Recap / The Secret of the Swordfish

The Secret of the Swordfish, the first story in the series, groups three volumes (Ruthless Pursuit, Mortimer's Escape and SX1 Counterattacks), and was published between 1950 and 1953.

A few years, perhaps just months after the end of World War II, the world is once again on the cusp of another planetary conflict. The mysterious Yellow Empire, its headquarters located in Lhassa, prepares to invade and conquer Earth with an army equipped with the newest and most efficient weapons, assisted by the council of several European renegades, Colonel Olrik chief among them.

One of their main targets is the base of Scaw-Fell, where professor Philip Mortimer puts the finishing touch to the plans of his latest invention, a supersonic and amphibious water/air fighter/bomber rocket plane named the SX-1 Swordfish, that should allow the resistance to fight back against the Yellow Empire. Along with his friend, Captain Francis Blake, he manages to escape the attack with the plans, but the enemy is relentless in their pursuit.

The album was adapted into a two-parter episode in the 1997 animated series.

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Tropes in this album:

• Affably Evil:
  • Olrik plays this card with Mortimer during their time in Karachi, wishing to discuss 'between civilized men', which falls rather flat, as he ordered the professor to be tortured mere days prior. That said, he does apologize to Mortimer for having tortured him, but it's unclear whether or not he's genuine.
  • Doctor Sun-Fo is always polite to a fault, a mild-mannered man, but dangerous nonetheless.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The series begins with the Yellow Empire invading Asia, Europe and America, making them the masters of the world in a matter of hours.
• America Saves the Day: Britain, actually. The "Free World" resistance movement is global and contains members from many different nationalities. However, its headquarters is the British secret base of Admiral William Gray, and while the various factions around the world are performing acts of sabotage all through the war, it's not until the British give the order (after completing the Swordfish superweapon) that they all rise up in open revolution.
• Attack Drone: What the Swordfish is supposed to be. However, the design of the automatic piloting system is highly complex and, pressed for time, Mortimer ends up replacing it with a human cockpit, turning it into a conventional airplane and allowing him and Blake to fly them to the rescue in a Big Damn Heroes moment.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: At the end of the second part, Mortimer is ready to kill himself rather than be captured again. Fortunately, his attempt is interrupted by Blake and Nasir's arrival.
• Big Bad: Emperor Basam Damdu, absolute ruler of the "Yellow Empire" (a fantasy counterpart to Tibet).
• Big Good: Sir William Gray, a Royal Navy admiral commanding the British secret base in the Straits of Hormuz that becomes the headquarters of the global resistance.
• Bittersweet Ending: Mostly averted, but the final shot of the story shows Blake and Mortimer standing in front of the field of ruins that used to be London, reminding everyone just how much was lost before the war was finally won. It's to Edgar P. Jacobs' credit that he nevertheless manages to end this on an optimistic note:

  Blake: We will rebuild, and once again, civilization will have had the last word. Let's hope that this time, it'll be for good.

• Bond Villain Stupidity: Basam Damdu has his nuclear arsenal linked to the palace so that he can launch it and destroy the entire world in retaliation for its rebellion. However, he decides at the last minute that this is too merciful, instead going on the air to give the entire world his Motive Rant before pushing the button. This gives the heroes' Swordfish squadron the extra few minutes they need to reach Lhassa and drop their own nuke. If he'd just launched the nukes without the speech, the world would've ended.
• Brains and Brawn: Downplayed, as unlike in most stories involving a scientist and a soldier, Captain Blake is definitely more brains than brawns, while Professor Mortimer is both.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Happens to Mortimer in Olrik's headquarters in Karachi, over the course of three months.
• Cool Plane: Several, starting with the Golden Rocket, then Olrik's Red Wing and, of course, the titular Swordfish.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Refreshingly averted. The "Shark" Mook Mobiles get shot down by the dozen, but the Red Wing, Olrik's personal aircraft, which first appears to be an Elite Mook, doesn't fare any better, and goes down (twice) because of a single hit. Similarly, once the Swordfish make their appearance, none of the enemy's aircraft, ships, or air defenses give them anything approaching a fair fight, and the only reason one of them goes down is because of a malfunction (predictably for a prototype).
• Curb-Stomp Battle: A single Swordfish makes quick work of the Yellow Empire's entire fleet in the end, plus the fighter jets and the flying wing
• Downer Beginning: The album (and thus the series overall) starts with the Yellow Empire conquering a big chunk of the world and Blake and Mortimer being on the run from it and trying their best to rally the base of La Résistance to build the Swordfish and strike back.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Though the Yellow Empire mostly employs Asian officers and soldiers, they also hire collaborators from other parts of the world, such as Olrik - a fact also referenced in Plutarch's Staff.
• Fantasy Conflict Counterpart: Of World War II, which had just ended a few years before the novel's release. The Yellow Empire's surprise attack is effectively German blitzkrieg tactics from 1939/1940, updated with jet engines, nuclear weapons, and a global scale. Their flag is a rising sun resembling Imperial Japan's war flag. Their leader is a mad dictator who reacts to setbacks with Adolf Hitler style temper tantrums, and tries to take his entire empire down with him when he's about to die. They imprison their enemies in an extensive network concentration camps. The opposition to him organizes itself as a resistance movement called the "Free World" (evoking the "Free France" of readers' recent memories), its fighters are referred to as "partisans," and its leader, Sir William Gray, physically resembles Winston Churchill. Even the "Golden Rocket" aircraft the heroes flee on at the beginning is effectively an American B-17 or B-29 long-range bomber adapted for the jet age.
• Giant Squid: Rather, a giant octopus, which lives near the resistance's secret base in Ormuz, and tries to put Olrik on its menu for dinner.
• Gory Discretion Shot: We are spared pictures of Mortimer's interrogation, but we're informed it was severe enough to make him faint.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Ahmed Nasir, a sergeant in the British colonial army who links up with Blake and Mortimer after they're shot down in his territory. He prevents them from walking into a Yellow trap, helps them steal an aircraft, navigates the local civil society to bring them to tribal chiefs loyal to the Free World and not the Yellow Empire, brings Blake safely to the resistance's main base, infiltrates Mortimer's prison as a spy for months in order to help in his eventual escape, then picks up a gun and participates in the defense of the base when the Yellow discover and attack it. While he fades away in subsequent novels, in this one he's effectively a lead character.
• The Infiltration: All over the place.
  • Hasso, a highly placed Yellow officer, is actually a spy for British intelligence. He's discovered and shot in the first few pages of the book, but not before he's been able to inform London of the imminent attack, allowing Blake and Mortimer to escape with the plans of the Swordfish.
  • Nasir infiltrates the Karachi prison where Mortimer is being held by posing as a local servant. He's eventually uncovered, but not before he's gotten the Swordfish plans from Mortimer, and helped set up his escape.
  • Olrik infiltrates the resistance movement by hiding among the prisoners in transit to a concentration camp that are rescued by British partisans. He, too, is exposed, but manages to escape with the location of the resistance's secret base.
• Les Collaborateurs: The Yellow have little trouble finding traitors in the countries they conquer that are willing to become their local deputies. The most prominent is Commander Hussein of the Iranian army and his men, who hold Blake and Mortimer prisoner for a time after they're shot down.
• MacGuffin: The plans of the Swordfish, an extremely advanced weapon being developed by the British government that virtually guarantees victory in any conventional war. When the Yellow attack, it's on the verge of completion, and Blake and Mortimer have to destroy all their research and flee to a secret base in the Persian Gulf where they'll be able to rebuild the weapons. However, they're shot down, and Mortimer has to hide the plans before being captured. The heroes then need to find the plans and then apply them, while the Yellow try to force Mortimer to reconstitute them (and he tries to stall them until he's rescued).
• Mook Mobile: The "Shark", a stand-in for the Zero and effectively the Yellow Empire's version of a TIE fighter. A jet-powered high-altitude fighter armed with air-to-air missiles, it's actually very advanced by the standards of the time (compare the Gloster Meteor or the P-80). The heroes' aircraft (and their aim) is just much better, resulting in a substantial number of Sharks being shot down over the course of the story.
• Nuclear Option: Multiple times. (One of the ways the novel's late 1940s/early 1950s context shows is that atomic weapons are regularly used but little mention is made of fallout or other long-term negative effects).
  • The Yellow Empire's takeover of the world makes heavy use of them: Paris, London, Rome, Bombay, New York, Moscow, and various other cities are shown as having been hit with atomic weapons.
  • The war ends with the resistance's Swordfish dropping an atomic bomb on Lhassa, the enemy capital, killing the Emperor and ruling council and destroying their own atomic arsenal.
  • The latter narrowly averts a planetwide Apocalypse How. The Yellow Empire had already stockpiled enough intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy all of human civilization. When Basam Damdu's empire starts collapsing around him, he tries to unleash all of them in a Taking You with Me ploy: thankfully, the heroes' nuke kills him just before he can.
• Race Against the Clock: When the Yellow finally discover the location of the secret base in the Straits of Hormuz, Mortimer states that he needs and his men need thirty hours to finish two Swordfish prototypes that can turn the tide of the battle. Cue the climax of the story, a heroic battle in which the British forces repel and then delay the Yellow invaders, with countdown clocks showing the current time on every page. The Swordfish are completed just in time.
• La Résistance: Against the Yellow Empire, a international small army is created, animated mostly by the British and their colonies, though they are joined by officers and scientists from all over the world. In the final stage of the war, this graduates to a full-blown revolution, as resistance factions from all over the world (Paris, Madrid, Rome, Buenos Aires, and New York City are mentioned) rise up against their occupiers.
• Room Disservice: Nasir plays the part of a servant in the imperial headquarters, carrying food and drinks as he prepares Mortimer's escape.
• Sanity Slippage: Emperor Basam Damdu as his global empire slips through his fingers. He only appears in a limited number of scenes, but his transition from Inscrutable Oriental in his early appearances to Hitler-like temper tantrums at the end is very noticeable all the same.
• Spoiler Cover: The cover of the third volume pictures the beginning of the climax battle, the Swordfish wiping the floor with the Imperial fleet that attacked the Resistance's base.
• State Sec: The 13th Bureau, the Yellow Empire's intelligence and security organ, which is under the control of Colonel Olrik.
• Superweapon: The titular Swordfish. It's a craft that can travel in the air, on the water, or underwater, is armed with atomic weapons of varying yields (ranging from "destroy a battleship" to "destroy an entire city"), can fly past Mach 8, and has a range of (based on their final attack on Lhassa) 4,000 miles. No wonder the Yellows are terrified of it, and want to get their hands on it before La Résistance can manage to build one.
• Take Over the World: Unlike a great many villains, the Yellow Empire actually succeed, conquering the entire world in an atomic blitzkrieg at the beginning of the story. This is slightly more plausible when you remember that most of the world in this era was still ruled by colonial empires: all the Yellow had to do was conquer the colonial power in order to inherit all of their colonies. The difficulties of keeping the world under their boot are also alluded to, as the ruling council is shown facing opposition from all over the quarters, and ridicule Olrik's attempts to assure them that everything is under control.
• Taking You with Me: Once it's clear the Yellow Empire is doomed, Basam tries to fire off all his nuclear missiles at once.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: It's generally treated as such, not surprisingly for a Franco-Belgian comic written in the aftermath of World War II and its collaborator regimes.
  • The point isn't labored too much, but all the heroes express contempt for collaborators on general principle, with a communique from the resistance headquarters calling for no mercy against them. It's notable, however, that even the main villains' characterization emphasizes their villainous traits;
  • Colonel Olrik is repeatedly referred to as a "renegade." His actual home country has never been revealed, but he's a European who betrayed his country to become a senior adviser to the Yelloe Emperor. Word of God has speculated on his having come from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or Miklos Horthy's Hungary, but without ever settling on one of the options.
  • Even Emperor Basam Damdu is referred to several times as "the Usurper." Given how vastly different his Tibet is from the real-life version, one can assume that he's the one who overthrew the Tibetan government and gradually turned it into the "Yellow Empire" it's now become.
• To the Pain: The Iranese officer who captured Blake and Mortimer is very insisting regarding the interrogation they will suffer at the hands of the Empire's soldiers.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: It is not clear whether Harper was killed or not by Olrik during the later's escape from Ormuz.
• Wolf in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Olrik disguises himself as a prisoner in order to infiltrate the resistance's base.
  • Blake poses as a harmless blind beggar while trying to free Mortimer in Karachi.
• World War III: Shortly after 1945, an East Asian empire triggers a new world war.
• Yellow Peril: Downplayed. The novel actually averts most of the cliches associated with this trope, with the Yellow officers and bureaucrats mostly being treated as generic modern fascists (or punch-clock villains) who just happen to be ethnic East Asians... Except for the one glaring fact that the villain's nation is literally called "the Yellow Empire" (and its personnel referred to as "the Yellows").

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