Belgian · 1904–1987
Belgian cartoonist who created Blake and Mortimer, the cerebral counterpart to Tintin. Born Edgard Félix Pierre Jacobs, he trained as an opera singer before turning to comics, assisting Hergé before launching his own series in 1946. The albums combine science fiction, Egyptology, and Cold War paranoia with meticulous research and detailed backgrounds. The pace is slow, the dialogue expository, the atmosphere serious. Jacobs completed only eleven albums in forty years; each is dense with invention. The series continues under other hands, but the original remains distinctive.