André Juillard (1948–2024)

I'm finding the variety of the adventures into which Blake and Mortimer get themselves enmeshed one of the pleasures of this series. From militaristic, gung-ho, pulp-style war heroics, to Flash Gordonesque science fantasy antics or Quatermass-style scientific speculation, to magic, mysticism and ghosts, or spy adventures and "The Great Game" of Empires.

In The Oath of the Five Lords, Yves Sante delivers a murder mystery, combining political intrigue with a revenge vendetta. As the readers and show more the protagonists of the stories become further separated in time, the writers of the new adventures feel able to bring in historical characters contemporary with Blake and Mortimer, in this instance, T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia". We're also given some further flashbacks into Blake's back story, which proves integral to the plot.

There are some neat background clues as to suspects and motives for the observant reader, the 'Hamlet' theatre poster in Alfred's room being my favourite, and while the mystery isn't so hard to fathom, the details as to motive, the blending of fiction and fact, and the ambiguity as to Lawrence's intentions are handled well. I thoroughly enjoyed it! show less

I’ve been impressed with a couple of Sente’s scripts, more so than I have anything written by series creator Edgar P Jacobs – chiefly because Sente manages to stitch his stories into real history. And so he does in this one, and it’s particularly effective. The story is essentially a murder-mystery. The titular lords are a secret society, created decades before to safeguard a pamphlet written by TE Lawrence but which he was never allowed to publish. Someone is bumping off the lords show more and stealing their portion of the pamphlet. It’s up to Blake and Mortimer to learn the identity of the killer/thief before the pamphlet is all together lost and the five lords all murdered. It’s not a very complex mystery, though Sente still manages a few bits of sleight of hand with his clues. I thought this one of the better entries in the series. show less

Only two more and the series is complete. Well, there’s two more left that were originally penned by series creator Edgar P Jacobs, but who knows how many more the Jacobs Studio will produce. But since I like the series, that wouldn’t, of course, be a problem. And I actually like the non-Jacobs titles more than the Jacobs ones. Chiefly because they’re more modern, although set in the past, and a good deal cleverer. This one is set during WWII, and details how Blake and Mortimer came to show more be friends and colleagues. They had met before – in The Oath of the Five Lords (see here) – but had then gone their separate ways. As Plutarch’s Staff opens, Blake is a RAF squadron leader flying Seafires for the Fleet Air Arm, and Mortimer is working at a secret research establishment in a Scottish glen hidden beneath an artificially-generated cloud. But Jacobs’s more-than-problematical villains, the Yellow Empire, are waiting in the wings, ready to pounce once WWII has ended. Although they’re not above helping things along. Sente and Juillard drag in quite a bit of history – including a visit to Bletchley Park – and manage to cleverly slot Jacobs’s weird alternate history into our history. Good stuff. show less

One of the modern additions to the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer, this one is an early story in the internal chronology, taking place towards the end of WWII and setting up the original series openers, the Swordfish trilogy. Much daring-do for Blake, with Mortimer taking an important, but subsidiary, part.

Nice touches include the advent of Olrik, and a bit of his back story, unreliable as that information might be, and how Blake comes to reside at 99a Park Lane with Mrs Benson; a missed show more opportunity was no Alan Turing cameo during the Bletchley scenes. An enjoyable episode in the series. show less