The Astonishing Return of Blake and Mortimer: Francophone Fantasies of Britain as Imperial Power and Retrospective Rewritings

Abstract

On 21 September 1996, the headline ‘Blake and Mortimer have been found!’ dominated page one of the French newspaper Libération.¹ The next three pages were devoted to the same sensational event: the resurrection of Belgian artist Edgar P. Jacobs’s comic-strip heroes, nine years after their creator’s death. The phlegmatic, Eton-educated Captain Francis Blake, never known to betray his emotions beyond the occasional ‘By Jove!’, the more volatile but intrepid physics professor Philip Mortimer, and the suave but unscrupulous Olrik, their implacable enemy, were to meet again, thanks to a decision by the publisher Dargaud to pay 10 million francs to buy out the Editions Blake et Mortimer and the Studio Jacobs, which held the back catalogue and the copyright on the characters. Dargaud then invested a further 8 million francs in a massive publicity operation, which included the handing out of 100,000 free copies of classic Jacobs albums from the 1940s and 1950s to first-class TGV passengers, a strategy that suggests that the readership being targeted for the first of the Blake and Mortimer remakes was largely an adult one (Lindon, 1996, p. 2).