The Yellow 'M'
Blake and Mortimer 6
by Edgar Jacobs
translated by Clarence Holland
1956, reprinted 2007
The Yellow 'M' is an early Franco-Belgian comic about a mysterious villain's crime spree in London. At first, the criminal just seems exceptionally competent, but he evades capture in ways that are truly superhuman, which suggests the involvement of a mad scientist in the whole scheme... The Yellow 'M' is the sixth book in Edgar Jacobs's collected Blake and Mortimer comics, although I gather it might be the most popular, and it was the first one of the series reprinted in English.
Probably the best known Franco-Belgian comics, for American audiences, are The Adventures of Tintin. The Blake and Mortimer comics are visually very similar to Tintin, with the same ligne claire art style, with fairly realistic drawings, thin outlines with no shading, and flat colors. (The best known FB comic characters are probably the Smurfs, but most Americans would known them from their cartoons, not their books, and they're stylistically very different.)
Captain Blake is in MI5, and Professor Mortimer is a physicist. They solve mysteries in London in the late 1940s and early 50s (which was present-day at the time they were written), and I gather that a lot of their adventures are like this one - initially fairly realistic, but increasingly science fictional as the uncover the fantastic methods employed to commit the crimes. In The Yellow 'M', for example, the pair eventually uncover that the mastermind behind the crime spree is using hypnosis, various psychic powers, and a machine that projects something like radio waves to remotely dominate people's minds!
At the start of the comic, 'the Yellow M' is the codename the London police have given to an unknown criminal who's been on a very successful burglary spree. He announces his crimes in advance, manages to commit them despite increased surveillance, and signs a yellow M in chalk at each scene. (In the earliest Batman comics, the Joker gets his start by announcing he will poison specific people and then succeeding. I wonder if this was a common villain plan back then?)
We witness the Yellow M's latest crime, the theft of the crown from the royal Crown Jewels, from the perspective of the beefeater guards. They're totally outmatched. Only one even sees the thief, and he's knocked unconscious, with no memory of the encounter.
Blake gets assigned to the case because the local crimes have become a matter of national importance, and he calls in Mortimer to consult. At this point, the Yellow M switches from stealing to kidnapping, abducting several gentlemen who belong to the same club as Blake and Mortimer, including a newspaper editor and a judge. It seems like the Yellow M is going after anyone who investigates him, but Mortimer intuits another connection between the victims, an old libel case from before WWII, involving a scientist who claimed to have discovered psychic powers...
Eventually Blake and Mortimer figure out who's responsible, and find their hideout, a facility constructed for official use during the Blitz and abandoned after the war. I hope it doesn't spoil too much to say that 'the Yellow M' is not just one man, working alone. It turns out that the investigators know one of the criminals better than his own partner does, and they use that one advantage as a wedge to drive them apart. (The villain they know is recurring from an earlier book in the series, so if you read them in order, you'd recognize him too.)
Because Blake wears a uniform and works directly for the British government, he's quite unlike Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. And while he's able to fight as well as a soldier, he's no superhero. He catches the super-powered thief with police work, not superior martial arts. Mortimer is the one with the most intuition, and the one who finds the vital clue, but mostly does that by researching court cases and newspaper scandals in the library. His status as a scientist maybe lets him understand how the Yellow M's machines work, but he doesn't have any genius insights or deductions. It's more like teamwork and proper procedure win the day, allowing competent but ordinary investigators to solve and stop an extraordinary crime.
Probably the best known Franco-Belgian comics, for American audiences, are The Adventures of Tintin. The Blake and Mortimer comics are visually very similar to Tintin, with the same ligne claire art style, with fairly realistic drawings, thin outlines with no shading, and flat colors. (The best known FB comic characters are probably the Smurfs, but most Americans would known them from their cartoons, not their books, and they're stylistically very different.)
Captain Blake is in MI5, and Professor Mortimer is a physicist. They solve mysteries in London in the late 1940s and early 50s (which was present-day at the time they were written), and I gather that a lot of their adventures are like this one - initially fairly realistic, but increasingly science fictional as the uncover the fantastic methods employed to commit the crimes. In The Yellow 'M', for example, the pair eventually uncover that the mastermind behind the crime spree is using hypnosis, various psychic powers, and a machine that projects something like radio waves to remotely dominate people's minds!
At the start of the comic, 'the Yellow M' is the codename the London police have given to an unknown criminal who's been on a very successful burglary spree. He announces his crimes in advance, manages to commit them despite increased surveillance, and signs a yellow M in chalk at each scene. (In the earliest Batman comics, the Joker gets his start by announcing he will poison specific people and then succeeding. I wonder if this was a common villain plan back then?)
We witness the Yellow M's latest crime, the theft of the crown from the royal Crown Jewels, from the perspective of the beefeater guards. They're totally outmatched. Only one even sees the thief, and he's knocked unconscious, with no memory of the encounter.
Blake gets assigned to the case because the local crimes have become a matter of national importance, and he calls in Mortimer to consult. At this point, the Yellow M switches from stealing to kidnapping, abducting several gentlemen who belong to the same club as Blake and Mortimer, including a newspaper editor and a judge. It seems like the Yellow M is going after anyone who investigates him, but Mortimer intuits another connection between the victims, an old libel case from before WWII, involving a scientist who claimed to have discovered psychic powers...
Eventually Blake and Mortimer figure out who's responsible, and find their hideout, a facility constructed for official use during the Blitz and abandoned after the war. I hope it doesn't spoil too much to say that 'the Yellow M' is not just one man, working alone. It turns out that the investigators know one of the criminals better than his own partner does, and they use that one advantage as a wedge to drive them apart. (The villain they know is recurring from an earlier book in the series, so if you read them in order, you'd recognize him too.)
Because Blake wears a uniform and works directly for the British government, he's quite unlike Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. And while he's able to fight as well as a soldier, he's no superhero. He catches the super-powered thief with police work, not superior martial arts. Mortimer is the one with the most intuition, and the one who finds the vital clue, but mostly does that by researching court cases and newspaper scandals in the library. His status as a scientist maybe lets him understand how the Yellow M's machines work, but he doesn't have any genius insights or deductions. It's more like teamwork and proper procedure win the day, allowing competent but ordinary investigators to solve and stop an extraordinary crime.
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