Comic Book / Blake and Mortimer

Mortimer, left, and Blake, right.

Blake and Mortimer is a Belgian comic created in 1946 by Edgar P. Jacobs, a friend and collaborator of Hergé (the creator of Tintin). The comic, which mixes traditional mystery and Cold War espionage stories with Science Fiction elements, stars two middle-aged brits: Captain Francis Blake, a Welsh Ace Pilot and an MI5 agent; and Professor Philip Mortimer, a brilliant Scottish Omni Disciplinary Scientist. Another important character is the duo's Archenemy, the devious Colonel Olrik, whose appearance was based on Jacobs in his younger years.

Since the death of Jacobs in 1987, the comic has been continued by other authors and artists, including Jean Van Hamme (the creator of Thorgal and XIII), Yves Sente and André Juillard. In the Belgian Comics and Franco-Belgian Comics world, Blake and Mortimer is still considered to be a pinnacle of exquisite artwork and storytelling.

The Jacobs albums and The Francis Blake Affair were adapted into an animated series by the French studio Ellipse (of Tintin fame) in 1997. The last four stories in that series were original, due to only one continuation album (The Francis Blake Affair, again) existing back then.

List of albums so far, publication order

Edgar P. Jacobs canon

• The Secret of the Swordfish Volume 1: Ruthless Pursuit, 1950^note depending on the edition, the album also exists in a 2-volume version (which was the original format)
• The Secret of the Swordfish Volume 2: Mortimer's Escape, 1953
• The Secret of the Swordfish Volume 3: SX1 Counterattacks, 1953
• The Mystery of the Great Pyramid, Volume 1: Manetho's Papyrus, 1954
• The Mystery of the Great Pyramid Volume 2: The Chamber of Horus, 1955
• The Yellow M, 1956
• Atlantis Mystery, 1957
• S.O.S. Meteors: Mortimer in Paris, 1959
• The Time Trap, 1962
• The Necklace Affair, 1967
• Professor Satō's Three Formulae, Volume 1: Mortimer in Tokyo, 1977

Continuation albums

• Professor Satō's Three Formulae, Volume 2: Mortimer vs. Mortimer, 1990^note this one had actually been written by Jacobs but the drawings were finished after his death
• The Francis Blake Affair, 1996
• The Voronov Plot, 2000
• The Strange Encounter, 2001
• The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, Volume 1: The Universal Threat, 2003
• The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, Volume 2: Battle of the Minds, 2004
• The Gondwana Shrine, 2008
• The Curse of the Thirty Denarii, Volume 1: The Manuscript of Nicodemus, 2009
• The Curse of the Thirty Denarii, Volume 2: The Gate of Orpheus, 2010
• The Oath of the Five Lords, 2012
• The Septimus Wave, 2013
• Plutarch's Staff, 2014
• The Testament of William S., 2016
• The Valley of the Immortals, Volume 1, 2018
• The Valley of the Immortals, Volume 2, 2019
• The Last Pharaoh, 2020
• The Call of the Moloch, 2020
• The Last Swordfish, 2021
• Eight Hours In Berlin, 2022
• The Art Of War, 2024

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Blake and Mortimer provides examples of:

• Action Girl:
  • Ylang Ti in The Valley of the Immortals. Despite working in archeology, she has military training and prove herself capable.
  • Interestingly, women were almost entirely absent from the series while the original author was alive, and those few there were never had action-oriented parts. It was a man's world, and then some. Jacobs had included female characters in Le Rayon U, but the reason he did not do the same for Blake and Mortimer was that publication laws for youth-oriented series had become stricter after World War II. It was implicitly forbidden to draw attractive women in comics for kids, to avoid even the suggestion of anything sexual (though this was not, of course, an airtight strategy).
• Affectionate Parody: The Adventures of Philip and Francis by Pierre Veys and Nicolas Barral, published by Dargaud, the same publisher as the original books. Published albums include The Empire Under Threat, The Machiavellian Trap and SOS Meteo.
• The Alleged Car: The German archeologist's vehicle is called a survivor from the Heroic Age of Automobiles, in Mystery of the Great Pyramid. A real-life specimen is stored at the Car Museum of Mulhouse.
• Alien Invasion: The Call of Moloch deals with mysterious aliens who wish to invade the Earth and exterminate mankind, starting with London.
• Alternate History: It initially wasn't clear whether The Secret of the Swordfish was originally supposed to be World War III set at the time of its writing, or an alternate version of World War II in which the villain is "the Yellow Empire", an overpowered version of Tibet with World War II Germany and Japan traits. Post-Edgar P. Jacobs stories explicitly retold the events as a 1946 World War III against Tibet.
• Alternate History Wank: The Secret of the Swordfish opens with Tibet (well, an alternate overpowered version of it, but still) single-handedly conquering the world in the course of a single night.
• Ambiguously Brown: Both the Atlanteans and the Incas are depicted as brown-skinned despite their respective (Greek and, well, Inca) origins.
• Anachronic Order: Not inside the books themselves (unless you count the flashback in the first part of The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent) but in the publication order of the post-Edgar P. Jacobs books. For instance, Plutarch's Staff (23rd in publication order) is the prequel to The Secret of the Swordfish (1st-3rd published books in French, 15th-17th in English), whose immediate sequel is The Valley of the Immortals (25th and 26th books). In story order, the last books are the two-parts of Professor Sató's Three Formulae (11th and 12th).
• And I Must Scream: In The Curse of the Thirty Denarii, Judas is the Wandering Jew. God cursed him to wander the Earth with everyone shunning him. 200 years after Jesus' crucifixion, feeling his death is near, he confesses to a Christian priest who he really is. After his passing, the priest has him buried far away from his community. In the 20th century, Blake and Mortimer open his grave, but Judas is still flesh and blood. His body was actually too frail to move, talk or eat, meaning he was buried alive for nearly 2000 years!
• Anonymous Ringer: It's obvious that the hostile superpower in S.O.S. Meteors is the Soviet Union, but the country is never mentioned by name.
• Antagonist Title: The Voronov Plot is named after its Big Bad.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: A somewhat unusual example that serves as a reminder of the series being a Period Piece: In Valley of the Immortals, Mortimer is consistently skeptical of legends about the enormous tomb complex of the First Emperor and the eternal army said to guard it. Of course, the story being set in the 1940s, Mortimer, unlike the readers, has no way of knowing the tomb and its terracotta army will actually be found in the 1970s.
• Atlantis: Is accessible through caverns in South America, is at war with an Inca-descended underground empire, and is responsible for sightings of flying saucers.
• Artifact of Doom: The cursed thirty Denarii of Judas. It's being touched with Gods' wrath. It's an extremely bad idea to get a hold of them, especially for evil intents. A man who took a single coin from the lot was afflicted with a severe case of leprosy and died days later.
• Artistic License – History: The MacGuffin of The Necklace Affair is Marie-Antoinette's Diamond Necklace, which still exist as a single, full jewelry accessory. In real life, the historical necklace has been dismantled as soon as the scammers managed to get it (to sell its gems).
• Art-Shifted Sequel: The art-style of The Last Pharaoh (non-canon sequel of The Mystery of the Great Pyramid) is very realistic and very detailed instead of the ligne claire used in the canon albums.
• Author Avatar: In appearance only, Olrik looks like Jacobs, down to the mustache.
• Avenging the Villain: After Alister Lawless was imprisoned for the murder of Lawrence of Arabia, he left a letter to his son to avenge him. 35 years later, both his children, John and Lisa, end up taking revenge against the five lords who brought Lawless to justice. Only Blake survived the series of assassination.
• Badass Bookworm: Mortimer is a nuclear physicist who can build futuristic planes and nuclear bombs, and also able to more than hold his own in a fistfight.
• Bad Future:
  • In "The Time Trap", our hero gets sent to the far future after a great war where everything lies in ruins and huge war machines litter the landscape.
  • In "The Strange Encounter," we get a glimpse of the even further future, three millennia after that. It's worse.
• Beard of Evil:
  • Played straight in The Atlantis Enigma with the Big Bad (Jacobs's beard of evil is black and pointy).
  • Both the feudal lord and the traitor (during the futuristic part) in The Time Trap (who also sports a pointy black beard).
• Believing Their Own Lies: When Mortimer aided Radjak, Ashoka's trusty bodyguard, he realized Mortimer was always a good man. He decided to confess the truth about princess Gita. She never committed suicide, it was Sushil who killed her. Her father Ashoka lied to Mortimer to make him feel guilty. However, it was not the end. Gita survived and recovered. Ashoka fed her twisted lies that Mortimer was responsible for her heartbreak and assassination attempt. Ashoka, who was nearby, overheard the conversation and his face was revealed to be Gita, having taking his father's legacy. Even after overhearing the truth, she still refuses to believe it and blames Mortimer for her sorrow and called Radjak a liar.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: In The Strange Encounter, Olrik arms an H bomb and prefers to go up in a bang rather than be captured by Blake, Mortimer and US federal agents.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: On the outside, Lisa Pantry is a pleasant museum assistant and a normal person. In truth, she wants nothing but bloody revenge against the five lords who had her father jailed. She made arrangements to have Mortimer invited to the museum to better lure the fifth lord, Blake.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: In The Secret of the Great Pyramid, Sheikh Abdel Razek's magic spell to stop any attacker in his tracks is given in the original French as "par Horus, demeure." As a verb, "demeure" means "to stay/to remain." As a noun, it means "dwelling/abode." In context, the sheikh is pretty clearly saying "by Horus, stop" but it's translated instead as "by Horus' abode."
• Boring, but Practical: We are revealed that Lawrence of Arabia did not die from an accident, but was assassinated by a rogue MI-5 agent named Alister Lawless. While Blake was driving their car, Lawless used a slingshot to hurl a rock at Lawrence's forehead. Lawrence was destabilized and his motorcycle crashed off road, causing his death.
• Brandishment Bluff: There is a scene in S.O.S. Meteors where Blake threatens a suspect who is then revealed to be a disguised Olrik with his pipe in his coat pocket, brandished as if it were an handgun.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: In The Time Trap, the rebels of the 51st century have armed themselves with ancient weapons from the 20th and 21st centuries found in underground stockpiles.
• Break the Cutie: Princess Gita is completely heartbroken because of his father's lies. She thinks that Mortimer seduced her for a pastime and attempted to kill her to protect his eventual marriage (he never intended to marry Agatha) and fled to England. This lead to her Start of Darkness.
• British Stuffiness: But of course. Most pronounced in the first book, where Blake and Mortimer react to gunfire with "Enjoying the fireworks, old chap?"
  • The Septimus Wave has one where Mortimer is drugged, possibly distracted by (gasp!) the bare shoulders of the young lady he's talking to.
• Bulletproof Vest: Averted. In The Yellow M Inspector Kendall tries to explain away M's invulnerability as this; the ballistic expert begs to differ.
• The Cameo: Dr. Grossgrabenstein makes a cameo at the end of The Valley of Immortals. Of course it could be Olrik in disguise, since The Mystery of the Great Pyramid takes place after this story.
• Canon Discontinuity: The stories written by Jacobs tend to ignore the events that happened in The Secret of the Swordfish: apart from The Mystery of the Great Pyramid, no reference is ever made of Mortimer inventing the Swordfish nor Olrik being Basam Damdu's adviser. The world does not seem to be recovering from a war that destroyed most capitals and was followed by months of a brutal occupation. Also, the future biography of Mortimer that is found in The Time Trap pointedly never mentions the Swordfish while it references every other adventure, including some that would very probably have remained a secret between him and Blake. Post-Jacobs albums work to correct this, however.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Xi-Li considers Han-Dié a loose end and should be executed. However, he needs a translator so he allows him to live until his work if done.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Rainer von Stahl leads a remnant of Nazi and wants the Thirty Denarii of Judas to Take Over the World. He believes the cursed coins will make him the "Master of Evil".
• Chromosome Casting: The Jacobs stories feature exactly one female character with a significant role (which means she appears for roughly one third of the story), a literal Damsel in Distress living in the Middle Ages, and you can count female characters with a speaking part on the fingers of one hand. The books written after him added more female characters, either as allies or antagonists.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Olrik is quite prepared to betray the Yellow Empire.
• Clam Trap: When chasing Olrik underwater, Blake rescues him from a giant octopus attack, but then gets his foot stuck in a giant clam.
• Clear My Name:
  • One that's been waiting for two centuries in Strange Encounter: an ancestor of Mortimer's was kidnapped by the not aliens. He was said to be AWOL and ended up disgraced by the British Army. When he comes back however three centuries later to warn of the impending not alien invasion, his name is cleared.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Happens quite a lot in the series: Olrik has Sharkey beat up Professor Labrousse in S.O.S. Meteors, the same Olrik 'interrogated' Mortimer over the course of three months in Secret of the Swordfish, submits one of Blake's agents to the same treatment in The Francis Blake Affair and in The Last Swordfish, after capturing Mortimer and Nasir, knowing that the professor won't crack under torture, he puts Nasir through it instead, betting on Mortimer not leaving his friend to die in such a way.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The lighting inside the time machine in The Time Trap changes colour depending on the time period: white corresponds to present time, then as it travels further away from it it turns yellow, red, blue, etc (it is red in the Middle Ages, purple in the prehistoric era, and green in the 51st century).
• Comic-Book Time: Not as flagrant as other cases since none of the stories happen past The '60s.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Completely averted with the Swordfish: One is enough to near-completely outgun several battleships and an aircraft carrier (while it gets shot down, the heroes had another that was being fixed and finished the job), and when a dozen show up they wipe the floor that much faster.
• Continuity Nod: Plenty of them to The Secret of the Swordfish in Plutarch's Staff, including a prototype Golden Rocket (piloted by Blake), sketches of the Swordfish, the Scafell secret factory, etc.
• Continuity Snarl: In The Yellow M Septimus claims to have met an amnesiac Olrik (explicitly setting this shortly after The Mystery of the Great Pyramid) some years before World War 2. Given that The Mystery of the Great Pyramid references The Secret of the Swordfish multiple times, both of which clearly happen after World War II^note In the war against the Yellow Empire, the U.N. is repeatedly referenced, and London and other cities are said to be "once again" heavily bombed, strongly indicating it is a third, separate conflict, this makes no sense at all, no matter which way you cut it. Then again, Septimus is not the most mentally stable individual, so one could simply say he's getting his dates wrong.
• Cool Plane:
  • Olrik's personal Flying Wing while serving the Yellow Empire, the Red Wing and later, the Red Wing II. The Valley of the Immortals shows the Red Wing III with VTOL capability.
• Covers Always Lie: S.O.S. Meteors is guilty on at least two counts :
  • Even though it's one of the rare volumes where Blake actually has a bigger role than Mortimer for a change, it's inexplicably subtitled Mortimer in Paris and Blake does not appear on the cover.
  • The subtitle Mortimer in Paris itself is misleading : Mortimer spends less than 2 pages in Paris, only taking a taxi to go from one train station to another, while all of his adventures actually take place in Paris' rural suburbs, most notably in Jouy-en-Josas^note a small (a few thousands souls) city in the Yvelines (78) département (while Paris département number is 75), Jouy-en-Josas was at the time (the Fifties) essentially a place for Paris' bourgeois (like Professor Labrousse) to spend their week-end in their cozy rural residence. Since 1962, Jouy-en-Josas is home to HEC, one of France's most prestigious Grandes Ecoles. It is, however, still very rural. And now you know. .
• Crazy-Prepared: The Atlanteans. Not only they frequently send infiltrators to the surface world to destroy or steal anything that could lead humanity to Atlantis, they also found an inhabitable planet and built an entire fleet of rockets to take all of their population there in case Atlantis would fall.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The "aliens" use a non-lethal weapon that fires a light beam. When the beam hits someone's head, it cause the victim to fall asleep. Unfortunately for them, Mortimer quickly figure out that common leather motorcycle helms can deflect the beams, rendering the weapon useless. The "aliens" have no other weapons to defend themselves.
• Cyanide Pill: In Plutarch's Staff, Brandon has been caught spying for the Yellow Empire. Knowing there's no way out for him, he cracked a cyanide pill hidden inside one of his teeth and dies moments later.
• Damsel in Distress: Agnes in The Time Trap is a quintessential damsel in distress—a medieval maiden in need of rescue from rampaging peasants.
• Darker and Edgier: The series after Jacob's death, which contain unveiled references to the Soviet bloc, escaped Nazis, and how Blake unknowingly took part in the murder of his childhood hero, Lawrence of Arabia.
  • The Septimus Wave in particular, which deals with PTSD, addiction, and the long-lasting effects of Mind Rape.
• Dark Action Girl: Lisa Pantry uses her skills as a gymnast to better commit her crimes.
• Dated History: The Mystery of the Great Pyramid mentions future pharaoh Horemheb as being sympathetic towards the cult of Aten. Modern historians believe that it was Horemheb who had Akhenaten's monuments destroyed and his name erased from the records.
• Dead Man Writing: Miloch sends Mortimer a letter like this.
• Death by Materialism: Chou take the 10000 emeralds from emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. He ignores obviously dangerous dragons guarding the valley, so it's no surprise when they make short work of him.
• Death of a Child: In The Sanctuary of Gondwana, the child-character dies a pretty horrifying death.
• Deceptive Disciple:
  • Abdul, Ahmed's assistant, is working for Olrik.
  • Kim, Sato's assistant, turned traitor and secretly worked for Olrik.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Mortimer was born in India when it was still a colony of England. His father is shown to be racist and pro-colonist.
• Didn't Think This Through: Professor Scaramian has an alien dubbed "Moloch" trapped inside a sphere of glass strong enough to withstand an artillery shell. The prisoner turns out to be much stronger and makes a crack on the sphere with his fists. You think professor Scaramian will to put him into a much stronger prison? No, he let Moloch still inside the same prison and escape nights later with the sphere completely shattered.
• Diminishing Villain Threat:
  • Lampshaded in the aforementioned Affectionate Parody: when Olrik makes his first appearance, the narrator comments on his previous attempts to take over the world (with home appliances), adding that he lives with his parents and is still single, stopping only when Olrik shoots the text box a Death Glare.
• Dirty Communists:
  • Arguably, Miloch as well. It's not said in so many words, but he's obviously on the payroll of the Soviet Bloc.
  • Zigzagged in the post-Jacobs books. Soviet characters that appear can be either good (Professor Illyushin, General Oufa) or bad (Doctor Voronov, General Orlov), but the villains like Voronov are Renegade Russians disobeying their own government. On the other hand, the Soviet government can still serve as an antagonist from time to time, if not the main one - lending support to the main villains in The Sarcophagii of the Sixth Continent, for example.
• Discreet Drink Disposal: Mortimer discreetly pours on the floor a cup of sake that he (rightly) suspects of being drugged in Professor Satō's Three Formulae.
• Distant Sequel: The Last Pharaoh continues the story of The Mystery of the Great Pyramid decades later. Mortimer is retired and Blake's rank is now colonel.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The entire Secret of the Swordfish saga is one big expy of World War Two, set 20 Minutes into the Future.
• Downer Ending: Discussed. Jacobs wanted to end the series with Olrik's ultimate victory, but he died before reaching the conclusion of the series. This is eventually averted in Professor Sató's Three Formulae, where Olrik is Killed Off for Real. The following albums are constantly set before this book, to ensure that Olrik makes an appearance.
• The Dragon:
  • Olrik, when he's not working alone. Which is practically never - The Mystery of the Great Pyramid and The Necklace Affair are the only times we see him acting as his own master (as the kingpin of a major trafficking network and a gentleman-thief, respectively). Dragon is his default setting, whether for foreign powers, Nebulous Evil Organizations, Mad Scientists or power mad despots.
  • Olrik himself often has a dragon of his own - Sharkey is the most notable.
• Eagle Land: Sharkey is a very comprehensive Type 2. Most Americans in the series - Doctor Kaufmann, Professor Ramirez, FBI agents Calloway and Wingo - avert this honorably. Sharkey, however, is overweight, stupid, instinctively and pointlessly aggressive, ignorant of the local culture and pointlessly abusive towards the local population (whatever country he's in), acts and dresses like a character from a classic gangster movie... and likes Disney movies. He might just be the trope codifier.
• Easily Forgiven: Olrik by Basam Damdu in The Strange Encounter, when the former is reappointed as the latter's Head of Intelligence. When they last met, Basam Damdu had ordered Olrik to be strapped onto the first nuclear missile to be launched against the rest of the world.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The British military base in which is set most of the last part of The Secret of the Swordfish. Not just underground, but underwater as well, having three separate docks for each of its full-sized submarines, an electric train, and a natural bridge over a pit of spider crabs.
  • The no-celebrities-were-harmed version of the Soviet Union has a pretty impressive one in S.O.S. Meteors as well. Made all the more remarkable by the fact that they managed to build it under the suburbs of Paris without anyone noticing.
• Emergency Temporal Shift: "The Diabolical Trap" has Mortimer get into several close calls with the time machine, notably escaping a Torches and Pitchforks mob in the Middle Ages - leading to a local legend about a fiery-bearded devil escaping in a puff of smoke.
• The Empire:
  • The Beijing-based One World Order from The Time Trap is a much more terrifying version. Even setting aside all the futuristic tech at its disposal, it has ruled the Earth for nearly three thousand uninterrupted years, and is now close to developing technology that could suppress a human being's independent thought permanently.
• Enemy Mine:
  • In The Voronov Plot, western powers and USSR temporary team up to find out who's killing their leaders.
  • On a few occasions Mortimer and Olrik will team up to save themselves from a third party.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Mortimer tried to figure out how officials all around the world were being killed by a weaponized virus. When he witnessed a child almost getting hit by a car, he put two and two together. The virus was delivered from a kiss by children, since no one would suspect a child of foul play.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Sharkey, while watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, comments that he'd sure like to give the Queen a good slap or two.
  • Occasionally happens to Olrik. Emperor Ashoka employs him because of his skills and because of his personal knowledge of Blake and Mortimer, but still considers him to be amoral scum.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": "The Benzedjas", though he does give his name once (Razul).
• Everything Trying to Kill You: In China, the way to the Valley of Immortals is filled with hostile wildlife: swarms of mosquitoes, venomous snakes, hostile pandas and dragons.
• Expy: Word of God says that Miloch and Olrik's unnamed boss in S.O.S. Meteors, "The General," is one for senior Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan.
• Faking the Dead:
  • Belos Beloukian a.k.a. Count Rainer Von Stahl from The Curse of the Thirty Denarii uses this to escape his Nazi past at the end of World War Two, creating a new identity as an Armenian-born international businessman. Blake and Agent Calloway figure this out early in the first volume, but can't prove it.
  • Francis Blake himself in The Mystery of the Great Pyramid. Realizing that Olrik's men are onto him, he chooses to fake his own death by wearing a bulletproof vest under his clothes and letting them believe they've killed him. Then reappears under a new identity which allows him to keep an eye on proceedings incognito.
  • And also used by Emperor Ashoka in The Sarcophagii of the Sixth Continent when he allows Mortimer to believe that his daughter committed suicide out of heartbreak. It's done mostly to make him feel guilty, but turns out to be useful as hell when he dies and leaves her in charge: she puts on the mask, takes up his mantle and pretends to be him for years until the very end of the story arc.
  • A more short-lived example: cornered at the edge of a very high cliff, Mortimer pretends to commit suicide by jumping off, allowing the villains to assume they've killed him.
• Family-Friendly Firearms: Of a sort. Weapons could not be drawn on covers, so on the cover of The Yellow M (the page image), Mortimer is shown reaching into his pocket to (presumably) get one.
• Fate Worse than Death: An Oracle has stroke a bargain with Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Chinese emperor: immortality in exchange for giving up his throne. The emperor took the immortality, but refused the latter. The Oracle punished him by imprisoning in the Valley of Immortals. Qin Shi Huangdi quickly became bored with his eternal life since 210 BC.
• Feed the Mole: Once Mortimer and Blake realize that their embassy in Russia was infiltrated by a mole, they decide to use her to feed false information to Olrik.
• The '50s: Most of the series is set in this era. The Voronov Plot is explicitly set in 1957.
  • Originally, Edgar P. Jacobs' stories tended to be set in the present, whenever that was - his last book was in a fairly recognizable seventies setting, for example. It's the writers who took over the franchise from him who decided to turn it into a period piece, feeling that the fifties were the golden age for Blake and Mortimer.
• Foregone Conclusion: Plutarch's Staff served as a prequel to the series, so every readers knows the Yellow Empire's intentions, that the Scafell plant will be attacked, and poor Hasso will be assassinated.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: The titular Swordfish in the original story arc. It's incredibly fast and maneuverable, can travel either in the air, on the water, or underwater, can carry atomic weapons of varying yields (ranging from "destroy a battleship" to "destroy an entire city"), and in its first appearance, completely annihilates an entire enemy naval task force and expeditionary corps in five or ten minutes. ... and it's never seen or used again. (Probably as a result of In Spite of a Nail, see below; In-Universe the RAF refuses to risk such an advanced piece of equipment falling into enemy hands).
• Foreshadowing:
  • In The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent and The Gondwana Shrine there were plenty of subtle hints that Mortimer and Olrik switched bodies:
    • Mortimer shot Gita dead to save Nasir. Mortimer would have never done such thing, especially to an estranged former love.
    • Mortimer left Olrik's body behind when the base collapsed, something uncharacteristic of him.
    • Mortimer said he has memory lapses from his ordeal. The others recounted him the recent events including the truth about Gita's false suicide. His lack of emotional reaction toward Gita's past and death should have been enough to raise some red flags.
  • In The Valley of the Immortals, Mortimer meets a British engineer named Nathan Chase, who presents himself as a former worker in Bletchley Park, as well as a chess player. The first meeting between Olrik and Mortimer was in Plutarch's Staff, at Bletchley Park, where Olrik worked during World War II (and his introduction in said book has Olrik playing chess). Turns out "Chase" is Olrik with a latex mask, impersonating a real person who died before the events of the story.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: After the battle of their spirits, Mortimer and Olrik returned to their bodies, except Olrik took over Mortimer's body, forcing Mortimer to enter Olrik's body. It will be many months before Mortimer finally found a way to warn his friend Blake and switch bodies.
• Funetik Aksent:
  • "Condouisez ploutôt aoune brouette" ("you'd better drive a wheelbarrow" - without trying to reproduce the phonetic American accent), by an American soldier yelling on a French taxi driver in S.O.S. Meteors.
  • Also, Herr Doctor Grossgrabenstein in The Mystery of the Great Pyramid.
  • One of Mortimer's first hints that he's in the Bad Future is when he sees the station names written like this. The rebel leader tells him that it was one of the reasons for the civil war.
• Future Imperfect: When La Résistance from the Bad Future attempts to find data about Mortimer, they find a snippet from the mid-21th century about him (basically a century after his time) that contains a lot of errors, such as making him the inventor of the Telecephaloscope from The Yellow M.
• Genius Bruiser: Mortimer designs planes decades ahead of their times and is a skilled nuclear physicist, and also able to hold his own in a fight against multiple opponents.
• Genre Blindness: General Oufa is ordered to discreetly arrest Dr. Voronov when the higher-ups realize that he has gone rogue. The general decide to personally handle the case and go see Dr. Voronov alone, thinking his presence and authority should be enough to subdue him. Dr. Voronov has been using a deadly bacteria for a series of assassination for weeks and his lab personnel is loyal to him. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't end well for General Oufa
• Genre Roulette: While the series is known as a science-fiction/espionage mix, different books tend to fall heavily into whatever specific genre interested Jacobs or his successors at the time.
  • Plutarch's Staff and The Secret of the Swordfish are war-time adventures, with only a light dusting of Speculative Fiction regarding aircraft technology.
  • The Mystery of the Great Pyramid features Egyptian mythology and magic, but no sci-fi elements.
  • The Yellow M is the classic science fiction/espionage mix, but its sequels The Septimus Wave and The Call of the Moloch tip further towards science fiction and potential Alien Invasion.
  • The Atlantis Enigma is an Burroughs-style pulp Planetary Romance almost entirely taking place in a very advanced society.
  • The Necklace Affair is a caper story without any Speculative Fiction element.
  • The Francis Blake Affair and The Oath of the Five Lords are espionage thrillers without any Speculative Fiction. The Voronov Plot, The Last Swordfish, Eight Hours In Berlin and The Art Of War are mostly straightforward espionage/techno-thrillers, with a single sci-fi element each (an alien bacterium is the MacGuffin in The Voronov Plot, The Last Swordfish features Exactly What It Says on the Tin, Eight Hours In Berlin hasbrainwashed and surgically altered sleeper agents and The Art of War an experimental computer guided stealth bomber.).
  • The Curse of the Thirty Denarii is an Indiana Jones-like story about a race to gain an archaeological artefact. With an ending involving a similar divine punishment.
  • The Testament of William S., is an investigation of a historical mystery with no supernatural elements.
  • The Valley of the Immortals starts as a Chinese Civil War story, then adds in Chinese history and legends, as well as Speculative Fiction elements about aircraft technology.
• Genre Shift: Some of the stories begin as spy or crime stories before switching to something much more fantastical:
  • The third quarters of The Mystery of the Great Pyramid is a detective story, before old Egyptian magic gets involved.
  • The Atlantis Enigma starts as a spy story, with a nebulous organisation trying to steal Mortimer's latest discovery. Then it shifts into pure science-fiction closer to Space Opera (even though it takes place on Earth).
  • In The Time Trap, the genre shifts at each era Mortimer visits, between Jungle Opera, Swashbuckler, and Pulp science-fiction.
• Gentleman Thief: Olrik in The Necklace Affair.
• Gold Digger: The narrator mentions that Lady Rowena marries rich men of a certain age, and has earned quite a lot of money as a "professional widow".
• Godzilla Threshold: In the opening of The Secret of the Swordfish, the Yellow Empire is explicitly stated to have a large stockpile of nuclear weaponry, powerful enough to destroy the world. They don't plan to use them, unless the Yellow Empire's enemies come close to defeating them. In the ending, when the good side has almost won, the British bomb Lhasa at the exact time Basam Damdu orders to launch them.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: The heroes smoke pipes, Olrik uses a cigarette holder.
• Gratuitous English: Of the I Am Very British expressions. "By Jove!" is a popular one. Characters also like to use "Damned" (probably meant to be "Damn", or "Damn it", though Mortimer actually says the latter once).
• Gratuitous Greek: The Atlantes' civilisation seems derived from the Greek (though in-universe it is the probably the other way round) and as such use a lot of words derived from ancient Greek or at least sounding that way.
• Gratuitous Japanese: Satō and Kim speak many lines in Japanese. Justified, because their robots only obey their orders in Japanese.
• Great Britain Saves the Day: How The Secret of the Swordfish ends.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Sushil is jealous that Gita is attracted to Mortimer. He tried to kill Mortimer, even endangering the princess in the process. Later, he attacked Gita out of rage and knocked her out. When Gita's father came looking for his daughter, Sushil realized his terrible mistake, so he killed her, dumped her body in the river and placed the blame on Mortimer.
• Gunship Rescue: As Basam Damdu is about to unleash his entire nuclear arsenal on the world, an entire squadron of Swordfish show up and destroy all of them.
• Hammer and Sickle Removed for Your Protection: in S.O.S. Meteors, where the bad guys are obviously the Soviets, yet they're never specifically named.
• Hand Wave: More than one album ends with Colonel Olrik most probably dead, yet he always reappears in subsequent albums. Sometimes how he survived is explained, sometimes... not.
• Hardboiled Detective: Commissioner Pradier of the French DST is somewhere between this and Inspector Lestrade. He's a good cop, but lacks the imagination that Blake and Mortimer have (understandably, as neither the science fiction they regularly interact with nor Olrik's supervillainous tendencies are the sort of thing that would crop up too often in regular police work).
• Hastily Hidden MacGuffin: In the second book, Mortimer is held prisoner by the Yellow Empire, but manages to hide the Swordfish plans in a pyramid-shaped rock formation before he's captured. Much of the plot revolves around his trying to get the plan's location to the resistance, eventually getting it across in code. Blake is able to decypher it and get the plans to the resistance before they go rescue Mortimer.
• Hate Sink:
  • Basam-Damdu is the Emperor of the Yellow Empire and the Big Bad of The Secret of the Swordfish. Despite his claims of wanting peace, he proceeds to attack the free world, bombing several capitals in order to break the free world's minds, successfully taking over the world. When the international resistance started to fight back, Basam-Damdu and his High Council put the blame on Olrik, Basam-Damdu's Dragon, threatening, in two days, to send someone to torture Mortimer if Olrik doesn't manage to force Mortimer into revealing the Swordfish's plans. Basam-Damdu doesn't even care for his own empire, attempting to use its nuclear weapons to destroy the world out of spite when the resistance starts winning.
  • Professor Septimus, the Big Bad of The Yellow "M", wrote "The Mega Wave". The book dealt with aspects of the human brain, with Septimus stating that a part of the brain, the Mega Wave, could be used for brainwashing purposes. After scathing articles attacked the book, his publisher James Thornley instigated libel action against scathing press articles attacking the book and died after losing the case. After meeting a mind-raped Olrik, Septimus brainwashed him through his Mega Wave and had him commit robberies all across London, before having him kidnap all of those who attacked his book and brainwashing them as well, forcing them to constantly apologize to him. He also sent Olrik after Blake and Mortimer to kill them, and verbally abuses him when he fails, even threatening to kill him. While he didn't deserve to deal with the press attacking him, especially since his theories turned out to be right, he became a much worse person than those who humiliated him.
• He Knows Too Much: Han-Dié betrays Mortimer and had him captured to be delivered to Nathan Chase (actually a disguised Olrik). Han-Dié is also captured so he wouldn't leak the professor's kidnapping.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Philip Mortimer and Francis Blake share a house and go on holiday together.
• He Who Fights Monsters: The Ashoka that Mortimer encountered as a teenager may qualify for this trope.
• High-Class Glass: Olrik is very fond of his monocles.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Kind of. Olrik turns up working with almost every villain Blake & Mortimer face, but he's more often The Dragon than The Man Behind the Man.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • In The Voronov Plot, Mortimer crosses path with John Lennon and Paul McCartney in Liverpool, at the event where the two of them historically first met, years before the founding of The Beatles.
  • Gandhi has a cameo appearance during the long Indian flashback in the The Sarcophagi from the Sixth Continent.
  • Judas is shown in the flashbacks of The Curse of the Thirty Denarii. His intact corpse show-up late in the story.
  • Lawrence of Arabia has an important role in The Oath of the Five Lords. He is killed by a resentful rogue agent who thought Lawrence had joined the fascists for real, in fact he was infiltrating them.
  • There is a scene involving Winston Churchill in The Septimus Wave and in Plutarch's Staff.
  • Still in Plutarch's Staff, the end features Clement Attlee.
  • The Valley of the Immortals features an ancient Chinese scroll which records a series of events featuring Qin Shi Huangdi. Mortimer eventually encounters him, still alive, in the eponymous valley, but the scene is part of a whole Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane sequence (which may or may not be a fever dream to begin with).
• Historical In-Joke: The Oath of the Five Lords includes an explanation for the motorbike accident which killed Lawrence of Arabia. It was a false accident engineered by MI5 to eliminate him because he joined Oswald Mosley's fascist party. Blake was one of the agents who contributed to his death. Lawrence actually joined the British fascists as an MI6 mole. His murder was a rogue operation organized by a MI5 officer for revenge.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: Damdu uses vaguely Chinese-sounding threats like "the twin wu-t'chang await only my orders to drag you before the ten che-tien-yen-wang!"
• Honey Trap: A stencil machine keeps breaking down at the MI-5's HQ. The secretary suspects the repairman, who is constantly courting her, is a spy. Her superior Blake orders her to start a relationship with him so the MI-5 can use him for their plan.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Discussed. After the incident with the ryu that killed air force pilots, professor Satō wonder if he should talk or not. Revealing that the ryu was his robotic creation will mean the end of his career, while remaining silent is dishonorable. Ultimately, he chooses the former.
  • Mortimer will not shoot Olrik while he is defenseless and unarmed.
  • Blake is being visited by "Olrik" (actually Mortimer inside Olrik's body) in the middle of the night. "Olrik" knows Blake is a man of honor, so he gives him his gun in exchange for Blake listening to "Olrik"'s misadventure.
• The Horde: Played with in the case of the Yellow Empire. The nuclear blitzkrieg tactics that allow them to Take Over the World certainly make them look like this, and the BBC announcer during the invasion describes them in those terms. However, once they've taken over they rule pretty much as an ordinary Empire. The night before the invasion, their leadership also stresses to it troops the importance of seizing, not destroying, the industrial and technological facilities of the countries they're invading, making them more pragmatic and farsighted than the typical horde.
• Human Subspecies: The Little Green Men are actually humanity's post-nuclear apocalypse descendants.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Mortimer at the beginning of The Time Trap. Shockingly, it turns that using a time machine that an enemy of yours built and bequeathed you isn't a great idea...
  • Mortimer grabs it again in Professor Sato's three formulas. After discovering that his friend Sato is spied upon (and that the spy knows they know), and after Sato entrusted him with the titular formulas containing all his work, all it takes for Mortimer to rush into a trap is a phone call from someone badly imitating Sato asking him to come with the formulas despite the fact they had just planned the exact opposite.
• Ignored Expert: At the end of Plutarch's Staff, Blake and the MI6 tries to convince Churchill's and his cabinet of the Yellow Empire's plan to invade the world, but they keep ignoring him. Knowing that this is album is a prequel to the series, readers already know what's going to happen next.
• Implacable Man: The Mortimer robot duplicates are unstoppable killing machines. They can leap in the air several stories high, are imprevious to firearms and can destroy anything with their bare hands.
• Info Dump: Edgar P. Jacobs tends to put description above almost every single frame. Justified, due to the fact the comics were initially serialised weekly in Tintin Magazine. Jacobs had a lot of information to pack in in a limited space.
• Inside Job: In many albums, Olrik will have accomplices or corrupted workers secretly working for him.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • The world has known a Third World War, the whole world has been almost conquered by Basam Damdu, the main western cities have been destroyed by fire (according to radio reports, anyway), yet, after the events of The Secret of the Swordfish, in The Voronov Plot the timeline of the series seems to be the one of the 20th century we know. The story is explicitly mentionned to be set in 1957 and refers to construction of European Union; it ends with the news of the Sputnik launch.
  • In The Valley of the Immortals, neither said Third World War nor the presence of a third party in the civil war (a petty warlord named Xi-Li, who attempts to conquer China by himself) didn't prevent the second part of Chinese Civil War. The second book ends in 1949, with newspaper articles about the communist victory.
• Insufferable Genius: In Plutarch's Staff, Olrik is one of the Bletchley Park residents, as a specialist in Slavic languages. He is described by others as brilliant but arrogant, and with a high opinion of himself.
• Irony: At the end of The Last Swordfish, which take place after The Secret of the Swordfish and The Valley of the Immortals, Blake thinks that they've seen the last of Olrik who has escaped. He couldn't be more wrong: Blake and Mortiner will cross path with Olrik in almost every one of their adventures.
• Japan Takes Over the World: The Yellow Empire is a Tibetan expy of Imperial Japan, with soldiers wearing Japanese-like uniforms and using World War 2 era German weapons. They even manage to conquer most of the world in the beginning of the story with a massive surprise attack on all major world cities (including sinking the U.S.' Pacific fleet), and are destroyed in a nuclear explosion (not a bomb, but a raid on their nuclear stockpile), as their leader decided that his own people didn't deserve to live, having failed him so utterly.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Sushil points out that while Mortimer is truly a friend, Mortimer's father is racist as he only invited Mortimer's British friends for their party and none of his Indians friends were invited.
• Joker Immunity: Olrik is a downplayed example. Most stories end with him either in prison or still at large, clearly leaving the door open for his return in the next story. Secret of the Swordfish, however, ended with him getting nuked, along with the entire capital city of the Yellow Empire. It's never explained how he was the only member of the imperial leadership to survive^note at least without supernatural intervention despite their having all been in the same room. In The Atlantis Enigma, the story ends with him left behind in a vast underground cave, just as the Atlantic Ocean caves in through the top and wipes the whole place clean. Somehow, he survives that too. Apparently averted in the last Jacobs book, Professor Sató's Three Formulae, as all following books are set before it or are non-canon.
• Karmic Death: Sushil kills princess Gita out of anger using Mortimer's dagger. He then dumps her body in the river and places the blame on Mortimer. When Ashoka finds out about the truth, he kills Sushil with the very same dagger and dumbs his body in the river.
• Karma Houdini: Doctor Voronov, who escapes at the end of his book and is never seen again. Surprising for one of the nastiest antagonists in the series to date.
• Killed Off for Real: It's implied Olrik finally dies in Professor Sató's Three Formulae, (When attempting to flee in an helicopter with Kim and Sharkey, Sató's robot Samurai catches up with the helicopter and destroys it with its occupants on board, and then following with the submarine waiting for them, essentially destroying any chance of survival) as the following albums are constantly set before this one, as if to ensure he makes an appearance.
• Knight Templar: Alister Lawless proudly say he is this. Lawless killed Lawrence of Arabia because he was going to join the fascists, even going against his superiors who ordered Lawrence to actually infiltrate the fascists. In truth, Lawless killed Lawrence because he held a personal grudge against him.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Blake is murdered during the plot of The Mystery of the Great Pyramid. His eventual survival could have been a surprise at this moment, but he then reappears in each of the following albums.
  • Spoiler Title: Blake's name is in the serie's title, so...
• Latex Perfection: In The Valley of the Immortals, Chase is Olrik with a latex mask (making him look like a bearded, balding gray-heared man) and spectacles.
• Lesser Star:
  • Although the series is called Blake and Mortimer, most stories involve Mortimer as the main protagonist, with Blake sometimes barely even showing up at all. This was deliberately corrected years after Edgar P. Jacob's death by The Francis Blake Affair, which makes him the main protagonist for a change.
  • Curiously enough, S.O.S. Meteors, where Mortimer is captured early in the book and Blake does most of the action, was subtitled "Mortimer in Paris" in some editions.
• Let's You and Him Fight: The Yellow Empire's approach to World War Two, apparently. It encourages the war by playing the Allies and Axis off of each other, while developing its intelligence networks in both of them and trying to steal the military secrets they develop as part of the war. Overlaps with Xanatos Gambit: no matter how the war ends, one side will be destroyed and the other will be exhausted and easy to attack.
• Loophole Abuse: Reiner von Stahl gives specific orders to Olrik to not kill a captured Mortimer until he served his purposes. Olrik then facilitated Mortimer's escape on a lifeboat, only he had the food and the oars removed beforehand, effectively stranding him in the middle of the sea.
• Mad Scientist: Septimus, Miloch, Voronov and Z'Ong all qualify.
• Master of Disguise: Olrik is an expert of this trope. Blake is pretty good at it as well.
  • Close call, but the gold medal probably goes to Blake. Impersonating a sheep herder from the Scottish highlands? That's one thing. Impersonating a humble Egyptian digger for weeks and completely fooling not only all of the other diggers but his best friend Mortimer himself, who interacts with him multiple times and never recognizes him? That's quite another.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • Ashoka in The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent: while we learn that the "present" Ashoka is the daughter of her predecessor, we never learn who said predecessor was. Plus, the giant albino monkeys (which apparently have survived for 30+ years and can be summoned with a puff of smoke) are never explained.
  • Nothing of what Sheikh Abdel Razek does in The Mystery of the Great Pyramid is ever explained either.
• Mayincatec: The "barbarians" in The Atlantis Enigma. It is stated that they were once colonized by the Atlanteans, and that some of them chose to follow them into their new underground civilization after the cataclysm.
• Metatwist:
  • Sort of, in The Oath of the Five Lords. Although the real identity of the actual villain is a twist by itself, said twist is not "Olrik is actually involved is the plot". Olrik himself doesn't appear at all in this story.
  • In The Testament of William S., Olrik is imprisoned in a British jail, from which he gives orders to his henchmen. It's also revealed that the current Big Bad is planning to help him breaking out of the jail, so, the story will features the usual twist of Olrik being free again at the end, right? Nope. The heroes manage to stop and capture the Big Bad before he executes this part of the plan, thus Olrik is still in jail when the story is finished.
  • In "The Art Of War'', Orlik is arrested for vandalizing an Egyptian artifact in an amnesiac daze, meaning this is another continuation of the Great Pyramid or Yellow "M" storylines, right? Nope, Olrik faked the whole thing to lure Blake and Mortimer into a trap.
• Mexican Standoff: Blake was trying to meet one of his agent in Russia, when Olrik and three of his goons cornered him with guns drawn. Then, Mortimer and another agent surprised Olrik from behind. THEN, a fourth goon showed up to back Olrik, surprising everyone. Blake took advantage of this to shoot first and this lead to a messy firefight. Final outcome: Olrik escaped, four goons are dead, 1 agent died and 1 agent injured.
• Military Mashup Machine: The Swordfish is a jetfighter which is also able to move underwater: in the end of The Secret of the Swordfish, the first operational Swordfish goes bombing the Yellow fleet surrounding the British secret base after leaving it through an underwater exit.
• Mind-Control Device: The Mega Wave in The Yellow M and The Septimus Wave.
• Mistaken for Fake Hair: The Voronov Plot has the English sneak Mortimer out of the USSR by having him travel with an ambassador and a bearded agent with the same build as Captain Blake. As they go through the airport, Olrik catches them and has them detained on grounds of leaving with an escaped fugitive (Blake), gloats about the laughable disguise (Blake's previous disguise was just a mustache), and attempts to pull off the agent's beard, promptly getting the agent to cry out in pain. Olrik's accusation falling flat, he's forced to let Mortimer go (Blake as actually disguised as the ambassador).
• Mistaken for Gay: In The Last Swordfish, Blake whispers something in Mortimer's ear while they are having lunch at their club, prompting two other club patrons to comment that it looks as if they are kissing, and that they live together (the patrons are seen again near the end of the book, this time complaining about Nasir's presence in the club).
• The Mole:
  • Kisin, a barbarian warrior in Atlantis Mystery join forces with the heroes after they save his life, having already good reasons to hate the barbarians after Olrik sent his brother to his death.
  • Doyle-Smith in The Francis Blake Affair.
  • Nastasia in The Voronov Plot. Ten years ago, Blake convinced her to become a mole after he revealed to her that her father didn't die from a car accident, but from an assassination carried out by the KGB. Then MI-5 revealed to her that her father was working for them and her parents died in one of Stalin's fake accidents. Learning the truth, she switched sides and has secretly been worked for the MI-5 for 10 years.
  • Colonel Georgiopoulos, head of the Greek counterintelligence, is a actually an accomplice to the Nazi remnant.
• Monumental Damage: The Eiffel Tower, the Basilica of Saint Peter and Big Ben are all seen in flames in The Secret of the Swordfish.
• More Dakka: The very first page of the entire series shows a tank that can fire five hundred rockets a minute.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Blake and Mortimer lives and breathes this trope. In rough order of publication;
  • Dr. Sun Fo in The Secret Of The Swordfish. His field of expertise is never specified, and he spends most of the story as a Mouth of Sauron for the Big Bad, Emperor Basam Damdu. Definitely morally ambiguous, though: even State Security boss Colonel Olrik and his men think he's a snake in the grass.
  • Dr. Jonathan Septimus from The Yellow M is the most infamous example. A medical doctor specializing in the human brain, he's developed technology allowing him to completely (or so he thinks) control another human's behavior. While he mostly uses it to remote-control his slave into committing crimes around London, he also sees him as "the perfect prototype of the citizen-robot of the future."
  • Dr. Miloch Georgevitch is a Soviet scientist who's developed sophisticated weather-control technology, uses it to wreak havoc on Western Europe, and is planning to use it to enable a Soviet conquest of the continent. That's just his day job. On his own time, he's also tinkered with time travel technology, and before dying, he wills his time machine to Mortimer... after sabotaging it to ensure that it'll trap Mortimer in A Fate Worse Than Death, cycling through time without ever being able to return to his own era.
  • Dr. Voronov: a KGB scientist who uses biological warfare to target world leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain, in the hopes of restoring Stalinism to the USSR and despite the risk of starting a world war. Doesn't hesitate to use children as part of his schemes.
  • Dr Z'ong, the main antagonist from The Strange Encounter, is a downplayed version. A Well-Intentioned Extremist with a sympathetic motive, he's a time traveler from After the End, when the nuclear wars of the 21st century have doomed humanity to a slow death, and wants to help his people escape their fate. Unfortunately, he plans to do this by colonizing the 20th century and allying himself with deposed dictator Basam Damdu, reasoning that since he's actually managed to Take Over the World once, he's the one best qualified to help them rule it. Because his own era is so far from the twentieth century, Z'ong doesn't realize that his new ally is A Nazi by Any Other Name whose rule would be catastrophic for everyone, ultimately including the time travelers. (This becomes even more ironic when you remember that Basam Damdu had a massive nuclear arsenal of his own, and came within seconds of nuking the entire planet in a fit of rage while watching his regime collapse around him).
  • The same book, however, finally gives us an aversion with Dr. Kaufman, the American scientist whose request for help brings Mortimer into the story in the first place. He's unambiguously one of the good guys, even accompanying Blake, Mortimer, and their FBI allies on the time-travelers' portal.
• Mugged for Disguise: When Mortimer awoke in a hospital bed, he needed to see the police immediately as Satō was in danger. However, the doctor didn't believe his story, so Mortimer knocked him out and took his clothes to disguise himself. To top it off, he then stole an ambulance.
• Multinational Team: The scientists rescued by the resistance in The Secret of The Swordfish.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: Colonel Georgiopoulos, head of the Greek counterintelligence, is secretly working for the remnant of the Nazi. He commits suicide rather than be captured. His last words were: "Whatever you do, our time will come." This will lead to the Regime of the Colonels, 12 years later.
• Natural Disaster Cascade: In S.O.S. Meteors: Mortimer in Paris, Western Europe has been suffering a series of weather disasters for some months, which Mortimer discovers are the work of villains utilizing a network of Weather-Control Machines. The main phase of the Evil Plan is covering all of Western Europe in a Weather of War fog for an invasion.
• No Biochemical Barriers: The Voronov Plot begins when a Soviet rocket falls to Earth with an alien bacterium which carries a disease incurable for humans.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: The dinner-scene between Olrik and Blake in The Francis Blake Affair.
• No One Could Survive That!: In The Francis Blake Affair, there is a scene during which Mortimer jumps from a high cliff into the sea to escape his pursuers. One of them invokes the trope.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Averted in The Secret of The Swordfish. Mortimer being captured does not prevent the Swordfish to be built once the plans are recovered (though it was still Mortimer who knew where they were, but he was able to communicate their location before being freed).
• Obviously Evil: One of the generals in Secret of the Swordfish has a Hitler mustache.
• Oddball in the Series: The Necklace Affair is this for Jacobs' run. It is the only of his stories to feature neither sci-fi nor fantastical element and is essentially a crime thriller. This was partly due to the publisher requesting a softer story after The Time Trap was seen as excessively violent.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: Olrik's career could be summed up as "regularly has his ass handed to him by B&M". Why do evil governments and shady organizations keep hiring him? Why doesn't Sharkey look for a different employer? It simply makes no sense... unless Olrik has other successful operations going on in the background, which are successful for the simple reason that B&M never come across them.
• Omni Disciplinary Scientist: Mortimer. Egyptology (technically it's a hobby of his), aeronautics, nuclear physics, you name it.
• The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: "The Scorpio Group" that hired Olrik to steal Satō's research. Nothing is known about them except that they wish to conquer the world and impose "technocracy".
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Mr. Henry in S.O.S. Meteors because of anger after being threatened by Blake. This is how he is revealed to be Olrik in disguise.
• Origins Episode: Plutarch's Staff (released in 2014) is the first story in the continuity of the series (at this point) as it is set in 1944. It tells how Blake joined MI5, how him and Mortimer met again decades after their Indian adventure during their teens, and features the rising threat of the Yellow Empire while World War II isn't finished yet. Plutarch's Staff ending is actually the beginning of The Secret of the Swordfish, making it a direct Prequel.
• Our Dragons Are Different:
  • A Ryu (Japanese dragon) shows up and destroys two airplanes. It was actually a robotic dragon created by Professor Satō.
  • The Valley of Immortals in China is guarded by dragons, who actually look like giant-sized Archaeopteryx.
• Out-Gambitted:
  • Financially ruined jeweler Duranton has a chance to bounce back, he's been assigned to restore the lost and now found necklace of Queen Marie-Antoinette. However, he wanted the necklace for himself, so he helped Olrik escape from the police. They both hatched a scheme to steal the necklace and share the loot 50-50. However, Duranton double-crossed Olrik, having placed a fake necklace for him to steal and ultimately, placing the blame on him. Olrik, on the other hand, found out it was fake and decided to ride with it. He leaked the news of theft to the press, harassed Duranton repeatedly on the phone and staged many kidnapping attempts. All this is was to make Duranton crack so he'd give him the real necklace.
  • In Eight Hours in Berlin, Olrik's latest plan is teaming with a rogue US general to replace all the worlds leaders with dopplegangers under their control. However, Olrik backstabs the general and takes president Kennedy hostage for himself, holding the entire world under his thumb.
• Overzealous Underling: In "The Oath of the Five Lords", an MI5 agent is certain Lawrence of Arabia is betraying his country, having seen him in the company of foreign operatives. The agent (who's also jealous and resentful of Lawrence) inducts a young Francis Blake to unwittingly help him murder Lawrence for his betrayal... who it turns out was infiltrating on his superiors' orders. Oops.
• Potential Applications: Mortimer tries to adapt the Mega Wave apparatus as a method of treating mental diseases.
• Pragmatic Villainy: In the Call of Moloch, Olrik becomes the unlikely savior of London and the world from alien invaders. This was purely for selfish reasons as being exterminated by aliens is a lot less fun than being imprisoned for life.
• Precursors: The Lost World of Gondwana. They lived 350 millions of years ago, making them even older than the dinosaurs. Their technologies far surpass today's modern science. An uprising led to their destruction and was responsible for the continental drift. Before their end, they seeded the second wave of humans which become today's modern humans.
  • Atlantis. While "only" 12.000 years old, the Atlantean civilization ruled the world until the fall of Earth's second moon into the ocean caused their native island to sink, with the survivors going into hiding underground.
• Prisoner Exchange: The Soviets agree to exchange Olrik, who's detained by the MI-5, in exchange for Nastasia, a scientist who betrayed the Soviets.
• Ragnarök Proofing: In The Time Trap, people from the 51st century are using 21st century weapons they found in old caches and they work perfectly well. Then Mortimer manages to restart a 3000 years old nuclear reactor after only a couple of weeks of work.
• Ramming Always Works: Plutarch's Staff begins with a German air raid on the Parliament House in London, performed by a high tech jet plane too tough to be harmed by British bullets. Blake destroyed it by ramming into it with his own plane (a Golden Rocket prototype).
• Ray Gun: All Atlantis weapons are variants of this, from sidearms to artillery pieces.
• Real Men Love Allah: Ahmed Nasir, the main duo's manservant/bodyguard.
• Replaced with Replica: The Necklace Affair features a crooked jeweler making a replica of the necklace, hoping to pull off a double-cross by selling the fake to Olrik and the selling the real one. At the end, the jeweler drops off the necklace which is picked up by Olrik... but unbeknownst to him, the heroes had switched it for the fake. And proceed to gloat about it on TV, which Olrik was watching to call their bluff.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: When Blake discovered Dr Voronov's true intent to destabilize both Western Powers and USSR, he requested an audience with the Russian ambassador in Britain. Blake explained the whole plot, including how the MI-5 got their intelligence. Upon learning that that the MI-5 has been operating illegally in Russia, the KGB representative called the whole thing scandalous and demanded compensation. However, the Russian ambassador saw a more urgent matter and decided that cooperation was the best solution to prevent more casualties and a war between the two superpowers.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Literally in The Sarcophagi from the Sixth Continent; it is revealed that Major Varitch (a KGB officer) has been reassigned to a Russian embassy in India, as punishment for his intervention during the meeting between Blake and the Russian ambassador in London during The Voronov Plot.
• Redemption Equals Death: After Rainer von Stahl take the 30 Denarii, Judas rises and denounce him for taking the coins for an evil intent. Then, God smites Rainer von Stahl and forgives Judas who goes to Heaven.
• Red Herring: When sent to retrieve the bacteria X, Olrik destroyed the British lab and left a letter from the KGB to mislead the MI6 into thiking the Kremlin was behind the attack. Fortunatly, Blake figured out it was the work of rogue agents and not the Russian goverment.
• Reduced to Dust: After Judas' soul goes to heavens, his corpse crumble to dust.
• Renegade Russian: Voronov, the Big Bad of the eponymous book, tries to attack the Western Block with a weaponized alien bacterium.
• La Résistance:
  • In the futuristic part of The Time Trap, the insurgents against the totalitarian rule of the Supreme Guide.
  • The Free World Resistance in The Secret of the Swordfish. Their main secret base is situated underwater, in the strait of Hormuz.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Han-Dié helps with the kidnapping of Mortimer and is himself captured to prevent any leaks. Xi-Li orders Han-Dié to translate the scrolls from Sho's diary. It's strongly implied that Xi-Li will dispose of him after his work is finished.
• Robot Me:
  • Professor Satō created a robot named Ozu that resemble himself.
  • Olrik commissioned two of them to look exactly like Mortimer. One to steal Satō's three formulas. Another one to kill Blake.
• Rock Beats Laser: Averted in Atlantis Mystery. Despite having superior numbers, the Incas' maces, spears and slings are no match for Atlantis' Ray Guns. They only "win" with the help of renegade Atlantean soldiers and Olrik.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Icarus (prince of Atlantis) and Tlalak (king of the "barbarians") in Atlantis Mystery. The former vouches for Blake and Mortimer and fights with them to unravel The Conspiracy against his father; the latter leads his men into battle all the way through Atlantis and goes down with them when a flood destroys it.
• Samus Is a Girl: Ashoka our heroes confront is actually his daughter Gita.
• San Dimas Time: When Mortimer manages to return the Chronoscaphe to the present after spending some weeks in the future, he arrives two months after he left.
• Shakespeare in Fiction: The Testament of William S. is an investigation about the mystery surrounding Shakespeare's real authorship of his works. It turns out that William Shakespeare is actually the collective pen-name of two friends, an English peasant named William Shake (who became the official face of their duo) and an Italian aristocrat named Guillermo Da Spiri. Since his family forbade him to befriend this kind of commoner, Da Spiri couldn't use his real name to sign their plays, thus the pen-name "William Shake-Speare" ("Guillermo" being the Italian equivalent of "William". It's also revealed that "Shakespeare" simulated his death in 1616 and fled England with his friend Da Spiri, living in Italy under a fake identity for a couple of decades.
• Shout-Out: Mainly in the post-Jacobs books^note Tintin shout-outs may be Mythology Gags, as several Tintin adventures were made with the collaboration of Edgar P. Jacobs. In fact, Tintin's author Hergé and Jacobs appeared as background characters in some Tintin books.:
  • In the second "Thirty Denarii", Olrik is wearing the distinctive Captain Haddock sweater.
  • Sharkey asks his boss for permission to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs while guarding the lab.
  • In The Voronov Plot, there's a two panels scene with The Mole entering a restaurant to make a phone call. Said restaurant is a copy of the Syldavian restaurant from Tintin's adventure King Ottokar's Sceptre (down to the owner), except it is set in Moscow instead of Brussels.
  • In The Septimus Wave, when Nasir is attacked by a Septimus clone, the panel shows his shadow, shaped like a famous picture◊ from Nosferatu. The same book has Tintin appear in the background at Heathrow Airport.
  • In The Valley of the Immortals, a look-alike of Captain Haddock appears in the background among the patrons of a seedy bar in Hong Kong. Also, the same book features an American businessman named William Gibbons, who explains he owned a factory in Shanghai until the city was given back to China. There's also Chang Chong-Chen, as one of the orphans helped by a good samaritan in Hong Kong. Father Odilon Verjus (a character created by the French-Belgian duo Yann Le Pennetier and Laurent Verron) also makes an appearance in this story.
  • Eight hours In Berlin features Mortimer getting the Ludovico Treatment (by another name) and John F. Kennedy dressed in Patrick McGoohan's distinctive outfit from The Prisoner (1967).
• Show Within a Show: The Septimus Wave has a short scene in which a play adapted from The Yellow M events is performed in London. All the audience turns into Septimus clones.
• Skeptic No Longer: Mortimer brushes off anything supernatural about the Thirty Denarii, although he does admit that science can't always explain everything. However, the more he investigates, the more he starts to believe that divine powers are at work:
  • Mortimer uncovers Judas' corpse and it's still intact after 19 centuries.
  • Judas' corpse animate on its own and denounce (in perfect English) Reiner von Stahl for taking the cursed coins.
  • Reiner von Stahl is smitten by God's lightning.
  • A heavenly light takes Judas' soul to heavens.
  • An earthquake kills many remaining Nazi.
• Skewed Priorities: When a cave is collapsing during an earthquake, Olrik only thought was gunning down Blake and Mortimer rather than getting the hell out of there. Unsurprisingly, he fails to score a hit and falls in a crevice.
• Slipping a Mickey: Mortimer is served a drugged cup of coffee in The Mystery of the Great Pyramid.
  • By Professor Satō's Three Formulae, he's learned. When two suspicious-looking hosts try to pull this on him, he distracts them for a second, discreetly dumps the cup's contents, then pretends to fall asleep, only to catch them by surprise later.
• Smart People Play Chess: Olrik is a master chess player.
• Soviet Super Science: The weather control technology in S.O.S. Meteors.
• Spanner in the Works: In Professor Satō's Three Formulae, Olrik's plan was to wait for Professor Satō's research in robotics to reach a breakthrough and kidnap him. Unfortunately, Satō's assistant, Kim, tinkered with one of the robot which caused a well-publicized disaster. This prompted Satō to call Mortimer for help and split his research into three formulas.
• Spiritual Successor: Blake and Mortimer is one to Le Rayon U. Although the latter is set in a totally fictional Sci-Fi setting instead of The '50s, it tells the adventure of a scientist, a military friend of him, and his servant looking for Green Rocks, while a spy from another country is the antagonist. They are respectively the ancestors of Mortimer, Nasir, Blake, and Olrik, who also have roughly the same appearance.^note The French publicator eventually published Le Rayon U as number 0 of the official Blake & Mortimer series
• Spit Take: When Mortimer's father went on a rant against pro-independence Indians, he mentioned Gandhi's name, causing Mortimer to spit out his drink.
• Spoiler Cover:
  • The cover of The Curse Of The Thirty Denarii (Volume 1) is the last panel of the book.
  • The cover of Mystery of the Great Pyramid (Volume 2) shows Abdel Razek in his full Egyptian priest garb, something which happens only in the final pages of the book.
  • The cover of Atlantis Mystery shows the second-to-last panel of the book.
  • The cover of The Time Trap shows events from the various era Mortimer visits through the book. It presents an additional spoiler for the French version, which is titled The Diabolical Trap, by revealing that time travel will be involved in the story, although this is hinted in the first couple of pages anyway.
  • Averted with The Necklace Affair: the cover shows Olrik gloatingly holding up the necklace, but in the actual scene the jeweler is the one doing so in the exact same pose.
  • The covers of both "The Septimus Wave" and "The Call of the Moloch" spoil the fact that Olrik is the Yellow M.
• The Spymaster: Blake's promotion to head of MI5 makes him this, although MI5's main duty is counterintelligence and not intelligence. His counterpart William Steele of MI6, a longtime friend and colleague, is closer to a straight version of this trope. And of course Olrik, a spymaster for hire in his case.
• Stunned Silence: Ashoka confronts Mortimer with the latter's dagger, intending to make him publicly admit that he killed his daughter, Gita. Though, Mortimer explains that the dagger is paired with another and the one Ashoka is holding belonged to Sushil. Mortimer further adds that his own dagger was lost when he killed the tiger that attacked Gita. Sensing that Mortimer is telling truth and realizing that Sushil has lied to him, Ashoka is silent for a moment.
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Plutarch's Staff is set in World War II and begins with a German air raid performed by a high tech jet fighter so tough it can't be scratched by the bullets fired by the British planes trying to shot it ^note Such an aircraft did exist, at least in prototype form. However it never participated in air raids..
• Superdickery: The Francis Blake Affair cover shows Blake and Olrik wearing tuxedos, sitting in a dinner room, and raising a toast to each other while the hitman from The Mystery of the Great Pyramid is standing in the background, dressed like a butler. In context, the scene happened after Blake has been captured by Olrik.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Basam Damdu's contigency plan is to fire his entire nuclear arsenal at the world should he fall. He almost succeeds, too.
  • In the The Strange Encounter, Olrik is the only one in his gang unaccounted for. He escapes in a truck with an H bomb. When Blake and Mortimer corner him, he resorts to arm and detonate the bomb, even if it means killing everyone including taking a good chunk of America with him. Fortunately, he is stopped before the bomb's clock reaches zero.
• Tempting Fate: Major McBarger, a high-ranking NATO official, joked to his bodyguard that the Soviets are out to get him in the middle of France and his Ukrainian barman is really an assassin in disguise. Moments later, the barman's daughter infected him with a deadly bacteria through a little smooch and the Major died 24 hours later.
• Trash the Set: This happens near the end of Professor Satō's Three Formulae. Most of the story takes place at Satō's house. Mortimer drives an ambulance on the garden, damaging it. A little while later, the police arrive and a firefight ensue with the crooks. Then, a horde of killer robots are set loose on both sides. This cumulate with the destruction of Satō's house when Olrik triggers the bombs.
• Those Wacky Nazis:
  • Nazi remnants are the villains of Thirty Denarii. We even learn that there was a secret pact between them and the Yellow Empire.
  • Subverted in Plutarch's Staff. Although it is set during World War II and opens with a German air raid, the true villains are actually a group of Yellow Empire's spies.
• Throw-Away Guns: In The Yellow M, Mortimer fires 4 shots at the intruder, realises that they have no effect, and throws the gun at him.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Ylang Ti threw one of Xi-Li's sword and impaled one of his soldiers.
• Time Travel: The Time Trap and The Strange Encounter.
  • Which leads to Time-Travelers Are Spies: happens in the Middle Ages and in the far future for Mortimer.
• Truth in Television: British forces did have a secret base almost as cool as the one in The Secret of the Swordfish during World War II, only it wasn't located in quite the same place: it was the Rock of Gibraltar.
• Twofer Token Minority: Jessie Wingo the FBI agent. She happens to be a woman and is of native American origin.
• Underestimating Badassery: Olrik had a robot duplicate of Mortimer built to assassinate Blake. Sharkey laugh it off and decide to test its fightning ability. Before he could touch it, the robot threw Sharkey on the ground with just one hand. Sharkey got up and punched it in the face and it didn't even budged. It retaliated with a hard punch in Sharkey's gut, ending the fight.
• Underground City: People from Atlantis live in a set of gargantuan caves, large enough to contain their capital city, a sea (complete with storms), and various outposts.
• Video Phone: Their adventure "The Time Trap" depicts a dystopian far future in which communication takes place via camera-equipped wrist phones, for those who can afford them anyway.
• Villain Opening Scene: In The Secret of The Swordfish, Olrik is the first character to appear on stage.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Basam Damdu goes from Inscrutable Oriental to ranting against his enemies and the troops who failed him, comparable to the Hitler rant from Downfall.
  • Not as extreme, but fairly impressive nonetheless, is Olrik's breakdown at the end of The Necklace Affair when he discovers that the necklace he's finally escaped with after all that work was a fake, switched by Blake and Mortimer just before he recovered it.
  • Magon, who is moments away from drowning, shouted madly at the water and order it to go away.
• Viral Transformation: In The Septimus Wave, the alien being which is mimicking Septimus is able to convert people in copies of itself from contact.
• Weather-Control Machine: The secret weapon of that totally-not-the-USSR hostile superpower to the East in S.O.S. Meteors.
• Weather of War: In S.O.S. Meteors: Mortimer in Paris, the villains' Evil Plan with the Weather-Control Machine is to cover Western Europe in a fog which will have a lax-inducing effect on those exposed, creating perfect cover for an invasion.
• We Have Reserves: Olrik's forces take heavy losses when they attack the British's secret base, much to the protest of one of his officer. Olrik brush it off was they have plenty of reserves.
• Weirdness Magnet: All three main characters, Blake, Mortimer and Olrik have been embroiled in bizarre adventures since the beginning. Wars, political intrigues, supernatural phenomenons, Ancient Conspiracy, Atlantis, time travel, weather control machine, Killer Robot, you name it.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: In order to prevent the Bad Future caused by global nuclear warfare, the future humans decide to unite the Earth under the man closest to achieving world domination: Basam Damdu.
• We Used to Be Friends: Mortimer and Sushil were best friends since childhood. When Mortimer returned to India from his studies, Sushil has changed greatly and joined an Indian extremist group and consider Mortimer his enemy, but the feeling is one-sided as Mortimer still thinks of Sushil as his friend.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • In Jacobs' albums, Nasir simply disappears after The Yellow M. The continuation albums eventually established he moved back to India, where he joined the India intelligence service.
  • Han-Dié's final fate. Last we saw him, he was held captive by warlord Xi-Li and we never saw him again.
• Who's Laughing Now?: Septimus turned evil after his theories were ridiculed by other scientists. Then he brainwashed them into believing he was their god.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Miloch's posthumous revenge plan against Mortimer in The Time Trap is as follows: Step 1: Build working time machine. Step 2: Sabotage it so that it's borderline uncontrollable and anyone taken by surprise who uses it will go beyond the beginning of time and be Ret-Gone or something. Step 3: Just in case, add a bomb set to go off in case the machine returns to the present. Step 4: Hope Mortimer is stupid enough to get in a machine built by a guy with an obvious grudge against him. As opposed to a simpler method like, say, plant a bomb set to go off as soon as Mortimer stepped in the lab...
• Woman Scorned: Gita's heart is broken by Mortimer when she saw him with an Abhorrent Admirer. Her father's lies only make it worse.
• World War III: The Secret of The Swordfish. In the prequel Plutarch's Staff, British Intelligence is aware that there will be a world war involving the Yellow Empire.
• Yellow Peril:
  • The Yellow Empire of Basam Damdu, whose capital is in Lhasa.
  • The survivors of the final world war who conquered the Earth in The Time Trap were in China. When Focas is summoned before the world government, the text tells you he's in Beijing ("Peking.")
• You Already Changed the Past: How Miloch's time machine seems to work. Mortimer reads an account of his actions in the Middle Ages (framed as a legend) before he actually went there. It would also explain why Miloch did not decide to use the machine to simply Ret-Gone Mortimer (see also Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? above).
• You Have Failed Me:
  • Damdu to Olrik. "Guards! Seize this traitor and tie him to the first rocket to launch!"
  • Olrik himself doesn't tolerate failure and get rid of anyone who doesn't deliver the goods.
• Young Future Famous People:
  • Teenage John Lennon and Paul McCartney appears in a few panels of The Voronov Plot, moments away from first meeting each other.
  • A young Queen Elizabeth II makes in apperance in The Call of Moloch. She interacts with both Blake and Mortimer.

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