YMMV / Blake and Mortimer

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: in The Time Trap, a time-traveling Mortimer finds that, at some point in the future, the quaint village of La Roche-Guyon has somehow grown into a sprawling metropolis and replaced Paris as the administrative capital of France. Far-fetched as it may sound, this was an actual project that was being seriously considered by the French government at the time the story was published, although it was ultimately rejected.
• Complete Monster: Over the years, Blake and Mortimer faced various enemies, but a few managed to stand out from the crowd through their sheer evil:
  • The Secret Of The Swordfish: Emperor Basam-Damdu is the head of the Yellow Empire. After claiming that he wanted peace, he attacked the free world, bombing several capitals in order to break the free world's minds, successfully taking over the world. When La Résistance starts fighting back, Basam-Damdu and his Great Council put the blame on Colonel Olrik, subtly threatening him and telling him to force Mortimer to reveal the Swordfish's plans in two days, or he will send someone to torture Mortimer. When the resistance is slowly winning, Basam-Damdu launches his empire's nuclear arsenal, attempting to destroy the world out of spite. A selfish, uncaring man who didn't care even for his own empire, Basam-Damdu was among the first, and among the worst, of the comic's villains.
  • The Time Trap: The Sublime Guide is the descendant of Asian people who wanted to recreate civilization in an "ant colony way". Inheriting its ancestors' depravity, the Sublime Guide reigned upon the Subdued, the remnants of human civilization, with an iron first, "mercilessly" crushing the Subdued's first revolt in the 31th Century. In the 51th Century, upon learning that some its underlings plotted against its rule, the Sublime Guide asked Dr. Focas to permanently brainwash the entire world. When Focas secretly helped Mortimer and the Subdued's revolt, the Sublime Guide had Focas's traitorous second-in-command Krishma hid transmitter relays close to Mortimer and Focas to attract the police robots. Summoning Focas, the Sublime Guide viciously mind raped him into obeying it, before having Focas and Krishma lead the rebels outside, where the Sublime Guide can easily exterminate all of them with superior weaponry before proceeding similarly with the rest of the world's rebels. When Mortimer manages to defeat the police robots, the Sublime Guide sends the Thing in a last-ditch effort to slaughter the Resistance. Despite being minor, the Sublime Guide remains one of the comic's cruelest villains.
  • The Voronov Plot: Dr. Voronov, thinking that the current Soviet leaders fail to follow Josef Stalin's ideas, plans to take over the USSR and kill its current leaders. Discovering the bacteria Z, which can kill adults in a day while children are immune to it, Voronov, against the government's orders, decides to use it against the West and the United States, having his agents send children bearing the bacteria to kiss celebrities, thus infecting and killing them. When Colonel Olrik fails to prevent Blake and Mortimer from foiling Voronov's plan, Voronov sends Olrik to London to retrieve or destroy the sample of the bacteria stolen by Blake and his allies. He also wants Olrik to frame the Kremlin, which, combined with their assassination attempt against Elizabeth II, would lead to a nuclear war, killing millions, something Voronov is fully aware of. When General Oufa tries to stop him, Voronov kills him with a drill. When learning that Grace, the infected girl who kissed the queen, had sickle-cell anemia, thus destroying the bacteria, Voronov sent Olrik to kidnap her. Loyal to none but his fanatic Stalinist ideals, Voronov is one of the comic's most depraved non-Jacobs villains.
  • Animated: Colonel Olrik is even more fiendish than in the comics. A mercenary willing to work for the highest bidder, Olrik is first introduced working as a military adviser for an empire and leads bombing runs against several major cities, devastating them and killing thousands in the process. Olrik wants to steal Professor Mortimer's new invention the Swordfish plane, betray the Empire and rule the world himself. After that scheme is foiled, Olrik returns, leads a military coup that turns a democratic country into a dictatorship and joins forces with a rogue general in Atlantis, trying to encourage a military coup there as well that would leave hundreds dead, just to plunder Atlantis's resources. Olrik later shows up and commissions a Mad Scientist to build a machine that controls the weather. Olrik uses this machine to cause disasters across Europe, until he unveils his master plan to blanket Western Europe in a toxic fog, killing everyone, so that a foreign power can successfully invade. Much later Olrik is seemingly killed after trying to using alchemy to gain immortality, but he is merely banished to an alternate world, where he takes over and rules as a dictator. Wanting revenge for being banished from the Earth, Olrik plans to use a powerful moon medallion in a ritual that would destroy the Earth.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Secret of the Swordfish is about Tibet conquering the whole world. It predates the historical Chinese annexation of Tibet by a few years.
  • The mysterious disease which is deadly to adults and relatively harmless to children in The Voronov Plot hits harder after the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In The Time Trap, the simplified spelling rules used in future France after a language reform mid 21st century are reminiscent of the SMS language, which did not exist when Jacobs wrote the book.
• Ho Yay: Blake and Mortimer are one of the most long-standing examples in European comics, and people have read their relationship as lovers for decades. Over the course of the series, it becomes clear that they are by far the most important people in each other's lives. They usually live together. At one point, they are taken prisoner and sleep on the same bed. This was exacerbated by the fact that during Jacobs' era he couldn't depict any women the same age as his heroes, so there was no particular evidence of their heterosexuality to contradict this interpretation either.
  • It got an explicit mention in the text for the first time ever in The Last Swordfish, when two patrons at the Centaur Club sneer at Blake and Mortimer's apparent intimacy and gossip maliciously that they are unmarried men living in the same house and are always together where ever they go. Later on, they are shocked when the pair bring Nasir to dinner at the club, revealing them as racists as well as homophobes.
• Jerkass Woobie: Colonel Olrik, of all people, goes through a lot in The Septimus Wave. Not having recovered from the late Septimus's brainwashing in The Yellow "M", he found refuge in Miss Sing's Chinese establishment, where only morphine injections prevent him from completely going insane. The four Big Bads and Mortimer's activities with two Telecephaloscopes (one of Septimus's machines) doesn't help him; he has visions of a horde of Septimus wanting him back, only increasing his mental instability. The main antagonists kidnap him with the intention of brainwashing him again. The aforementioned Septimus horde actually exists and wants to capture him at all costs, forcing him to make an alliance with Mortimer. Desperate to get rid of the Mind Rapes for good, Olrik even accepts taking over the Mega Wave to end the phenomenon, despite risking the permanent loss of his sanity in the process. In the end, he hasn't recovered from his experience and is reduced to repeating a Madness Mantra in Bedlam Hospice. Despite being the overarching villain of the series, Olrik's weaknesses are heavily present throughout the book, making him a surprisingly sympathetic and pitiable character for once.
• Magnificent Bastard: Whether it's their Arch-Enemy Olrik or various Villains of the Week, Blake and Mortimer faced multiple enemies. However, the following stood out by their sheer brilliance:
  • Under Edgar P. Jacobs' pen, Colonel Olrik himself is Blake and Mortimer's most frequent foe and a mercenary. A No-Nonsense Nemesis: Olrik constantly tried to make sure that Blake and Mortimer were truly dead when they tried to fake their deaths in The Secret of the Swordfish; immediately sent assassins after Mortimer once he learned he was in Japan in Professor Sató's Three Formulae, and immediately kills Kisin once he learns that he is a traitor in Atlantis Mystery. A brilliant Master of Disguise, Olrik fools even the observant heroes with his getups, even changing his personality and accent. A master of improvisation, he out-smarted Blake and the police on Paris' roofs in S.O.S. Meteors: Mortimer in Paris and forcs Blake and the police to let him escape by threatening Mortimer and Sató's lives in Professor Sató's Three Formulae. Proficient in the art of distraction, Olrik triggers an explosion to distract everyone while he steals the necklace in The Necklace Affair and has his men sabotage Blake and Mortimer's car while he infiltrates Mortimer's apartment in Atlantis Mystery. A charming and cunning character, Olrik is one of the most beloved villains in all Franco-Belgian comics.
  • Introduced as a pleasant scientist working with Olrik in S.O.S. Meteors: Mortimer in Paris, Professor Miloch Georgevitch is left irremediably irradiated and dying after the album's events, and plans to get revenge on Mortimer, becoming the Time Trap album's main antagonist. Creating a time machine, Miloch dies soon afterwards but left the machine to Mortimer as inheritance, playing on his scientific curiosity to manipulate him into using it. Having rigged the machine, Miloch first attempts to lock Mortimer in several eras, from prehistory to the future. When Mortimer manages to find a way back in the present, it turns out Miloch had planned for that possibility as well, leaving a bomb set to blow up the machine with Mortimer inside it case it happens. Hammy, polite and brilliant, Miloch proved to be a worthy adversary even after his death.
  • The Oath of the Five Lords: John Hastings (né Lawless) and Lisa Pantry (née Elisabeth Lawless) are Allister Lawless' children who blames the TE Spirit Society for their father's demise. In their quest for revenge, they prove to be brilliant manipulators, with Lisa seducing Alfred Clayton and allowing John to later switching identities with him to create their cover, while Lisa becomes the seemingly nice assistant of Professor Diging in the Ashmolean Museum, and John masquerades as Diging's aide as the supposedly mentally ill Alfred Clayton. Meanwhile, they steal the parts of Lawrence's manuscript hidden by the society in several objects through the museum and kill the Society's members. When Mortimer hides in his room one of the objects, John retrieves it from there, having spied on him. Lisa is even responsible for Mortimer's involvement, convincing Diging to ask for his help regarding the thefts, which would lure out Blake, Mortimer's best friend and a member of the Society. By the climax, Lisa's true nature was still unknown and the siblings retrieve all the parts of the manuscript, having killed all but one member of the society, proving to be unexpectedly competent antagonists despite their young age and low resources.
  • The Septimus Wave: Lady Lisbeth Rowana is a young and charming "inconsolable widow" with a history of marrying ailing men to inherit their fortune upon their deaths. An admirer of Professor Septimus's work, she joins police Lieutenant McFarlane, banker Oscar Balley and Professor Evangely and plans to use Septimus' original Guinea Pig, Olrik and brainwash him into doing what their bidding. When she meets Mortimer by accident in the Bedlam Hospice, she easily charms him and invites him to a private party with the intention of using his genius to continue Septimus' work. When the Septimus army attempts to retrieve Olrik, Evangely, Rowana and McFarlane make an alliance with Mortimer and Olrik which proves useful to them, as the latter two managed to stop the phenomenon. During their escape from the Septimus army, Evangely and Rowana takes advantage of Olrik briefly having a seizure while Mortimer tends to him to leave them behind, thus suffering no consequences for their actions.
  • 1997 animated series: The animated incarnation of Professor Miloch Georgevitch, faking his death after the events of "Heavy Weather", returns as the main antagonist of "The Infernal Machine". Leaving his time machine to Blake and Mortimer as inheritance, Miloch rigs it in order to leave them stranded in the past forever. He first attempt to lock Mortimer in several eras ranging from prehistoric times to the Middle Ages. When Blake arrives late and manages to send Mortimer back to the present, Miloch takes advantage of Blake checking on the unconscious Mortimer and Princess Agnès to trap Blake in the machine as well before sending them to the future. When Mortimer figures out how to come back to the present, Miloch activates the machine's self-destruct sequence, nearly killing Blake and Mortimer. Surviving the events of this work, Miloch proved to be just as cunning as—if not more than—his late comic self.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The cover of "The Yellow M", which had been frequently parodied by other Franco-Belgian comics.
  • In France, "Damned!" as an interjection, which is frequently used by the heroes (probably as an erroneous transcription of "damn it"), has entered common language and appears in other comics.
• Moral Event Horizon: In The Art of War, Olrik crosses it by trapping Blake and Mortimer in an experimental remote controlled stealth bomber and sending it on a collision course with the newly built UN headquarters with the intent of framing Blake and Mortimer as the worst traitors in history and start World War III simply because he can.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The incompleted Mortimer robots duplicates. They look horrifically inhuman and are nigh-unstoppable killing machines.
  • In The Curse of the Thirty Denarii, a man stole one of the cursed coin and was afflicted with a severe case of leprosy. His head became a misshapen ball of rotten flesh.
  • In The Curse of the Thirty Denarii, Rainer von Stahl is smitten by God's thunder. His body melts away as he screams horribly.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: A significant portion of the comics' fandom still considers the Edgar P. Jacobs albums as the best ones.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The Curse of the Thirty Denarii is basically an unofficial adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark. A story located in the Mediterranean region? Check. A biblical artifact serving as MacGuffin? Check. The artifact is rumored of having supernatural powers? Check. The antagonists are a group of Nazi looking for said MacGuffin? Check. A submarine appears as a Deus Ex Machina in favor of the bad guys? Check. The good guys are the first ones to find the artifact, then the villains stole it from then? Check. The mystical power of the artifact kills the Nazi antagonists? Check.
  • To Hergé's Tintin adventure series. In fact Jacobs and Hergé were close acquaintances, and Hergé would often make a reference to Jacobs in his works.
• Values Dissonance: In the first book, various characters freely refer to the Yellow Peril enemies as, well, "the yellows", and Olrik's willingness to betray them in partially based on his being white.

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