I have not been posting much lately. After a year of illness (or thereabout) I did go into 2018 with a feeling that I was getting better and that things just might get back to normal. It was therefore a bit counterintuitive that I in the middle of January suddenly felt completely wasted. The thing is that it is quite common. I talked to a friend who has been cured for cancer and even started working again. After a while he had the same reaction. It is as if the body uses the new found strength to force you to take it easy. A whole year I have struggled to keep my head over the water, so as soon as it was possible my body decided that it was time for some resting time...

I am very reasonable when it comes to obeying my body, so I just followed the flow and stopped the things that I couldn't cope with, most importantly: Computers and Social Media!

So what have I been doing instead? I will make a couple of posts to get you up to speed... or rather down to a full halt. In this post I will write about:

Blake and Mortimer

One of the things I have done is going to the library and lending the complete Blake and Mortimer series. It is a Belgian comic made in the same style as Tintin and is besides this giant among comic-books series one of the classics in the Belgian/French Ligne-clair style. Reading it has been a great pleasure and nicely escapist, while it also got me to think in new ways about creating comics.

Edgar P. Jacobs, the creator of the series and both drawing and writing the stories, had his first chance of making a comic under the second world war. Because of the war the newspapers couldn't get access to the US comics strips they had been publishing and as a result they needed local artists to complete the stories, which interestingly often went in completely different directions than the originals that still was created in the States. Jacobs worked on Flash Gordon and the newspaper was so pleased with the result that they let him make his own story: The U-Beam.

The U-beam is a very like The US comic, Flash Gordon.

But after having meet Hergé, the creator of Tintin, when he was working as a theatre painter on a Tintin stage production, Jacobs was offered to make his own series in the Tintin-magazine.

The Great Struggle

At a first glance Blake and Mortimer looks a lot like Tintin. It has generally more text, but apart from that it is also a adventure series in the elegant style of the post-war Belgian cartoonists. But when you start reading there is one big difference: Blake and Mortimer is not funny! Hergé's Tintin is full of slapstick humour, but Jacobs' inclination was towards a more solemn tone. In the first three albums he shows us a new war that succeed the just finished Second World War.

The three albums called "The Great Struggle" was made right after WWII and depicts a new war that follows. Here Delhi, Rome, Paris and London is burning

Even though these three albums today seem a bit outdated it is interesting to see how people just after the war looked at the possible future, and Jacobs at least did not seem to dismiss the threat of a new dictator. In the albums a yellow emperor with base in Tibet is starting a all out war using new, sinister technology. There is no doubt that the Japanese enemy and the atomic bomb is the model. In later albums made under the cold war, Jacobs still had a grim view of how world history would develop.

From the album, "The Time Trap", from 1962. Mortimer has been lured to use a time-machine, and the future he sees is not pleasant! A nuclear war is inevitable..."

Pyramids and brainwashing

The two protagonists are interesting because they are stout stereotypes of English gentlemen made in Belgium. Not that far from what I am doing from Denmark :) Mortimer is a brilliant scientists (the one with the silly red beard) and Blake is the leader of MI5, the British national intelligence. Most of their adventures are taking place in other countries though, mainly France. But the first two albums after the strange war-fantasy is happening in Egypt.

A lot of interesting research has gone into the double albums "The Mystery of the Great Pyramid", and the ancient mystery, when you finally reach it, is both plausible and fascinating.

Here Jacobs has really found his way around making comics and I still remember these albums from my childhood, but the next one, The Yellow M is absolutely the best. It is a mystery story that takes up another topic that was all the rage in the paranoid post-war world: brainwashing.

The dramatic and beautifully rendered opening of 'The yellow M'

Olrik

One thing I found very annoying when I read the series as a child was that it always feature the same villain, colonel Olrik. In Tintin the same villains was also reused, but to good effect, whereas always using the same character seems almost impossible to suspend from your disbeliefs. None the less he is there in all the albums and often in interesting roles, especially in The Yellow M.

Olrik and some of his henchmen that also shows up in the later albums.

Continuation

Jacobs did only make 11 albums, but after a long break the franchise has been continued by French publishers. I have of course also read all the new albums and they are quite OK. One thing I really noticed is that there is women in the stories. Both Hergé and Jacobs worked in the conservative Catholic Belgium and as far as I have understood the publishers made them avoid female characters to be completely sure that no saucy stuff would be presented to the youth. But that restriction is fortunately gone in the new albums.

From the album "The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent Part I", where we witness the rather dry Mortimer's moist youth.

All right this was a rather thorough introduction... hadn't thought it should be this long, but I hope some of you will be tempted to read or reread Balke and Mortimer. Here is a link to the Wikipedia-page.