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

Your biographers emphasize the 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 privilege to have biographers of age — have rightly underlined this influence. My reference authors were the great Rudyard Kipling (now wrongly forgotten), 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, the strange or the disturbing out of a familiar or banal place that everyone has seen or knows very well. I emphasize that The War of the Worlds has very little to do with current science fiction, which usually projects us into the future or on another planet, with completely imaginative settings and costumes. When Wells are The War of the Worlds wrote, science had already made fantastic progress in the fields of telecommunications, electricity and even (already) radioactivity. In other words, his imagination was completely imbued with it. Like Jules Vernes famous scientific anticipations of the Industrial Revolution had been before him.”

Then why your rejection of space opera?

Jacobs: “In the science fiction genre, I think we need to make a clear distinction between the ‘inexplicable present’, which I have chosen, and the ‘space western’, which is pure imagination. Did you know, for example, that Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon places the launch pad for his spaceship just a few miles from Cape Canaveral? 104 years later, the Apollo rocket would take off there and land on the moon in 1969. That’s what I call anticipation or pre-science. So like those illustrious predecessors, in all my scenarios I make it a point to stay halfway between the hypothetical and the possible.”

How did you come to terms with it? The War of the Worlds to illustrate?

Jacobs: “To answer your question, I have to go back to the heroic days of the first issues of Tintin in September 1946 (then Bravo asked me for a follow up The “U” beam to make). Some Raymond Leblanc had the idea and the 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. Herge accepted the idea and the team was quickly assembled. Besides Hergé, Jacques Laudythe very young one Paul Cuvelier and myself, with Jacques Van Melkebeke as editor-in-chief and Gérard Liger-Belair as a graphic designer. In the euphoria and recklessness of the post-war period, four cartoonists and I created it Tintin of the ‘heyday’, it Tintin that all readers are now missing. At the very last minute we realized that we were missing a ‘realistic’ contemporary story, because everyone had chosen a historical subject. Because I am the only one, apart from Hergé, who writes his own screenplays, I was asked to create such a series. The result was The Secret of the Swordfish, which I drew according to the numbers following each other. I still helped Hergé and drew black and white illustrations for other stories. In the meantime, publisher bought Lombard the reproduction rights for The War of the Worlds, which needed to be illustrated. Once again I was given the privilege, but this soon forced me to give up the collaboration with Hergé.”

In fact, forty years ago you were a forerunner of a literary genre in which an imaginary contemporary story is constructed from real events. In a sense, were you a forerunner of Ken Folett, Robert Ludlum, Vladimir Volkoff and other Forsyths?

Jacobs: “Well, if you say so…”