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Cinebook are releasing "Blake & Mortimer - The Complete Collection", an omnibus series publishing two or three stories in single volumes.

Volume 1 contains all three episodes of "The Secret of the Swordfish" and
Volume 2 includes the Pyramid saga and the "Yellow M".
Volume 3 includes Atlantis Mystery and S.O.S. Meteors, while
Volume 4 includes Time Trap and The Affair of the Necklace.

Each volume also includes several pages of documentation, such as details of the background of the series and the author, as well as sketches and historical notes. For example, Volume 1 mentions Jacobs' earlier "U Ray" story and shows some of the differences between the original magazine publication and the subsequent book version.

They are available on Amazon as Kindle or hardbacks. Enjoy.

It was inevitable that this would be announced, because of course I have now collected all the individual books... ;-)
Can't justify going for these again myself, but they do look to be a great way to collect the series! Thanks for the heads-up!

I got the first two volumes of this series today. I haven't had a chance to properly dive into them yet, but first impressions are positive: they're physically well-made books, with the page size fractionally larger than the individual paperback editions. The bonus material is spread out throughout the books, inserted between each story.

There's an ad page at the end of volume 1 for other volumes in the series, which suggests it'll run to eight in total. It doesn't specify what will be contained in each volume, but based on the cover art and the series running order, this breakdown seems plausible:

Volume 5: Professor Satō's Three Formulae, parts 1 & 2, and The Francis Blake Affair
Volume 6: The Voronov Plot and The Strange Encounter
Volume 7: The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, parts 1 & 2 (and potentially The Gondwana Shrine)
Volume 8: The Curse of the 30 Pieces of Silver, parts 1 & 2 (and potentially The Oath of the Five Lords)

I recognise each of these words but never seen them in that order before! It is almost like there's such a thing as 'self control'!

I'm really enjoying these books, both as an excuse to revisit the stories, and as a 'biography' of the series as a whole. It has just about everything you'd want, orignal art, layouts, comparisions between how it was presented in Tintin versus the publication in albums, excerpts from interviews with the creator(s), analysis of the story, connections with Tintin, and even analysis of a page of story telling from each of the reprinted albums. And, of course, the stories themselves.

It is facinating to see the evolution of the art over the years. Of course I can do that already by pulling down the paperbacks, but thick hardbacks somehow make it easier to scrutinise in detail. For what it is worth, I think that The Mystery of the Great Pyramid pair are the most 'Tintin' in look of the lot.


I think you are right that V7 will include The Gondwana Shrine as they'll want to print them in order and for some reason if it was bumped to the next volume it'd feel wrong (to me...) to have a single album lead off a double.

I've all four of the books published so far and smashed though the first pair already (to no suprise to anyone that's read me bore-on about these for years!)

This does show me that Tintin isn't as well served in English as Blake & Mortimer, Lucky Luke (which Cinebook are returning to next year for more hardbacks with additional text), and Valérian and Laureline. Of course it is great that there's a major publisher behind Tintin in the UK and they're kept the books in print for 50+ years. But it also feels like Tintin is just a backlisted item for them rather than something to cherish. Cinebook has done for Blake and Mortimer what Methuen did for Tintin, but those four books with 'Making of' content are a generation (or more ago).

George