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Martin Jacques MystĖre, the Detective of the Impossible, was created by Alfredo Castelli and is published in Italy by Sergio Bonelli Editore. The series are aimed at an audience ranging from thirteen to twenty five years of age, with a decidedly overwhelming percentage of older readers. Martin MystĖre readers are avid consumers of books, newspapers, and magazines; the Martin MystĖre series published by Sergio Bonelli Editore sell around 1,500,000 copies annually.

Martin MystĖre is often treated as a real person by the Italian press, with such titles as "Martin MystĖre investigates in Rome" or "Martin MystĖre seen in Bari" occasionally gracing the pages of local newspapers. Italian fans used to pay a visit to his home at 3, Washington Mews, NY, rather to the discontentment of the actual resident.

Martin MystĖre's investigations involve various narrative genres, the stories are rarely limited to the stereotypical hero-saves-damsel-in-distress-and-saves-the-world-while-at-it plot template usually favored by many other comic books. The most common literary genres explored by Martin MystĖre's adventures are:

  • Exotic adventure (journeys, explorations)
  • Science fiction
  • Thriller
  • Horror and gothic (vampires, werewolves, monsters)
  • Magic and esoterism (secret sects, enchanted objects, mysterious rituals)

Therefore, a Martin MystĖre fandom comes complete with a crash course in literary genres as a free bonus.

The stories have further didactic value in that they take place in rigorously authentic settings. Special care is taken with the informative and documentary side of the series; many didactic elements are integrated in the narration without disrupting the dynamic rhetoric so that, through the reading of a MystĖre adventure, the reader is introduced to a remarkable amount of information on such subjects as:

  • History
  • Geography
  • Archeology and paleontology
  • Anthropology and ethnography (folklore, habits and customs)
  • Technology (with particular emphasis on computer science)
  • The arts (music, painting, sculpture, architecture)
  • Linguistics (foreign languages and alphabets, secret codes)
  • Mythology, the history of religions, the history of magic
  • Tourism (transportation, local habits, food and cooking)

An ecological and pacificist background is always present in the stories, although it is never expressed in a pedantic way. News items constitute a regular part of the stories to further prove that they take place in our real world. It must be noted, however, that Martin Jacques MystĖre's universe differs from ours in certain key respects.

Similarly, MystĖre differs from the stereotypical comic book hero.