AUBIN

ANTOINE AUBIN BLAKE AND MORTIMER Eight hours in Berlin (T.29), Blake and Mortimer 2022 Original cover. Signed. India ink on paper 39.5 × 47.5 cm (15.55 × 18.7 in.) Depicting the Wall on the cover of a spy adventure set in Berlin in 1963, at the height of the Cold War, was an obvious choice. The Wall was always present, on every sketch of this cover, as a constraint. And compelling it was. A perspective of this Wall, with a vanishing point in the space of the drawing, was finally imposed, allowing to identify the East and West sides with the right and the left, as on a map held in the right direction. The characters are therefore on the East side, in enemy territory, facing danger. They are cornered at the Wall, in the no man's land delimited on the right by the Czech hedgehogs, as if trapped. This is reminiscent of Blake and Mortimer's posture on the cover of The Yellow Mark. The reader will discover in the album strangely deserted places, visited by the heroes in nocturnal adventures, and evoked here by settings that seem uninhabited. Antoine Aubin