The Biggest Scandal in Original Belgian Comics Art: The Stolen Pages of Blake and Mortimer

Hundreds of original art pages from a classic Belgian comic were sold to private collectors against the wishes of their creator.

I don’t mean “wishes” as in “he once gave an interview where he said he’d never sell the pages.” No, this is more along the lines of “the creator set up a Foundation recognized by the law of the land to protect the pages from being sold.”

Millions of dollars changed hands, the Foundation responsible for the preservation of the art has been dissolved, the remaining pages have been donated to a charitable trust, and the people at the center of this scandal have been indicted.

Police in France and Belgium have been working together to figure out how it all went down. Now some of those details are out, and it’s ugly for anyone who believes in preserving the cultural heritage of a classic comic.

Let me start by introducing the Belgian creator in question after this brief and italicized legal notice:

The Legal Department at Pipeline Comics, Inc., a wholly fictitious legal entity, advises me to point out that nobody has been convicted in this case as of yet, so the reader should add “allegedly” at the end of every sentence in this article.

A Super Quick Introduction to Edgar P. Jacobs

Born in Brussels, Belgium in 1904, Edgar P. Jacobs caught his big break helping Hergé out with coloring Tintin. He went on to draw some backgrounds and then to help plot the series. Eventually, he struck out on his own with his signature creation, “Blake and Mortimer,” about a British scientist and his MI5 friend having adventures around the world and, in one case, through time.

A nit-picky perfectionist, Jacobs would only complete 10 albums in the series before he died in 1987.

The Business of Legacy Comics

In the final years of his life, Jacobs contemplated his legacy. 

In 1983, he created an organization that would own and manage his original art pages. He had saved nearly all of them, and did not want them broken up and hidden in private collections. He famously locked up the artboards in a bank vault in Brussels, Belgium, just across the street from the royal palace.

His art would stay intact and out of the original art market. It would be available for any future reprintings, scholarly research, or museum loans.

The closest to this we have here in the States is when an artist donates their work to a library of some sort — their alma mater, or a local University with a comics collection, or an art museum of some kind. Chris Claremont, for example, donated his papers to Columbia University.

It was a good plan, but it didn’t quite work out the way he had hoped. Ironically, by keeping the pages off the open market, the value of the pages only skyrocketed. That increased the odds that someone would see a big payday and do something they shouldn’t.

This is that story.

The Disorganized Business of The Jacobs Foundation

The first problem is that there was never an inventory of the pages Jacobs left in the vault. He said it was everything save a few pages and covers that had been lost before that. He had a list of those specific missing items, but no list of the actual pages in hand.

The Foundation never went about the work of creating an inventory. They defended the move, perhaps weakly, as being done for tax purposes. The second there was a known list of pages and an estimated value for them, the Foundation would face a huge tax bill.

When I say “they” here, I mean Philippe Biermé. With a background in production at Lombard (the original publisher of “Blake and Mortimer”), he had befriended Jacobs in his later years. Biermé claims to have been like a son to Jacobs, who was a widower with no children. Biermé also helped convince Jacobs to leave his publisher, Lombard, and to publish his books on his own.

I don’t blame you if you don’t start thinking back to the several shenanigans we’ve seen in the States with senior creators trusting younger friends/fans with their businesses, but who turned out to be nightmares for them. Stan Lee immediately comes to mind.

Jacobs’ end of life was a drama. Hergé, whom I met from time to time, had nevertheless warned me. He said that Jacobs had the art of surrounding himself with people he should be wary of…”

Christian Vanderhaeghe, co-founder of Editions Blake and Mortimer

Though Biermè helped Jacobs set up the Jacobs Foundation, he didn’t have anything to do with it at first.

He was, however, involved with the other two institutions set up to carry on the legacy of Blake and Mortimer. Biermé was the owner of Studio Jacobs, which held the rights to the characters and could create new books in the series or license them out. He also owned shares in Editions Blake and Mortimer, which published the works. (The controversy surrounding that organization is another story entirely, but suffice it to say it included controversy over the continuation of the series, some conflicted people, potential securities fraud, and a letter from Jacobs that got one of the founders booted. Biermé comes out as a villain in that story, too. Allegedly.)

To complete the trifecta, though, two years after Jacobs’ death in 1987, Biermé became president of the Jacobs Foundation over the objections of one Board member who pointed out the conflict of interest in profiting from Jacob’s work while leading the Foundation, which was more geared towards preserving and celebrating the work without financial incentives.

Imagine how the Board must have felt when Biermè sold those two businesses to Dargaud, which is owned by Média-Participations (who own most everything you’ve heard of in Franco-Belgian comics these days) and pocketed 1.5 million Euros in the process.

The Board member who opposed Biermé’s appointment as president demanded his resignation after that, but nothing came of it.

Still, a potential conflict of interest doesn’t necessarily mean there is a conflict of interest. Things could run perfectly smoothly in this scenario, so long as the different missions of the different organizations were respected and the machinery kept chugging along.

What happened was worse than a conflict of interest…

Pages Start Leaking Out

Starting in the mid-2000s, original art pages from the series began showing up in private collections. Many would argue they were was the best pages from the series that showed up first.

But how could that be, if Jacobs locked up his art at the bank and created a Foundation to protect it from ever being sold privately?

François Deneyer, an author of a book on original comic book art and a gallery founder, himself, said of the first pages:

In Brussels, Alain Van Neyghen of 9th Art Gallery offered two or three plates. […] The great Belgian collector, André Querton bought one. An employee of the Lombard editions got himself another, from “The Mystery of the Great Pyramid,” for 100,000 euros. Six months later, Van Neyghen returned with two boards from “The Yellow ‘M'”. […] It became clear that the doors of the chests were open.

Some pages even showed up at 2dGalleries.com, the European version of ComicArtFans.com, from a collector in Hong Kong. It was taken down within hours, but it was too late. The fans had seen this public display of supposedly locked-up pages.

How could Jacobs’ art, which Jacobs worked so hard to protect, suddenly be leaking like a sieve from a bank vault in Brussels?!?

Suspicion immediately fell on Philippe Biermé. As head of the Jacobs Foundation, he had the easiest access to the art of anyone.

Biermé’s Blames

Biermé found plenty of people to blame for this problem, none of whom was himself. Naturally.

Only a limited number of people had access to the art, but even with that it would be difficult to tell who visited the vault:

… the registration of visits is not a legal obligation for the coffers of a foundation. They have therefore not been able to establish a very precise agenda of archive consultations, nor have they been able to determine with certainty the names of all those who have had access to it…

Biermé said that Jacobs’ house was looted after his death. One of the alleged looters, it should be noted, was Biermé’s half-brother, Guy Imperiali. However, the pages were already in the vault by the time of Jacobs’ death, so they weren’t in the house to be stolen.

Biermé claimed that the inventory wasn’t complete to begin with, and some of it was copies or forgeries. He said the Foundations’ administrators were to blame.

He said some of it was on loan and never returned. One museum curator vehemently denies this one. Early members of the Foundation dispute that, as well.

Biermé blamed a colorist on a recent re-mastering of the books. To be fair, that colorist was, indeed, a professional forger who used his access to high-quality copies of the original art boards for coloring as an opportunity to create new copies of them. He had been convicted of forging Andre Franquin’s pages previously.

Biermé also said that if he had access to the Vault and could pull this all off, why didn’t he steal ALL the pages? (That’s hardly a stirring defense, but give him desperation points for trying.)

One French comic art dealer went so far as to blame Edgar Jacobs, himself, for not setting up his Foundation properly. Without a listing of the art in that vault, anything on the open market couldn’t be proven to belong to him in the first place, so it’s all fair game.

It’s amazing to see a Gaul be so galling. Just wait, fans of Gaul, there IS an Asterix connection coming up in this story!

Starting Over Again, With “The Least Popular Man In Belgium”

Biermé, seeking to “professionalize” the Foundation that he led for 25 years without ever bothering to even do a basic inventory, liquidated it in 2016 and created a new Jacobs Foundation to take its place with a “more professional” board of directors.

He joined forces in this effort with a British gentleman by the name of Nick Rodwell. Rodwell had been a lightning rod of some controversy already. His Tintin Imaginatio company (formerly Moulinsart) controlled the legacy of Tintin, the Belgian comics brand that Jacobs had originally worked on.

Rodwell got there by marrying Herge’s widow, then ruling the property with an iron fist, displaying caring and kindness for the brand by doing things like suing scholarly writers for copyright infringement for reproducing a single Tintin image. (I don’t know the rules on Fair Use in Europe, but that seems heavy-handed to me.)

Then he turned Tintin into a luxury brand, catering to the high end of the market.

Many Tintin fans do not like the man, to put it mildly.

And he reveled in it. “The Least Popular Man in Belgium” is a self-bestowed name.

The Remaining Pages Get a New Owner

Next, the remaining original art boards in the bank vault were donated to the King Baudouin Foundation. The KBF is a charitable organization (named after a previous King of Belgium) set up to fund efforts in and around Belgium. Part of its mission is to maintain Belgian culture.

These art boards fell under that remit.

The KBF is also home to a collection of original art by Francois Schuiten, who just to happens to be a “Blake and Mortimer” fan, one of the most vocal people trying to get answers to this whole scandal, and the artist of “The Last Pharoah,” a “Blake and Mortimer” tribute album from a few years ago.

The KBF’s mission is preservation. They’ve said that they have no interest in tracking down the missing pages:

“Philippe Biermé donated the exceptional collection of the Jacobs Foundation to the King Baudouin Foundation. It is the formal guarantee that this heritage is now sanctuarized. The invaluable value of these works deserved that the King Baudouin Foundation take the risk of accepting this donation, regardless of what may have happened in the past. Our vocation is not to look for what would be missing in the chests.”

That quote is from an article written in 2017. At the time, they estimated that they had 470 pages of art in the vault. Experts say there should be closer to 720 pages in that vault, even after accounting for the few that Jacobs originally listed as missing.

Even worse, an expert looking into the collection noted:

His wise eye also spotted many facsimiles. On some, he noticed “pencil strokes added on top, as if we wanted to make believe that they were real originals“

So, someone stole the page and replaced them with forgeries to throw people off?!? The story is getting crazier.

But you ain’t heard nothing yet.

The Criminal Investigation Begins

By 2018, the Brussels prosecutor’s office opened up an official case to look into what was happening. The Foundation was created with a royal decree. This isn’t a fly-by-night thing with naught but paperwork to its name.

The art the Foundation was created to protect is considered part of Belgium’s cultural legacy.

The Belgian police wanted it back.

And, oh boy, did they find an amazing story, the likes of which American comic book collectors would think was made up. It’s part screwball comedy, part James Bond, part Infuriating Rich Guy Syndrome.

People have been indicted. Luxury cars have been repossessed. Comic art collectors are defying authority.

Now we can follow the trail of how the art emerged from the vaults.

(Allegedly)

Now It Can Be Told: Here’s How The Heist Happened

The following is an account of what happened taken from police records, interviews, eyewitness accounts, actual newspaper investigations, and more.

There have been no prosecutions yet, so I’ll continue to remind you to mentally add “allegedly” to every paragraph in this section. (Though the evidence is pretty damning and makes some of the suspects look like utter morons incapable of pulling off a relatively simple art heist and then hiding their tracks.)

Philippe Biermé is at the center of this, unsurprisingly, but did not act alone. Fencing stolen goods, after all, requires an impressive Rolodex of customers who are willing to pay big bucks for things they know they shouldn’t have.

Enter Eric Leroy, an expert working with the French auction house, Artcurial. He was responsible for the $3 million sale back in 2021 of Herge’s Blue Lotus cover. There was, to put it mildly, some side-eyed suspicion of that piece of art when it went on the block, too, for different reasons. That’s a story for another time, though…

In the tell-all article from Le Monde, we get the story of how the cover to the Blake and Mortimer album, “The Yellow M,” escaped the vault and landed in a collector’s hands.

Biermé, as president of the Jacobs Foundation, went to the vault in 2010 and took the page out with him. Did he stuff it down his shirt? Carry an art portfolio in with him? We don’t know.

Biermé gave the page to Leroy in exchange for four pages of original Asterix art. How do we know that?

Here’s where the story gets fun — BECAUSE BIERMÉ WROTE OUT A RECEIPT TO LEROY! It literally says:

« J’ai échangé la couverture de La Marque jaune à Eric Leroy contre quatre planches originales d’Astérix. Bruxelles, le 10 mai 2010 »

“I exchanged the cover of “The Yellow ‘M'” to Eric Leroy for four original pages of Asterix. Brussels, May 10, 2010″

He stole a page of art, traded it to an art dealer, and made sure to note the deal on paper.

It’s like creating a Certificate of Authenticity for stolen goods. Provenance is everything!

The mind boggles.

I’m not even putting “Allegedly” here because the police have the note. The guilty party, in his own handwriting, confessed!

Leroy then turned around and sold the cover to a man in Switzerland who is the heir to the Bic pen empire. His name is Antoine Bich, and he’s a super collector of Franco-Belgian art. He already had Franquin, Peyo, and Uderzo pages. He needed a Jacobs sample, too, and so he started with the best-known cover Jacobs ever did.

Good news — LEROY WROTE A RECEIPT, TOO!

I wish I still had a podcast still so you could hear the disbelief in my voice as this story gets more and more insane.

Let’s go another step further in this deliciously twisted tale: Leroy’s deal with Bich wasn’t a cash deal. Leroy traded the art for a 1936 BMW 328.

Fair Trade?

Bich walks away with the best-known piece of “Blake and Mortimer” art that would likely be worth well over a million (dollars or Euros) today. Leroy gets a car worth up to 600,000 Euros. And Biermé gets four pages of Asterix art worth about 800,000 Euros.

Biermé definitely won this game. That cover is nice and all, but four pages of Uderzo Asterix art?!? How could you say “no” to that?!?

(I don’t know if it’s known which four pages he got, but there’s always a question of provenance when it comes to Uderzo’s Asterix work. While he did give some pages to friends and sold a page or two for charity, he held on to most of it. His family has been very protective about it whenever a questionable page sees the light of day…)

Belgian investigators checked in on Leroy’s garage during their investigation. He has a fleet of high-end cars. The BMW sat among them.

Curiously, Bic Heir Bich also sent Biermé a payment of 675,000 euros. Belgian authorities haven’t found a receipt for that one, so we can’t be sure what that was for. Additional pages? A split payment between Leroy and Biermé?

Allegedly.

Because this is a tangled web to be unwoven, here’s another fun trade: Leroy once swapped an original Blake and Mortimer page to a different car collector for a 1950s Porsche 550. That car collector then resold the page to a well-known Belgian collector.

The arbitrage game is afoot!

Allegedly.

“Blake and Mortimer”: The Artist’s Edition

One of the ways Leroy and Biermé covered their tracks was by replacing the stolen original art with photocopies of the art. These were four color scans of the original art, to ensure that the replica would look like the original down to the colored pencil annotations Jacobs wrote in the margins. And, just in case, Leroy would sometimes make marks on the copy so you’d see the pencil lines on top of the page and it would look more real.

It’s a very corrupt version of a homemade Artist’s Edition, isn’t it?

Don’t worry — they wrote out receipts for these transactions, too, though they’re written more as promissory notes that he took the art to make a copy and promises he’s returning it. Weirdly, though, the receipts valued the art at 40,000 euros each, far below what their actual value was.

Remember that, because it’ll really annoy Biermé when he realizes how much more he could get for these (allegedly) stolen pages…

Secrets Are Impossible

Finding people to buy these pages when they’re widely known to be off the market is no easy task. Keeping those people quiet is even harder.

Leroy tried to get people to swear they wouldn’t resell the pages they bought for a period of years. He tried to convince people not to show off publicly what they were buying.

But people will be people. There’s no controlling their hubris. People sold pages early, posted images online, showed their collecting friends in person, etc.

Seriously, who in their right mind would think you could keep a secret between that many people?!?

Daniel Maghen Steps In

One of the biggest dealers in Blake and Mortimer pages throughout this scandal has been Daniel Maghen, he of the Galerie Daniel Maghen in Paris. When Biermé saw the prices the originals were getting out in the open market, he felt like he wasn’t getting enough from Leroy. So he diversified his client base and brought in Maghen to get a higher price on the pages in the first place.

If you pay attention to the world of Franco-Belgian comics or even just ComicArtFans.com, you’d know that name. He hosts amazing exhibitions by impressive artists at his gallery, and was also the expert in putting together the Christie’s auctions of bandes dessinees art in the 2010s. (We’ll look at those auctions next.)

Things are a little hazier here. While I’d easily label Biermé as a villain in this article for his (alleged) bad actions, Maghen’s actions are a little more nuanced.

Le Soir ran an interview with him in 2017, where he outlines his case. While the translation of the interview, at least, makes him sound abrupt and obstinate, he does make decent points underneath it all.

Picture it: Maghen has been a high-end bandes dessinees art dealer since 1990. He knows lots of people on both sides of this marketplace. In the world of art dealing, that’s the gig. It gives him access to incredible pages to sell, and well-heeled collectors who want to buy them.

He has his ear to the ground and knows what’s going on in the market. He sees pages from Blake and Mortimer entering the private market. Lots of people — including many of his customers — are likely telling him about their pages and where they got them from.

The first page he resells isn’t even from Biermè. It’s a page that moved previously through another arthouse, and they wouldn’t do anything underhanded and sleazy, would they?!? Surely, that other auction house did due diligence and established the provenance of the piece, right?

Besides that, after Maghen sold that page, he didn’t hear anything from the Jacobs Foundation. If he did something wrong, surely he’d hear from the Jacobs Foundation, right? (Of course not! The head of that organization was the one selling the pages, after all! Allegedly.)

So he was in the clear, right?

It’s not inconceivable at that point to think these sales are legit. They’re coming from the one true source of such pages — in fact, they’re ultimately coming up from the president of the organization, the one who would make such decisions. Biermé put everything in writing. 100 pages had already been sold to private collectors, all with receipts.

Biermé also wrote out receipts for all the art he sold to Maghen, which amounted to nearly 4 million euros’ worth over 125 pages. Those pages sold for roughly twice that price to collectors.

The Christie’s Auction Catalogs

Or, maybe your author here is conflicted. In 2014, the Gallerie Daniel Maghen looked to increase its exposure in America. They sent me the auction books for two or three years, and I wrote columns about them.

The books are super nice. The art was always fascinating to see. I had a lot of fun exploring the original art world of BD and finding new artists and creations along the way.

In 2017, Christie’s hosted a show of some of the original art pages at their gallery in New York City. I attended and wrote about it here.

I took those auction books out this week and looked to see what art from the Jacobs vault might have been in there.

The first book I have is from 2014. It features three lots by Jacobs. The first is a sketch done for a writer at Tintin Journal. That seems legit.

The second two lots are individual panels cut out from pages in “The Yellow ‘M'” as they originally appeared in Tintin Journal.

A Belgian art dealer named Thierry Goossens had sold some Jacobs work in the 90s, but not original pages from “Blake and Mortimer.” In an interview, he believes he knows where those cut-out panels came from. It wasn’t the vault. It was Jacobs’ house, and the alleged thief is a name I’ve already mentioned:

There were sometimes panels cut from the albums of “The Mystery of the Great Pyramid” or “The Yellow ‘M'”, layers of “The Enigma of Atlantis.” Some of these documents came from the boxes stolen by Guy Imperiali, Philippe Biermé’s half-brother, at Jacobs’ death. 

The 2015 auction book is mentioned in the LeMonde article about this investigation. It’s a very heavy 432-page book with 7 Jacobs lots in there. It’s a highlight in the catalog, including a biography of Jacobs and a couple of extra pages of detailed magnifications of the highlighted pages.

There’s a page there from “The Yellow ‘M'” that we now know came from the vaults and was being sold from a Dutch collector who, despite Leroy’s urging to hold onto the page, realized the arbitrage available to him here and sold the page through Christie’s.

It was expected to sell for between 100,000 and 120,000 euros. At the final hammer, it sold for 205,500. This sale is the point at which Biermé realized the value of these pages and sought out Maghen’s help to get a better page rate.

The book also contains a page from “The Secret of the Espadon” and a pencil version of a page from “The Necklace Affair.” That last one is listed as a “study” of the page. It’s a mixture of pencils and ink, with and without lettering. Knowing how meticulous Jacobs was, it doesn’t surprise me to see him work in such detail as a draft.

The auction also included a finished page from “Le Rayon U” (“The U Ray”), the science fiction series Jacobs started in the pages of “Bravo” magazine before creating Blake and Mortimer. Was that also in the bank vault? I’m not sure.

23 additional lots after that featured Blake and Mortimer pages from artists who continued the series long after Jacobs’ death.

Christie’s held two auctions in 2016. The first included a complete page from “The Mystery of the Great Pyramids” as well as a cover from Tintin Journal. The second had a finished “The Yellow ‘M'” page as well as a cover color study, and a pencil version of a page from “S.O.S. Meteors.”

I’m sure there were more in the auctions after that, but those are the books I have to reference. If you know where to look on Christie’s’ website, you can find PDF versions of all the auction books to download.

Maghen left Christie’s to start his own auctions in 2019, by the way, which makes a lot of business sense. He brought most of the pages to the auction, so why should he let Christie’s keep so much of the money?

Getting the Pages Back

The latest news is that Belgian authorities have indicted Biermé, Leroy, and Bich on different charges.

Biermé has a car collection that has now been seized, as has his bank account and his house. It is alleged that he brought in almost 7 million Euros by selling Jacobs’ art. How did he get to a number that large? Biermé said that some covers sold for as much as two million Euros. When did he say that? During a phone that the Belgian police had tapped!

Yes, police still do phone taps! And they work! I had no idea…

Some collectors have returned the pages, either through the Belgian police or directly to the KBF. That includes “dozens of pieces” that Daniel Maghen had on hand but not yet sold. Some pages are “seized in hand,” meaning the authorities are not taking them back yet, but the current owners cannot sell those pages pending their investigation.

One collector — a Belgian man planning (ironically) to open a comics museum — had 30 pages seized by the police before having them returned to him while legal processes grind on.

Some collectors have flat-out refused to ever give their pages back, including the Bic heir in Switzerland. The collector in Hong Kong who got in early, acquired several high end pieces, and then briefly posted them in his online gallery remains quiet. Belgium lacks any kind of legal agreement with Hong Kong to help repatriate that art.

All together, more than 120 pages have been recovered so far, but that would still leave anywhere from 100 – 150 pages and covers (depending on whose estimates you believe) scattered.

This story is far from over. While many have been indicted or charged, there hasn’t been a trial or any official arrests yet. It’s all charges and investigations. Will more pages return to the vault? Will anyone get their money back? Should anyone get their money back?!?

It’s a total mess.

Final Words in Praise of Edgar P. Jacobs

[Jacobs] had developed the perfect scenario: a Foundation for the Conservation of Originals, a publishing house to ensure that his books will continue to be published, a studio to ensure the archiving, restoration and reproduction of his works. The device was exemplary. Each of his plates is a treasure of incredible meticulousness. That’s why he wanted his boards to escape the commercial world. If he had created a Foundation, it was so that it would not happen. He had invested his personal money there. He was a visionary in the defense of BD heritage.

Francois Schuiten

He may have picked the wrong man to shepherd the process, but the idea was sound and, with a few tweaks, can be used (more strictly) by artists for generations to come.

Bibliography

I am deeply indebted to the work of Daniel Couvreur at Le Soir for his investigation of this debacle, and to Le Monde, whose most recent article took us behind the scenes of what the Belgian investigation discovered. Both are behind paywalls, but I happily signed up to each for research.

They are worth reading. As much detail as you just read, I left just just as much out. This story has many layers and so many players. I could easily spin a half dozen other articles out of this one. Comment below if you’d like to learn more about Edgar Jacobs, the controversy over the continuation of the series, other original art disputes, and so much more.

Thanks, also, to ActuaBD.com for pointing to this story as it developed. This article began as a draft nearly 5 years ago thanks to ActuaBD’s linkage.

• “«Blake et Mortimer» victimes du casse du siècle” by Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir, 16 Sept 2017
• “« Blake et Mortimer » : le jackpot des marchands d’art” by Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir, 17 Sept 2017
• “Daniel Maghen: J’ai vendu officiellement avec des factures” by Daniel Couvreur, 18 Sept 2017
• “Menace sur la suite des aventures de Blake et Mortimer” by Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir, 19 Sept 2017
• “Jean Auquier «Il s’agit là d’une évasion caractérisée de patrimoine»” by Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir, 20 Sept 2017
• “Philippe Biermé « Nick Rodwell mettra autant d’énergie à défendre le patrimoine de Jacobs que celui d’Hergé »” by Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir, 16 Sept 2018
• “Des perquisitions pour retrouver les joyaux disparus de Blake et Mortimer” by Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir, 25 Sept 2018
• “Les secrets de la liquidation de la Fondation Jacobs” by Daniel Couvreur, Le Soir, 25 Sept 2018
• “L’affaire Jacobs: La réponse de Daniel Maghen“, ActuaBD.com, 27 Nov 2018
• “Planches Jacobs : Schuiten met en garde les collectionneurs” by CaseMate, 29 May 2019
• “« Blake & Mortimer » : les millions envolés de la Fondation Jacobs” by Jérôme Dupuis, Le Monde, 13 Dec 2023
• Edgar P. Jacobs Wikipedia page
• Edgar P. Jacobs Lambiek.net page
• “Archives François Schuiten“, KBF Heritage Site