We reported previously about the new Blake And Mortimer album being accompanied by a real media frenzy, especially in francophone Europe. Newspapers and other news outlets were tripping over one another in order to attach their name to this event. But in the end, it all cooled down pretty quickly.
I should have known when I went to look for the book in my favourite comics store. Sure, there was a quite sizeable pile of Blake And Mortimer albums there, but compared with, for example, the deluge of books that the latest XIII episodes caused (or the number of books shops ordered when Bob De Moor had finished The Three Formulas of Professor Sato, E.P. Jacobs’s last Blake and Mortimer book). It would seem that the public at large couldn’t care less about this book, and in a way, the public was right.
(the new Blake and Mortimer, published by Dargaud)
“The Gondwana Shrine”, as the French title could be translated, is not the book that takes these two gentlemen into the twenty-first century. Sente and Juillard painstakingly imitate Jacobs’s admittedly antiquated style, with huge word balloons full of text, characters that seem to suffer from chronic back pains and a storyline that combines ancient civilisations with cutting-edge technology, without narratively tapping into either of them.
The book tells the story of how Professor Mortimer and Captain Blake find trails of an ancient civilisation, predating the dinosaurs, that is supposed to have lived on the old continent of Gondwana. On his expedition to find out more, Mortimer finds himself trapped in a shrine in the Ngorongoro crater (and, later on, even in more dire straits), while Blake rushes off to the South Pole to make some kind of subterranean vehicle ready for use. As you can see, it could have been a romp in pure Indiana Jones fashion. There’s even some love interest and some rare specks of humour. But it is no such thing, and here is why:
When Jacobs wrote and drew his stories, they played in some kind of general “now”. The earliest books were set in the fifties, but Jacobs followed technological and scientific trends, and used contemporary props in his stories. Not so with Juillard and Sente. Ever since they have taken the reign of the series, it is firmly set in and around 1958, the almost mythical year that saw the World Exhibition in Brussels and in Belgium (and Europe) is the embodiment of a strange combination of nostalgia and futurism. This may appeal to a certain type of futuro-melancholiacs, but it does not contribute to the book’s urgency.
Jacobs took his time to tell a story, and often used two or even three albums to do so. Sente and Juillard rush to tell their tale, introducing new characters, civilisations and technological wonders for a few pages or even frames, without firmly fixing them in the narrative and leaving them almost as soon as they had entered the story. There’s simply too much in this storyline to tackle thoroughly, and the result reads as a treatment for a movie; a lavishly illustrated treatment, but a treatment nonetheless.
(panels from Le Sanctuaire De Gondwana, written by Yves Sente with art by André Juillard, borrowed from the Dargaud site and (c) Dargaud.)
The series is called “Blake And Mortimer”, but the story is nothing of that sort. Blake is off to the South Pole, and Mortimer is trucking through central Africa with his two lady friends. Only at the end they, and their arch enemy Olrik (I’m not even going into that here), meet and save the day. Too much attention is paid to Mortimer’s back story (he’s even shown reading his own memoirs for two pages on end), and when the two friends meet up, it looks like a board meeting only short of a secretary to take notes.
It is a pity, and a missed opportunity. With Tintin forever archived and almost all other series from the Golden Age slowly fading away, Blake and Mortimer has everything needed to be a very important popular comics series. Instead, its creators and owners opt to embalm it in a sickly closeted atmosphere, only to be enjoyed by people longing back to a time that never was.
Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium and when not thinking about the benefits of their fine waffles writes extensively on comics culture; you can read more of his work on his own Ephemerist blog.
Fri, Apr 18, 2008
From our Continental Correspondent