Martin Mystère

Martin Mystère is an art historian, archaeologist, anthropologist, adventurer, writer, television producer and collector of unusual objects.

Based in New York City, where he was born Martin Jacques Mystère, he spent much of his early life studying in Italy, where many of his adventures take place.

After the unexplained deaths of his parents in a plane crash (1965), he started to devote his studies to the most enigmatic events and places of human history.

He is assisted in his adventures all around the world by Java, a mute and very strong Neanderthal man he discovered in the hidden City of Lucid Shadows in Mongolia.

Martin Mystère's main opponents include the Men in Black, the controversial art patron Sergej Orloff and Mr. Jinx.

However, their friendship ended after Sergej chose the evil path; his weapon can kill whereas Martin's Murchadna can only make the target faint when blasted.

In the true history of the world (according to the comic Before The Great Flood), two major civilizations emerged on two different continents, named Mu (a pseudo-Asiatic realm ruled by an authoritarian, collectivistic philosophy) and Atlantis (a proto-Aryan regime devoted to individualism and capitalism); despite their ideological differences, both had developed advanced civilizations, comparable to the 'Eighties' ideas of an early 21st century.

As a result of their rivalry, a great war flared up after several proxy conflicts fought over Gondwana, which ultimately saw the employment of nuclear warheads and other final weapons; in the end the losing side triggered a doomsday machine, which plunged the world in a veritable cataclysm, destroying nearly every sign of the antediluvian civilization.

The Atlantis-Mu overarching storyline was very poignant in the early 1980s, when the comic was born, as the antediluvian holocaust represented a warning to mankind (then enveloped in the last throes of the USA-USSR arms race); it gradually lost importance during the nineties.

It re-imagines the comic books' main characters Martin and Diana as 16-year-old step-siblings attending Torrington Academy, a high school in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

A video game based on the animated series, titled Martin Mystery: Monster Invasion, was produced by Ubisoft and released for Nintendo DS in 2008.