A new exhibition in Nice shows how writer-illustrator Edgar P. Jacobs built a cultural bridge from his Belgian cartoon characters to a Japan between imagination and reality.
A comic set in Japan by an author who never visited the country can be read many ways: as an act of imagination, a feat of documentation, or a controlled fantasy built from visual memory. Mortimer et le Japon de papier, now open at the Musée des arts asiatiques in Nice through 31 January 2027, takes that tension as its starting point and places cartoonist Edgar P. Jacobs’ story Professor Satō’s Three Formulae in dialogue with Japanese prints, objects, archives and preparatory drawings.
For anyone who grew up in France or Belgium, Captain Francis Blake and Professor Philip Mortimer need no introduction. For everyone else: they are the buttoned-up, brilliantly drawn heroes of a classic comic series created by Jacobs in 1946: Cold War adventurers who tackled espionage, science fiction and the occasional ancient curse with the unflappable certainty of men who have never once doubted their own tweed. Think Tintin, but with more atomic physics and considerably more pipe smoke.
Courtesy Département des Alpes-Maritimes / Musée départemental des arts asiatiques
Consisting of 157 originals and 55 archive pieces, the exhibition focuses on the last adventure Edgar P. Jacobs drew himself, in which Mortimer travels to Japan, befriends a cybernetics genius who has built autonomous androids in a laboratory under his Zen garden, and ends up kidnapped and replaced by a robotic double of himself. The protagonists confidently move through Tokyo and Kyoto against the backdrops of kabuki and samurai imagery.
Identity, imitation, and the uneasy gap between a person and their copy are metaphors here: Jacobs chose Japan for this story deliberately, drawn to a culture he saw as uniquely alive to the tension between deep tradition and the very near future.
The only problem, he had never been there…
And so he worked the way a detective works a cold case: assembling everything he could find, following every lead, and refusing to invent what he could verify. He wrote to Japan Airlines for documentation of Haneda Airport and received a complete dossier, with one condition: no accidents involving JAL planes. He also tracked down a Japanese professor of French literature at the University of Tokyo who became his guide to the texture of daily life. And he spent three weeks trying to find photographs of Japanese rubbish bins, because they appeared in a back-alley fight scene and he would not draw them from imagination. When the photos finally arrived, the bins turned out to be identical to American ones. His colleagues never let him forget it…
Courtesy Département des Alpes-Maritimes / Musée départemental des arts asiatiques
The exhibition lays all of this open and becomes a story of construction: how Jacobs assembled a fictional-yet-realistic Japan from documentation, drawings, and carefully studied visual references. The artefacts, including preparatory sketches, calques, and working notes are displayed alongside the museum’s own Japanese collections, estampes, and art objects to reveal how a European comics artist translated a foreign culture into the language of the pen.
That approach also shifts attention to the role of the page itself. The “paper” referenced in the title points to how a Franco-Belgian comic page and a Japanese woodblock print share the same fundamental logic, the same faith in lines as the vehicle of meaning, and the same primary material. It can also be interpreted as “Japan, on paper”, as the product of the illustrator’s imagination. The exhibition therefore is as much about the medium as the subject, asking how an artist can create the impression of a place through line, composition and the disciplined reuse of visual references.
Courtesy Département des Alpes-Maritimes / Musée départemental des arts asiatiques
In the end, the show does not need to settle the question of whether Jacobs’s Japan is “accurate.” Its value lies in showing how a European comic artist, working from visual impressions rather than travel as his reference, created a Japan that is at once imagined, researched and narratively functional. That tension between invention and source, fantasy and documentation gives Mortimer et le Japon de papier its deeper meaning.
In order to protect the most fragile works, the exhibition will rotate a significant proportion of the artefacts, offering a new selection of originals from 3 November 2026.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Mortimer et le Japon de papier
Musée départemental des arts asiatiques / Museum of Asian Arts
Until 31 January 2027
Open daily except Tuesday from 10 am to 5 pm (July and August until 6 pm)
Free admission
VENUE DETAILS
Musée départemental des arts asiatiques de Nice
405 Promenade des Anglais
06200 Nice
Tel: +33 (0)4 89 04 55 20
Web: www.maa.departement06.fr
PHOTO CREDITS
- All images courtesy Département des Alpes-Maritimes / Musée départemental des arts asiatiques de Nice
Advertisement
Leave a comment