Edgar P Jacobs assisted Herge with the creation of the Secret of the Unicorn/Red Rackham's Treasure and Seven Crystal Balls/Prisoners of the Sun adventures. He also worked on the coloured versions of Congo, America, Blue Lotus and King Ottokar's Sceptre. Jacobs created his own comic book characters, Blake and Mortimer and wrote and drew books featuring Blake & Mortimer from 1950 until 1971. After his death in 1987, first Bob de Moor, another Herge collaborator, and then two teams working together on seperate books, Jean Van Hamme and Ted Benoit, and Yves Sente and Andre Julliard.
THe Yellow M first appeared in Tintin magazine and was collected and published in a single book in 1956. This english translation was published in paperback in 2007 by Cinebook and was translated by Clarence E Holland.
THe artwork is finer than the clear line art of Tintin and has more detail in the subjects and background. Although written in Belgum it is set in London. The plot involves a detective mystery and science fiction. In amy ways the story is similar to Herge's The Secret Ray. It is beautiful to look at but unfortunately it is very hard to read. There is too much text which slows the pace of the adventure. Much of the text is redundant as in addition to dialogue boxes there are also scene explanation in almost every panel. Often both boxes repeat the same information. e.g. Scene explanation: "The Inspector recognises a black felt hat stuck on the end of a boat hook and dripping with water." Speech bubble: "It's his hat!!!". Most of the text boxes are stuffed full of words that are not needed. Some text boxes are so big that they are exhausting to look at and really made me struggle with enthusiasm when reading the book.
I found it very frustrating to read. I don't know if it is the text or the translation into english that is the problem. It needs a ruthless editor to remove at least half of the text to allow the story to flow. Herge was very economical with his words and often let the pictures tell the story. Jacobs obviously did not trust his pictures enough to do this.
There is a great read buried somewhere in this book.
1 comment:
The EP Jacobs books are crammed with text - even in French. There is a lot of technical stuff in some of them, and if your French is limited, you’ll get unstuck (like I have) many times.
I agree - they need editing, and I feel that they need better proof reading too. The English feels stilted at times, and could do with a final polish.
You may notice that there has been no attempt to resize speech bubbles, and at times text is crammed in at very small sizes.
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