In Review: Blake And Mortimer - The Gondwana Shrine

The Gondwana Shrine is the fourth of the new adventures of Blake And Mortimer by writer Yves Sente and artist André Juillard, originally published in French in 2008 and based on the original characters created by E.P. Jacobs.

Following on from his ordeal in The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, Professor Mortimer is suffering headaches and memory lapses and has been told by his doctor to take a rest from his work. Meeting Nastasia Wardynska, she tells him that analysis of an artifact that he brought back from Antarctica suggests that is from a civilisation that predates the earliest so far known.

Discovering that a similar artifact has been discovered in Tanganyika in east Africa, Mortimer persuades an old girlfriend, Sarah Summertown, who is a novelist and amateur archaeologist, to go with him and Nastasia to Africa to investigate the area around where the second artifact was discovered. Meanwhile in London, Captain Blake is confronted by a mysterious stranger who convinces him that Mortimer will need a lot of assistance in Africa.

Writer Yves Sente continues his Blake and Mortimer sequence with a story that begins in a fairly standard way and then, building on the plot of The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, heads off on a totally unexpected direction. Gondwana was the name of the ancient southern supercontinent and the tale does indeed take in truly ancient events albeit at times getting more far fetched than even the more science fictional Blake and Mortimer books normally do. That said the strength of the book is in its characters and with Nastasia from The Voronov Plot and yet another former girlfriend of Mortimer in Sarah, Sente has included characters that the reader grows concerned for as the story progresses.

André Juillard's artwork is impressive with accurate depictions of both the wildlife of Africa and the technology of the late 1950s/early 1960s period that these new Blake and Mortimer stories are set in - although quite why his accurately drawn French Air Force Noratlas propeller driven transport aircraft is called a Jumbo Jet in the text is beyond me.

The first of Sente's four B&M books was the rather wordy and somewhat dull The Voronov Plot but he found his feet with the two part Sarcophagi tale. The Gondwana Shrine does not require the reader to have read both Sarcophagi books first but, as it is a sequel to them, it would definitely help.

The Gondwana Shrine is a Blake and Mortimer book that takes both the characters and the reader to an unexpected place and those who enjoyed the previous Sente and Juillard books will not be disappointed.

There are more details of the English language Blake and Mortimer books on the Cinebook website.

There are more details on the series in general on the official Blake and Mortimer website (in French).

In Review: Blake & Mortimer - The Sarcophagi Of The Sixth Continent Part 2

Following directly on story-wise from the previous book, Cinebook have released the second part of their latest Blake and Mortimer title, The Sarcophagi Of The Sixth Continent. Created by writer Yves Sente and artist Andre Juillard and originally published in French in 2004 as Les Sarcophages Du Sixième Continent Tome 2: Le Duel Des Esprits, this follows on from Part One in which the eternal Indian Emperor Ashoka pledged revenge on the colonial powers and Philip Mortimer in particular. That revenge came as a psychic attack disrupting the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels.

Blake and Mortimer have tracked the source of the attack down to the new Indian Antarctic base but having arrived on the sixth continent they are captured by Ashoka's men. Blake escapes and makes it to the French base but Mortimer is taken to the underground section of the Indian base where Ashoka explains his plan which includes forcing Mortimer into one of the psychic sarcophagi. However Blake is determined to lead a rescue attempt using a French new submarine, the Subglacior.

After all the problems at the World's Fair in the first book, and the very interesting back story of the young Philip Mortimer's encounter with the Indian nationalist Ashoka and his beautiful daughter Gita, the second book becomes more of a traditional Blake and Mortimer action story with the two characters separated and imperilled both by the villains of the piece as well as the natural forces of earthquakes and volcanoes. The Subglacior, which was mentioned in passing in Part 1, comes to the rescue as Blake needs to enter the underground base although its ability to travel through solid ice by melting it and then travelling through the resultant water probably doesn't bear too much thinking about. However that is irrelevant to the flow of the plot as Sente piles problem upon problem for our heroes with the Soviets siding with Ashoka as a natural disaster threatens everyone.

The anonymous and apparently immortal Ashoka remains the most intriguing character with the second book returning to the first book's back story of the doomed love affair between Ashoka's daughter, the Indian Princess Gita, and the young and oh so English Mortimer. The details of this in the first book are enhanced with the second book's retelling of the tale from another person's perspective and, while it perhaps gives the reader enough information to figure out who Ashoka is, it is an interesting twist to both the back story and the main plot.

Not as heavy going as many of the Blake and Mortimer books, The Sarcophagi Of The Sixth Continent Part 2 continues the enjoyable story from the first part and together they combine to make for a satisfyingly long adventure that sheds a surprising new light on the youth of one of the series' main characters.


• There are more details of the English language Blake and Mortimer books on the Cinebook website.

• There are more details on the series in general on the official Blake and Mortimer website (in French).

The downthetubes review of Part One of this story is here.

In Review: Blake & Mortimer - The Sarcophagi Of The Sixth Continent Part 1

Edgar P Jacobs' MI5 chief Captain Francis Blake and Professor Philip Mortimer return in the first part of a two part adventure, The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent. Originally published in French in 2003 as Les Sarcophages du Sixième Continent, Tome 1: La Menace Universelle, it was the second of the (to-date) four Blake and Mortimer albums created by writer Yves Sente and artist Andre Juillard.

It is 1958 and Professor Mortimer is involved in the preparations for the British Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair which will include real time scientific information being relayed direct from the British Antarctic Survey base at Halley Station on the coast of Antarctica. As well as providing the information for the World's Fair, the British base is helping the nearby new Indian base with power and supplies. However the Indian base is being used as a cover by the apparent reincarnation of the eternal Indian Emperor Ashoka, someone the young Philip Mortimer had come across many years before and who had vowed revenge on him as he blamed Mortimer for what had happened to his daughter. With the help of the Soviets, Ashoka plans to disrupt the World's Fair from his base in Antarctica, the sixth continent.

Blake and Mortimer books, especially the original ones created by Jacobs, can be very text and plot heavy and, especially with the deliberate translation into the rather formal 1950s style of English, they can often be heavy going especially when the characters decide to sit around and discuss just where the plot has got to. Yet this first part of The Sarcophagi Of The Sixth Continent doesn't seem to fall into that trap. Perhaps it is because there is so much going on with so many different characters or perhaps it is the fact that there are effectively two different but interconnected stories with the 'modern day' plot set in Brussels and the flashback in colonial India. With 'sarcophagi' in the title, the book gives the impression that the story will be somehow mixed up in archeology and yet the opposite is very much the case with the sarcophagi, when they appear, being much very much ultra-modern technology - for 1958 at least.

However the delight of this book isn't the main plot of the attack on the World's Fair but rather the long flashback to the doomed love affair between the young clean shaven Philip Mortimer and Princess Gita, Ashoka's daughter, and the revenge that her Indian nationalist father plans against both Mortimer and the colonial powers of the West. It helps to put a more human face on Mortimer as well give the book's main villain the strongest of motives.

If this "origin story" of Mortimer isn't enough, Sente adds a string of characters familiar from other Blake and Mortimer books from both Jacobs' original titles as well as the more modern books including, of course, the duo's seemingly perpetual nemesis Colonel Olrik. Since most are only used fleetingly, a good grounding in B&M continuity is not required but it is a nice touch for the fans of the series and logical to the plot that so many of the Professor's scientific acquaintances would be helping out at the many pavilions at the World's Fair. The rest of the book deals with the attack on the Fair and Blake and Mortimer's realisation that it is originating in Antarctica and that is where they must go to to deal with the threat, a journey that will take them into the second part of the story and the next book.

Whatever it is that sets The Sarcophagi Of The Sixth Continent Part One apart from other Blake and Mortimer stories, be it the flashback, the double story or the characterisation, it makes for a story that is more interesting than some of the other Blake and Mortimer books that I have read and left me eager to read the second part.

• There are more details of the English language Blake and Mortimer books on the Cinebook website.

• There are more details on the series in general on the official Blake and Mortimer website (in French).