Blake and Mortimer - Main Characters

Main Characters

The three main characters of the series were already present in slightly different form in the unrelated, first full length comic strip by Jacobs, Le Rayon U (The U-Ray, 1943), which took a lot of its inspiration from Flash Gordon. The characters of Lord Calder, Professor Marduk and Captain Dagon can be connected to Blake, Mortimer and Olrik respectively.

In the original Jacobs' version it is not specified that Blake and Mortimer are Welsh and Scottish. They are simply two proud Britons serving HM's Government. The post-Jacobs title, The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, dwells on their early lives, showing how they met in colonial India.

• Professor Philip Angus Mortimer — a leading physicist of Scottish descent, he grew up in British Raj and is the archetypical British gentleman scholar.
• Captain Francis Percy Blake — Welsh-born officer in Her Majesty's armed forces. He studied at Oxford and later became head of the British Security Service MI5 but is still very active in the field. He is a master of disguise, even fooling Mortimer on occasion.

• Colonel Olrik — the perennial villain from the first instalment onwards. Of the original series there was only one book that did not feature him in one capacity or other: Le Piège diabolique (The Time Trap). Olrik started out in The Secret of the Swordfish as the head of intelligence for Oriental dictator Basam Damdu. His activities have since ranged from mercenary, spy, smuggler and general criminal adventurer.
• Ahmed Nasir - Nasir Ahmed is the faithful friend and ally of the two main heroes Francis Blake and Philip Mortimer.

He appears for the first time in the first volume of The Secret of the Swordfish where he prevents the two men being captured by Olrik in Iran. He is a sergeant of the 5th Battalion of the "Makran Levy Corps" who served under Blake. Following this intervention, Nasir during this adventure helps the two heroes in many situations, particularly in India playing a role of spy in the service of England in order to help Professor Mortimer. He later became the servant of Professor Philip Mortimer . Nasir will appear only in the first albums of Jacobs: The Secret of the Swordfish, The Mystery of the Great Pyramid, and The Yellow Mark. His disappearance (which in time corresponds to that of the British Empire) remained unexplained in the later albums by Jacobs.

He will reappear many years later in the albums of Yves Sente and André Juillard: The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent. We learn then that after leaving the service and Mortimer, he returned to India, where he went into the intelligence service.

• Commissioner Pradier is a character created by EP Jacobs, whose physique was greatly inspired by the actor Jean Gabin. Divisional Commissioner to the Paris Branch of Territorial Surveillance (DST), Pradier help Blake and Mortimer during their adventures taking place during their stay in France.

• Nastasia Wardynska is a female friend and ally of Blake and Mortimer. She is from Russia.

Philip Mortimer was based upon a friend and sometimes collaborator of Jacobs, Jacques Van Melkebeke. There was one imaginative addition by Jacobs since Van Melkebeke had no beard. Francis Blake was modeled by another friend and sometimes collaborator of Jacobs, Jacques Laudy, with added mustache. Olrik was a self-portrait of Jacobs.