The Blake and Mortimer series was created by Edgar Pierre “E.P.” Jacobs, with a significant style & spirit flowing directly from his work for Hergé from ~1944-1947. [more] B&M is in fact Jacobs’ signature series, representing by far most of his overall BD work.
Like Tintin, the B&M stories were meticulously researched and plotted, altho Jacobs tended not to go in for the amount of slapstick and humor that Hergé did, instead aiming for more serious, tense and spellbinding plotting, heavier on exposition & dialogue.
To attempt a total overview of Jacobs would be way more than I’m capable of at this time, but here’re some of my favorite ‘B&M in Egypt’ imagery that I’ve randomly collected.
I believe the above two come from the 2-part Mystery of the Great Pyramid books from 1954-55.
LEFT: B&M was first published in Le Journal de Tintin, and rightly commanded several of its covers as one of the early, significant series in the magazine.
RIGHT: This is a parody / tribute cover, perhaps by an artist named “Helkarman,” altho I wasn’t able to dig up anything on it. Note how Hergé is paid back for depicting Jacobs as a mummy on the cover of Tintin’s Cigars of the Pharaoh, this time by depicting Tintin and little Snowy as swaddled mummys!
RIGHT: The Last Pharaoh (2019), with art by Durieux and Francois Schuiten.
Jacobs wrote and drew 11 individual volumes from 1950 - 1977, passing away in 1987. Fortunately, Bob de Moor (another famous Hergé assistant) finished off the second volume of the unfinished two-parter, Professor Satō’s Three Formulae. This helped open the door to a variety of writers and artists picking up the series and carrying it forward right to today, something which notably did not happen with the Tintin BD series.
Well… there it is.
And note WP’s nice overview of the series:
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Wow! Really wonderful artwork selections you have included here.
Jacobs tended not to go in for the amount of slapstick and humor that Hergé did, instead aiming for more serious, tense and spellbinding plotting, heavier on exposition & dialogue.
That sounds appealing to me. Thank you for making me aware of this series!
Hey man, good to hear from you. Haven’t seen your comments for a while.
There’s a lot of specifics I left out about the series, but the WP link should fill that in nicely.
Although B&M stories are a bit too serious in tone for my taste, it’s drawings are excellent craftsmanship, beautiful!
a bit too serious in tone for my taste
Yeah man, that and the large blocks of text written in small script make reading the series a real chore, sometimes.
spoiler
The reoccurring villain is also strange to the point of being surreal, which I guess was the point. Still, it seems to totally clash with the overall seriousness of the series, so I’m pretty curious what the hell Jacobs’ real intentions were with that.
Man, I need to check out that last pharaoh one. I kind of like Blake and Mortimer, but more importantly I fucking love Schuiten’s style
