Blake and Mortimer by Patrick A. Dumas and an interview with Edgar P. Jacobs | recovery

Your autobiography emphasizes British influences in your work. What did you read as a teenager?

Jacobs: “For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to Anglo-Saxon literature. My biographers – and it is a great honor to have such great biographers – have rightly confirmed this influence. The reference authors were the great Rudyard (I mistakenly forgot now) Arthur Conan Doyle, Jerome K. Jerome, Robert Louis Stevenson And H.G. Wells. What these writers had in common was their talent for bringing the unexpected, strange, or disturbing out of a familiar or ordinary place that everyone had seen or known well. I confirm that War of the Worlds It has nothing to do with current science fiction, which usually transports us to the future or on another planet, with completely fantasy settings and costumes. When you are wales War of the Worlds He wrote that science had already made remarkable advances in communications, electricity, and even radioactivity (already). In other words, his imagination was completely saturated with it. Likes Jules Verne“His famous scientific predictions of the Industrial Revolution lay before him.”

So why did you reject space opera?

Jacobs: “In the science fiction genre, I think we need to clearly distinguish between the ‘inexplicable present’, which I chose, and the ‘space western’, which is pure fantasy. Did you know, for example, that Jules Verne in From the Earth to the moon He places the launch pad for his spaceship a few miles from Cape Canaveral? And 104 years later, the Apollo rocket will launch from there and land on the moon in 1969. This is what I call anticipation or pre-science. So, like those of my illustrious predecessors, in all my scenarios, I make sure to stay halfway between the hypothetical and the possible.

How did you come to terms with it? War of the Worlds To clarify?

Jacobs: “To answer your question, I have to go back to the heroic days of the first editions of Tintin In September 1946 (then I did well He asked me to follow up “U” beam. to make). some Raymond LeBlanc He had the idea and courage to create a new weekly magazine for young people. To do this, he approached Tintin’s famous father, with whom I had been working since the end of 1943. Hergé The idea was accepted and the team was quickly assembled. In addition to Hergé, Jack LudyVery small Paul Cuvillier And myself with Jack van Mielkebeek As editor-in-chief and Gerard Léger-Belair As a graphic designer. In the midst of the euphoria and recklessness of the post-war period, four cartoonists and I created it Tintin From “peak”, that Tintin That all readers are missing now. We realized at the last minute that we were missing a “realistic” contemporary story, because everyone had chosen a historical theme. Because I am the only one, apart from Hergé, who writes my own screenplays, I was asked to create such a series. And the result was The secret of the swordfishWhich I drew according to the numbers that follow. I still help Hergé and draw black and white illustrations for other stories. In the meantime, he bought the publisher Lombard Reproduction rights to War of the WorldsThis requires clarification. Once again I had this privilege, but this soon forced me to give up working with Hergé.”

In fact, forty years ago, I pioneered a genre in which a contemporary fictional story is built from real events. In a sense, were you a forerunner of Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum, Vladimir Volkoff, and others like Forsyth?

Jacobs: “Well, if you say so…”