Hitchcock, Jacobs, van Hamme. Alfred Hitchcock made in 1935 a rather remarkable film, still in England, where Robert Donat drags Madeleine Carroll in his attempt to escape a false accusation and his pursuers, both the law and foremost the unfriendly bad guys. It was “The Thirty-nine Steps”. The film includes some catching scenes, for instance, the escape with both main characters hand-cuffed. In the film the bad guys chase the heroes in the Scottish mountainous outdoors. It is almost mandatory to remember such environment when reading the first post Edgar Pierre Jacobs full instalment of Blake and Mortimer, delivered by Ted Benoit and Jean van Hamme in 1996, “L’ Affaire Francis Blake”. It is probably pointless to recall the importance of Jacobs in the Belgium and French comics (i.e. Bande Dessinée, BD), who stands side by side with Hergé, Uderzo, Goscinny and Franquin, just to mention some examples. Anyway, coming to the point, when van Hamme puts Jacobs’ heroes in the Scottish landscape, also to some extent running from danger, and with a girl playing also a relevant role in the story (something that Jacobs never did), the link to some particular segments in Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” is quite well succeeded. Naturally, being Jean van Hamme one of the most experienced and successful plot-writers of the French-Belgium BD industry, one should not really be surprised by the quality of the book they managed to deliver. Both Hitchcock and Jacobs would most likely enjoy the nice match of the wrongly accused man story line pitch and the successful recreation of Blake and Mortimer universe. Subsequent books of Blake and Mortimer, notably with a different author-duo, struggled somehow to match the quality of “L’ Affaire Francis Blake”. The same goes for remakes and movies inspired on Hitch’s most wellknown films, but that’s another story.