The new Blake and Mortimer unveils its cover
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DECRYPTION – Entitled Eight hours in Berlin, the new episode of the adventures of the tandem imagined by Edgar P. Jacobs, will be released on November 25. Jean-Luc Fromental, one of the three authors, analyzes this cover which summons up some memories.
Damned! 29e volume of the adventures of Blake and Mortimer is already looming on the horizon. Entitled Eight hours in Berlinpublished on November 25, we find the famous tandem created by Edgar P. Jacobs in the 60s.
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Even if we do not yet know much about the plot of this 29e episode, the cover of Eight o’clock in Berlin, which has just been unveiled by the Belgian publisher Yves Schlirf, gives the opportunity to find out more.
Concocted by designer Antoine Aubin (nine years after The Septimus wave), and the screenplay duo José-Louis Bocquet6Jean-Luc Fromental (who sign their first foray into the Jacobian universe), our dear “so British” heroes rush into the twists and turns of a plot that smacks of espionage in the heart of the Cold War.
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“It all started in 2015 when I received the phone call from Yves Schlirfremembers screenwriter Jean-Luc Fromental. Schlirf offered me point-blank: “Would you enjoy working on a new Blake and Mortimer adventure?” I immediately thought it was great, but I immediately suggested that Yves work with my friend José-Louis Bocquet.
We received a precise briefing. It was about taking Blake and Mortimer a bit out of the usual areas of their previous adventures set in the 1940s-50s. The second axis was to return to a plot related to espionage. And the third angle aimed to bring Francis Blake back to the fore, so that he would take on the light as much as the bubbling Professor Mortimer, who has an annoying tendency to attract adventure to him, like a magnet!
This is how the project for this 29e volume. Bocquet and Fromental decide to set the action of their album in 1963 Germany, in the heart of the city of Berlin, a hub of espionage between East and West during the Cold War.
“History is knitted in this wayspecifies Fromental, and for us it was like a long tickling Sunday. We took, José-Louis and I, a lot of pleasure in developing this plot in line with the spy novels of Len Deighton, which were adapted to the cinema, in particular in “Our Funeral in Berlin”, starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer. We have also thought about the atmosphere of films such as “The Russian House” by John Le Carré or more recently “The Bridge of Spies”in 2015, this Spielberg film which recounted the exchange between an American CIA pilot and a Soviet spy in Berlin in 1962.»
The cover of Eight hours in Berlin stems from these different influences. The year 1963 is not insignificant. It involves in particular the historic visit on June 26, 1963 of a mythical state figure, the President of the United States JF Kennedy, who made a speech that has remained famous (and more specifically the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner», “I am a Berliner”) on the occasion of the fifteen years of the blockade of Berlin. “I can’t tell you more,” indicates Fromental soberly.
“All I can tell you is that the cover of this album features a generic sequence that does not exist in the album, recognizes Jean-Luc Fromental. We wanted to show Francis Blake and Philip Mortimer on an equal footing, while recalling the vibe of past great Jacobs albums. It was Antoine Aubin, a great fan of Blake and Mortimer, a distinguished member of the Centaur Club, who presided over this image. He submitted several projects to us, including one where Mortimer wore a tank top, which will eventually be replaced by a putty raincoat. The tint of the sky also changes from pink to red.»
As for the shadow of the two heroes which stands out clearly on the Berlin Wall at dusk, it obviously evokes another emblematic cover of the adventures of Blake and Mortimer, designed in 1956 by Edgar P. Jacobs. The designer André Juillard has already paid tribute to this legendary image by diverting it for the pre-publication of the 14th volume of the adventures of Blake and Mortimer, “The Voronov Machination”published in the summer of 1999 in the pages of Figaro Magazine.
In “The Yellow Mark“, the brilliant Jacobs had placed his two “so British” heroes on the lookout, at the foot of a brick wall on the London docks. On this facade, not only the famous yellow “M” of the villain is drawn, but also the two shadows cast by the heroes, illuminated by a powerful light.
In Eight hours in Berlin, we find this slightly theatrical posture and this shadow that dramatizes the action. By Jove! We are eagerly awaiting the publication of this new adventure.
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