Reviews ComicBook / Blake And Mortimer

Suffocated by hopelessly dragging storytelling

I will not broach here the colonialist or racist subtext of these comics. Much could be said, and at least recent ones try to address it, but I will focus on their qualities as stories.

Blake and Mortimer has plenty of potential. It has a similar style to Tintin, but with vaster and more imaginative plots, great Dieselpunk designs and no censoring of violence. Dictators taking over the world, international conspiracies, underground ancient civilisations… but reading them is a Sisyphean struggle to see past the dead weight burying the story.

There is no continuity between albums, so it's no surprise that the protagonists are shallow, static characters. This is fairly common is serious Franco-Belgian comics, including Tintin. But this series takes it to an extreme where I cannot even remember who is who. And most unlike Tintin, most of the characters that Blake and Mortimer are just plot devices without so much as facial expressions. Les Sacrophages du Sixième Continent at least tries by tying them to the villain's backstory, but during the climax it is brought up for a few panels and then forgotten.

Buck Danny has a similar issue but at least offers fast-paced, inventive, high-stakes plots. Whereas here the high-concept plots are drowned out by padding. There is endless dialogue as bland as those giving it, most of it just humorless filler, walls of text filling up rows of panels of talking heads. On that note, a third of an album can be spent going through the motions before anything of note happens.

But while I've read plenty of bad comics from around the world, what makes this series stand out is that the authors don't understand or don't trust their visual medium. The art is fine for landscapes and machines, but can't convey movement or expressions. Instead we get, above almost every panel in the older albums, text boxes telling us just what is happening below. It's a throwback to the first strips of the nineteenth century. Like the dialogue, it's mostly redundant but must be read for the occasional plot-relevant nugget.

Finally, the stakes are often much lower than the build-up would have you believe. The superweapon in Les Sacrophages du Sixième Continent makes a few buildings shake and crumble; given that the real world by then had the atom bomb, it just whittles away any last chance of an emotional impact.