Tag: Belgium

Rich men’s flood myths: Batem and Yann’s comic “Fordlandia”

In a comic book from the Belgian comic series Marsupilami the artists Batem and Yann create a satire on megalomania pipe dreams of the super rich and the fascination of the flood myth.

Set in the South-American Amazon basin, the plot is based on the true stoy of Henry Ford’s „Fordlandia“ project, a business venture the us-American automobile entrepreneur conducted in the 1920‘s in the region to secure rubber supply for the booming car industry. In the comic book a fictitious billionaire follows Ford’s footsteps into the jungle to pick up the ruinous business. But he is obsessed with the idea of a second deluge and devotes all his time – and money – into catching animals to cage on his arch. Like a true business man he does not build the arch himself but buys a mega-flying boat off another billionaire, Howard Hughes. Like Fordlandia, the legendary „H-4 Hercules“ was a massive fail too; the only one of these planes ever produced had one flight only in 1947.

The images are from my german edition of the book:

The story was published in 1991 but one can’t help think of today’s grant rescue schemes of the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It’s a common feature of today’s climate debate, that billionaires seek and successfully generate public attention to techno-utopian elitist projects. (See this article by Douglas Ruschkoff on his encounter with prepper billionaires which caused quite a buzz upon it’s publication last year) The nice twist in Batem and Yann’s story is that this rescue project is completely built on the past failures of similar minded men.

In addition to these megalomania schemes and failures, the story also references environmental destruction and authoritarian development projects in developing countries: When the deluge does eventually come, it is not a universal one but just the massive tidal wave from a bust reservoir dam, that was finished just before by the authoritarian regime of Palumbia, the fictitious state the adventures of the Marsupilami are set in.

Man made flooding in “Tintin and the Lake of Sharks”

The Belgian animation movie and comic book from 1972 and 1973 is set around an artificial lake in a fictious mountain state in the Balkans. We do not learn much about the history of the lake but Tintin explains during the landing flight that a whole town had to be evacuated in order to create the lake. We also learn that the locals think of the lake as a bad place or as cursed, implying that the flooding was not at all desirable, possibly it was experienced as an act of cruelty and arrogance towards the local population.

As Tintin finds out eventually the buildings of this submerged town now serve as hideaway for the story’s villain.

Later in the story, there is a submarine chase in the town’s streets. The movie makes much humorous use of the strange intactness of the architecture of the submerged city, for example when Capt. Haddock in his submarine ponders over a “Do not enter”-street sign whether to ignore it or not. In the comic book, Haddock cusses at the other submarine just like a typical driver in any city traffic:

This illustrates quite well the peculiar condition and uncanny of submerged cities.

At the climax of the plot, the submerged town is once again destroyed, this time by explosives set within the villain’s hideaway. In an interesting revearsal of the function of a flood meter above water, the explosives are triggered by a flood meter, measuring the rise of the water entering into the building that is below the lake’s surface. When the room become fully flooded, the buildings of the submerged town explode, sending a massive tsunami-like wave across the lake’s surface.

This probably mirrors and repeats the situation the town got submerged in originally. And it signals the second and presumably final destruction of the town.

The full comic book in english is available here.

See also my other post on the various covers here.

Covers of “Tintin and the Lake of Sharks”

This classic Tintin comic story around an underwater city in a lake appeared first as a movie and a year later as a comic book. While the movie poster displayed various images from the movie in a rather playful manner, the first French language book edition had a much more dramatic cover, clearly shifting the focus of the story towards disaster narrative.

The movie poster from 1972:

The cover of the Belgian comic book from 1973:

At least two other covers appeared for different editions of the story:

See also my other post about the story here.

Blake and Mortimer: The Atlantis Mystery

In the Belgian classic comic series Blake and Mortimer there appeared in 1955 an adventure set in the mythical city Atlantis. It’s the seventh story in the series which started in 1950.

What I find noteworthy is that the city Atlantis here undergoes several metamorphosis: It was once a city (and state) on land. It then got submerged due to seismic events. The citizens however survived and formed a new community in a subterranean system of caves. In the story this “new” Atlantis gets flooded and destroyed once again and the citizens evacuate once more, this time into space.

Since the plot is quite complicated, I mostly quote here from the respective wikipedia entry.

Professor Philip Mortimer takes his vacation to São Miguel, an island of the Azores. In a cave in the extinct volcanoe Sete Cidades he finds a radioactive rock and cannot help making a rapprochement with the orichalcum mentioned by Plato, the mysterious metal of Atlantis.

The comic then tells the following version of the myth:

12,000 years ago, Atlantis ruled the world from an island in the middle of the Atlantic (an island of the Azores) . But the collision between Earth and a huge celestial body caused the submergence of the continental coasts and island. The few survivors of the Atlantean civilization then decided to build a new and secret Atlantis in the bowels of the Earth. The Atlanteans are watching the surface of the Earth thanks to what earthlings call flying saucers.

Blake and Mortimer climb down into a labyrinth of caves and eventually arrive in Poseidopolis, the capital of subterranean Atlantis. Here they get caught in a political uprising to overthrow the royal reign of the state. The uprising results in disaster: Atlantis is flooded a second time, when the flood gates that hold back the ocean are accidentlay opened. The monarchy then orders the evacuation that had been planned for a long time: the departure of the Atlanteans to another planet with an armada of spaceships. While the Atlanteans prepare to join other skies, the other ethnos of this subterranean world, the so called barbarians, are facing extinction in the rising waters. Blake and Mortimer are released and evacuated by a submarine. Back on land, on the shores of the caldera of Sete Cidades, they attend the majestic departure of Atlantean ships into the sky.

The connection between the ocean and outerspace was not an uncommon one in the 1950s as Helen M. Rozwadowski explains in her essay on submarine utopias in the 20. Century. Both – the deep sea and outerspace – held promises of alternate existences for an otherwise doomed human civilization. This also becomes evident in the oeuvre of one of sci-fi’s most important authors, Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote three volumes of non fiction books about the Great Barrier Reef. See my post on Rozwadowski’s essay here.

Original version of the comic book in french language here.

The 1953 flood in the North Sea

The events on January 31. 1953 constitutes one of the moste severe floodings in the 20. Century in Europe. More than 1.800 lives were lost in the Netherlands, more than 300 in England and Schottland and 28 died in Belgium. As a direct result of the catastrophic events England began the development of the Thames Barrier and the Netherlands of the Delta Works. The flood has become the source of many musical compositions, books and movies.

UK, Netherlands, Belgium; 20. Century; Flood;