlet Pimpernel, George Smiley and Harry Palmer. And Bond… James Bond…

In 2000 Anthony Horowitz produced Stormbreaker, the first of nine (and counting…) rip-snorting teen novels featuring orphan Alex Rider: a smart, fit, sports-mad lad like any other, who tragically discovers that his guardian Uncle Ian has suddenly been killed. Moreover the deceased gentleman was apparently a spy of some distinction and had been surreptitiously teaching the lad all the skills, techniques and disciplines needed to become a secret agent…

Soon MI6 were knocking on his door and he was inextricably embroiled in a fantastic plot with only his wits and courage keeping him alive against fantastic odds and vicious villains…

As well as a major motion picture and video game, some of the books have also been adapted to the comics medium; their easy blend of action, youthful rebellion and overwhelmingly comfortable 007-style pastiche winning many fans in the traditionally perilous older-boys book market. They’re really rather good…

This particular graphic novel – the second cataclysmic case for the British Agent too young to drink martinis, whether shaken or stirred – comes to you simply because it was hanging about in the graphic novel section of my local library and caught my attention. Besides, I never have enough to read (that last bit is sarcasm…).

Despite his potentially fabulous, intoxicating, adrenaline-fuelled lifestyle, all Alex wants is a normal life but his lifelong conditioning and utterly heroic nature make all that an impossibility.

This gripping thriller for older kids opens with a shocking death at New York conglomerate Roscoe Electronics, just as in London, far-from-average student Alex determines to end the predations of a couple of drug pushers targeting his classmates at the Brookland School…

The boy’s solution is, as always, unconventional but highly effective, forever ending the dealers’ insidious threat with no lives lost, but unfortunately causing millions of pounds of collateral damage and publicly humiliating the Home Secretary.

It does however bring the lad into police custody and leave him at the tender mercies of blackmailing MI6 spymaster Mr. Blunt, who just happens to specifically need a trained teenager for a perilous new assignment…

It transpires that two of the world’s most influential and wealthy men have recently died in mysterious circumstances. One was Blunt’s old college friend Michael Roscoe and the other ex-KGB Kingmaker Viktor Ivanov – the second most powerful man in post-Cold War Russia. The only thing they have in common is “difficult” sons with a history of crime and troublemaking who both settled down after attending the French Alpine boarding school Point Blanc Academy…

Ever-reluctant to get involved with people he doesn’t trust, Alex only acquiesces after Blunt threatens to revoke the visa of Rider’s housekeeper and Guardian Miss Starbright…

The school is something of a legend among the rich and powerful. Run by an enigmatic albino named Hugo Grief, the establishment – a converted castle atop a mountain – has an incredible reputation for turning around spoiled rich boys with discipline problems and making them into solid citizens their fathers can be proud of…

However, when Roscoe’s son Paul came home for a holiday, the father felt something was amiss. Calling his old friend inLondon, the senior Roscoe fell down an elevator shaft before he could share his misgivings…

Coincidentally, Ivanov’s son Dimitry, also on holiday, was the only survivor when his father’s yacht mysteriously blew up in theBlack Sea…

Up against a wall as usual, Rider agrees to go undercover at the Finishing School/Boot Camp and becomes wild-child brat Alex Friend, incorrigible scion of an aristocratic retail magnate dispatched to Grief’s tender mercies by a long-suffering billionaire parent with the ear of Prime Ministers and royalty…

Kitted out with a few handy gadgets courtesy of the ingenious quartermaster Mr. Smithers, Alex is soon collected by the formidable Mrs. Stellenbosch and hurtling by private helicopter to Paris, for one last night of relative freedom. However, Grief’s incredible Gemini Project has already been put into operation and Alex is drugged and subjected to a barrage of covert tests and measurements…

The next day he checks into the austere institution and meets fellow 14-year old reprobate James Sprintz, chief disappointment of Germany’s richest banker…

Oddly for such a disciplinarian place, there seem to be few rules and no scheduled lessons. Stranger still is the fact that the entire student body only consists of seven 14-year old sons of rich and influential men, and all the boys are of approximately the same weight, height and skin colour…

Even with security cameras everywhere and armed guards constantly watching, within a week Alex uncovers the bare bones of an incredible scheme: a plot to somehow make the kids slaves of the sinister headmaster. However Rider/Friend has no idea of the actual scope of the plot or how truly insane and dangerous Grief is until he finds hidden dungeons and sees a plastic surgeon callously murdered.

Finding photos and measurements of himself taken whilst unconscious in Paris, Alex realises the idea involves replacing the heirs of the world’s most influential people and presses his concealed panic button for immediate rescue, but Blunt arbitrarily decides to hold off, preferring to see what else will happen…

Abandoned and left to his own resources, Alex attempts to free the real students but is captured, after which Grief reveals his true ambition. The replacements are not actors or doctored doubles, but 16 actual clones of the insane biochemist, surgically altered to look like the wild boys and imbued with the all aging albino’s memories, aspirations and ambitions….

Now miraculously stable these good sons will return to their homes and welcoming parents, patiently awaiting the day when they will inherit the planet…

In fact eight finished Point Blanc graduates are already in situ, just waiting for the right moment…

With no one to rely on, Alex busts out in spectacular fashion and is chased through the Alps to his death – or at least that’s what Grief and Stellenbosch are told – whilst Rider leads a crack team of SAS troops on a mission to rescue the fifteen boys still held in the mastermind’s dungeon…

The raid culminates in a brutal firefight, the deaths of the biochemist and his savage major domo and the rounding up and incarceration of Grief’s 15 deadly doppelgangers, so with the job done and Miss Starbright safe from deportation, Alex returns to Brookland and a salutary, surprise lesson in the value of simple arithmetic…

This is an another supremely scintillating adventure-romp; hitting all the thrill-buttons for an ideal summer blockbuster, even though it’s told – and very convincingly – from the viewpoint of an surly, uncertain boy rather than a suave, sophisticated adult. Johnson’s adaptation is slick and sharp whilst the art by sisters Kanako & Yuzuru is in a full-colour, computer-rendered manga style which might not please everybody but certainly works exceedingly well in capturing the tension, rollercoaster pace and spectacular action set-pieces.

Be warned however, even though this is a kid’s book there is a substantial amount of fighting and a big bodycount, and the violence is not at all cartoony in context. If you intend sharing the story with younger children, best read it yourself first.

These books and their comic counterparts are a fine addition to our splendid fiction tradition and Alex Rider will return over and again… so why don’t you join him?
Text and illustrations © 2007 Walker Books Ltd. Based on the original novel Point Blanc © 2001 Anthony Horowitz. All rights reserved.