BLAKE & MORTIMER - NEW ADVENTURE SOON TO BE AVAILABLE

From Our Continental Correspondent - a new Blake and Mortimer album

March 20th, 2008

Filed under: Graphic Novels, From our Continental Correspondent � Wim @ 10:05 am
Their creator, Edgar P. Jacobs, may have passed away a long time ago now, but Blake and Mortimer still live on. And while it may pass virtually unnoticed in the world at large, in BD-land a new Blake And Mortimer album is still supposed to be a big deal. And so publisher Dargaud presents with great pride (and hope for good sales figures) the new Blake and Mortimer book: The Gondwana Sanctuary (Le Sanctuaire De Gondwana).
It’s the eighteenth book in the series, and the seventh that was not entirely created by Jacobs (album number 12, the second part of Professor Sato’s Three Formulas, was drawn by Hergé’s right-hand man Bob De Moor, based on unfinished sketches by Jacobs). Professor Mortimer has brought back a mysterious piece of rock from his expedition from the South Pole, and this leads him on the trail of a fantastic, lost civilisation. His search leads him to the entrails of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania (or Tanganyka, as Kenya and Tanzania were known then), not far from Lake Victoria. Thus starts a supposedly rollicking adventure that will lead Blake and Mortimer to black Africa for the first time.

The creative team on this book consists of writer Yves Sente and artist André Juillard. As they were also the team behind the previous Blake and Mortimer adventure, the two-parter The Sixth Contintent Sarcophages (Les Sarcophages du 6e continent), it would seem that the times of having another team create every other book are over.

(panels from Le Sanctuaire De Gondwana, written by Yves Sente with art by André Juillard, borrowed from the Dargaud site and (c) Dargaud. I tmay just be me but when I see this style it makes me want to stop what I am doing and go and read some of Garen Ewing’s Rainbow Orchid)

Juillard has clearly mastered Jacobs’ style to the minute, while Ted Benoit, who previously did two books together with writer Jean Van Hamme, always leaned more towards a Jacobsified Ligne Claire, if you will. And while Van Hamme at least tried to update the admittedly old-fashioned and quite tiresome storytelling style that Jacobs used, Sente always safely stays within the master’s footsteps. That results in the real Blake And Mortimer feeling, but whether it will attract a new audience, is another matter.

Judge for yourself, and read a six-page preview on the Dargaud site, but don’t bother to go to the official Blake And Mortimer site as yet though, because it looks as if the book is still unknown there thus far