some themes in tintin

*btw has anyone read/seen the original "ile noir" (mid-1940s, rewritten/drawn mid-60s)

a. does he carry a secret invisible backpack of beards, moustaches and dressing-up gear? (cf as before "black island", where he disguises himself as a little old white-beareded geezer sat at a window at a second's notice) (and/or the "blue lotus", when he deploys snowy&braces to give himself a military paunch)
b. cf also amusing self-mockery of this idea in the "broken ear", when the two villains after the fetish assume first that a man w.a paunch is tintin, then a geezer w.a white beard (the comedy of tugging hard on a bearded man's beard on the grounds that he is in disguise recurs): in fact tintin is disguised as a more-than-somewhat-dodgy cartoon stereotype of a black steward

Tintin's inability to tie an effective knot is obv Herge's subtle propaganda for his beloved Boy Scouts - if Tintin had joined the Scouts instead of gallivanting around the world from a tender age, risking life and limb without proper training, he would have been fully equipped to tie a panoply of knots for all occasions and much more effective in his adventures.

Black Island was totes redrawn twice no?

"La première version de L'Île noire date de 1938, et c'est en 1943 qu'eut lieu l'édition en couleurs. En 1965, Hergé redessina entièrement l'album à la demande de ses éditeurs anglais qui jugeaient la représentation de la Grande-Bretagne non conforme à la réalité. On peut remarquer un certain déséquilibre entre le dessin moderne et Tintin qui est toujours celui des années trente..."

a. again the black island is the core source: no less than four light aircraft fall from the sky! (actually possibly one of these is just a faked report by the villains when they hide on the BI) (also there's a caravan crash!)
b. possibly in terms of convincing realism this surely represents the state of flight in the mid-30s better than in the mid-60s?

a. explorers on the moon is shocking for having TWO ACTUAL REAL deaths; broken ear actually has three, all treated somewhat slapsticky (a bomber who blows himself up; the two knifethrower-villains who are chasin after the fetish through-out the book, who are ushered to hell by comical little devils

is that it? the deaths in explorers haunted me as a kid, frank wolfe's anyway ("by some miracle i will escape too"); i only just read broken ear for the first time at xmas, and was a little shocked when the comical bomber - who has tried many times - did actually finally kill himself (elsewhere - eg in the red sea sharks - actual real wars lead only to non-fatal slapstick even among otherwise faceless extras)

In "Tintin in the Congo" Tintin is rather cruel towards animals: he shoots a chimpanzee just to use its skin as a disguise, and he also blows up a rhino by drilling a hole into its hide and placing a stick of dynamite there. In "Tintin in Tibet" all the people in the plane crash except Chang die obviously, but this happens off-page. Also, the final fate of Rastapopoulos and his cronies is left unclear in "Flight 714", since it isn't shown what happens to them after they're abducted.

in prisoners of the sun, the aztec bandits who waylay tintin&haddock become human snowballs and tumble into a ravine (but rastapopoulos survived a similar fall in cigars of the pharaoh, so maybe they all just got bumps on their heads w.little stars and birdies circling)

isn't one of the two similar-looking japanese villains in the blue lotus executed, or something? (plus also: are they twins? i have only ever read this one in french, and don't entirely follow it)

in fact 6. twins who aren't exactly quite twins?
(thomsons/alembicks/bird brothers?

(i mean, are the thomsons even BROTHERS? their surname is difft!!)

what is his ADDRESS? (possibly more than one answer) (also very likely difft between french/english/whatever, but gimme one to justify yr love)

I'm pretty sure the address of Tintin's old flat is mentioned in one of the stories, but I can't remember what it is.

Hmm, I think in this case it was implied the bandits die, Tintin of sixties was clearly more realistic than Tintin of the thirties.

what nationality is capt.haddock in the original? cz his ancestor surely way more resembles an english (or possibly dutch) privateer than whatever the belgian equiv.wd have been

ok as you were: "The city of Port Royal at Jamaica, the base of Belgian pirates, was regarded as "worst town of the world""

possibly he moved in w.the captain later (once CH got past his rather unfanciable monocle-sporting stage)

i also plan to take issue w.tuomas's "gets more realistic" argt: i can see what is meant but i think it is more complex than that

however i have a morning's actual real work to get on with first :(

(if haddock is english then is marlinspike in england?) (i know this question is all bitched up since english translation editions imply w/o ever plainly stating that tintin is english and that the action is taking place in the uk)

in 7CB, when they are waiting for the magician and bianca castafiore sings, TT reminds CH that they met her in the Red Sea - but surely this was years after? (oddly enough they appear to be ordered chronologically on the backs of the UK issues currently)

were they published - rewrites not counted - in the order they "happened"?

He is called Archibald Haddock in the original Belgian version, as well as in the Finnish translation, but I don't know about other editions.

i also plan to take issue w.tuomas's "gets more realistic" argt: i can see what is meant but i think it is more complex than that

Well, obviously it doesn't get altogether more realistic, but I think it gets more realistic as related to death. In the later albums people don't escape deadly situations in funny ways like they used to in the earlier stories.

(if haddock is english then is marlinspike in england?) (i know this question is all bitched up since english translation editions imply w/o ever plainly stating that tintin is english and that the action is taking place in the uk)

That's a good question! Haddock seems to be English in the original stories as well (why else name him Haddock?), but Moulinsart (Marlinspike), his family castle, seems to be located in Belgium; even the name of the castle comes from the name of an actual Belgian small town, Sarmoulin. Maybe Hergé just wasn't thinking about all this too deeply?

in 7CB, when they are waiting for the magician and bianca castafiore sings, TT reminds CH that they met her in the Red Sea - but surely this was years after? (oddly enough they appear to be ordered chronologically on the backs of the UK issues currently)

In Belgium The Red Sea Adventure was published years after Seven Chrystal Balls (and the internal chronology of the Tintin stories runs exactly in the order they were published, so the Red Sea Adventure takes place later), but if the order was reverse in the UK, maybe the translator didn't want to confuse the kids who had just read an story where the Captain and Tintin met Castafiore. In the Finnish translation (and no doubt in the original) Tintin tells Haddock that he has met Castafiore (during the Ottokar adventure), but the Captain doesn't know her.

anyway: 8. tintin and the nature of realism

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets [never read it]
(Tintin au Congo): [never read it]
Tintin in America: [never read it]
Cigars of the Pharaoh: highly implausible in a standard comic-book comedy thriller type way but not "unrealistic" i don't think (problems: raijaijah juice/tintin "talks" to an elephant/tintin gets from egypt to india a bit quick)
The Blue Lotus: background politics very realistic (except raijaijah juice)
The Broken Ear: realistic in a light opera/borges fable type way
The Black Island: realistic (problems: the thomsons airshow/wd a gorilla threive on a remote scottish island?)
King Ottokar's Sceptre: realistic (tintin falls from a plane into a haystack)
The Crab with the Golden Claws: realistic
The Shooting Star: impossible science on the star fragment itself, plus it wd have caused much more damage when it landed if it's big enough to stick out of the ocean surely; other than this realistic
The Secret of the Unicorn: implausible in a treasure-island type way but realistic
Red Rackham's Treasure: ditto (calculus's ashakr sub = based on an actual real machine)
The Seven Crystal Balls: even if ball lightning exists - which it may - it doesn't behave the way it's shown to on the cover; plus also a MYSTICAL AZTEC PROPHECY comes true!!
Prisoners of the Sun: Turns out the liquid in the crystal balls themselves gives the Aztecs power over people thousands of miles away, provided they have made little models of them to torment!! (So Tintin may amaze the Aztec High Priests by ordering the sun around, but cold demystified rationalism doesn't exactly have the last word)
Land of Black Gold: ahem an untraceable pill to make petrol more explosive plus if you take it internally it causes yr hair to grow at mad pace and yr skin and hair colour to change rapidly: otherwise realistic
Destination Moon: realistic i guess
Explorers on the Moon: but actually i am a bit torn here - yes man got to the moon (only ten-plus years later), so all this was possible give or take, ands yes it is v.carefully researched, but still, it is a fantasy of the unknown at the time hergé wrote it
The Red Sea Sharks: realistic
The Calculus Affair: realistic
Tintin in Tibet: the migou? OK this is borderline "science" if you cross yr fingers (there's nothing impossible abt the existience of such a creature), BUT tintin's mystical connection w.chang? And the far-seeing monk who floats up into the air?
The Castafiore Emerald: realistic
Flight 714: hullo aliens and telepathy!!!
Tintin and the Picaros: realistic

As i said, i can see the point tuomas is making: there's an increasing attention to technical-drawing precision down the series, which functions as a kind of ahem mise-en-scene realismus-miasma in front of which to play out all kinds of fantasy shenanigans (like eco's famous essay on the james bond books - fleming is very precise about the marmalade and the drinks and the make of gun and the feel of place, in order to allow him to be super-fantastical in plot terms)

BUT i think there's if anything an increase in weird science...

Yes.

About realism: as I said, I was talking about increasing realism towards death and violence. The earlier albums (especially the first) are full of near-death escapes which, while not totally unrealistic, are highly implausible. There's also plenty comics-style funny scenes where a bomb explodes too early, yet the people near the bomb only get black faces. Stuff like this, or like Tintin falling from a plane into a haystack and surviving, never happen in the later adventures.

ii. at start of CwGC, a japanese detective is murdered as he tries to contact tintin

He is shot, yes, but he survives and is hospitalized. Tintin meets him at the end of the story. The Syldavian agent in King Ottokar's Sceptre dies, however.

and actually i think the first three possibly skew it back the other way

surely there are bomb-explodes-w/o-death scenes in calculus affair (when they're in the tank just at the border) and red sea (when the aircraft by mistake bomb their own troops/plus also the shark swallowing the mine possibly)?

HOWEVER i am still dubious abt what we're meant to think of the snowball deaths (or not) in PoS: it's true that TT and CH can't actually be blamed for them if they are deaths, but if the aztec bandidos DO die, it wd surely kinda dilute the "TT as a friend of our people" meme which later works for him. I mean, OK, they wd be set free (cz they can control the sun), but wd they be loaded down w.treasure?

but yes, it mainly works as dark slapstick if yr used to the idea that bombs don't kill ppl in tintin, they just give them black faces

It's been ages since I read Prisoners of the Sun, but was it ever implied that the bandidos were Incas (not Aztecs, the story doesn't take place in Mexico)? Maybe they were just some other bad guys?

will have to reread to be honest: i took it to be that true-born incas run a kind of nation w/i a nation (ie the police captain who won't help them), and hadn't the bandidos kidnapped the little (non-inca?) indian kid? ie they are part of the conspiracy?

haha Maybe Hergé just wasn't thinking about all this too deeply? Noooooooo don't say that!! Everything collapses if you start down that path!!

Nestor the butler seemsw v."English" (tho i know nothin abt french or belgian retainers, style-wise). I don't recall any channel-crossing in Secret of the Unicorn though. Are the Bird brothers english?

(Oh: there's a death in SotU also, isn't there!!) (A particularly gratuitous one, in fact...)

No, I think it is quite clear that Secret of the Unicorn takes place in Belgium, and hence Moulinsart/Marlinspike is located there as well. Maybe Haddock's forefather just decided, for some reason, to live in Belgium and required that there should always be an English butler in his castle... ;)

(Oh: there's a death in SotU also, isn't there!!) (A particularly gratuitous one, in fact...)

Can't remember, you'll have to remind me on that.

certainly one of the brothers is notably more murderous than the other

in english: tintin lives at 26 Labrador Road (address mentioned in 7CB and T in Tibet: Chang's letters is addressed to Labrador Rd, the forwarded to Marlinspike, then to wherever they are holidaying together)

of course I forgot what Marlinspike actually LOOKS like: there is no country house in the whole of the British Isles w.that high raked gable style - it is certainly in Belgium (or France).

v.long-running weird science gag: calculus's pendulum

the name archibald is originally german not british (it means "very brave")

Anyway, sorry to be a spoilsport, but this seems to prove that Tintin isn't English.

Also, I was told once by a French BD fan, that T and T are in fact "typical Belgian stereotpyes", and not as everyone thinks "typical Englishmen" -- any Belgians out there agree/or not?

(except actually i think the english translaters seem sometimes to be hoping that you do mistakenly assume he is English, for reasons that baffle grown-up mark s)

my only reasons for wondering about haddock and marlinspike, respectively, were that "sir frances haddock" somehow looked more of an english privateer (bcz i didn't know that belgium wz notorious for pirates in the 18th century); and that nestor somehow looked more of an english butler, dress-wise

FIW, The Avengers TV series was known in France as Chapeau Melon & Bottes de Cuir (Bowler Hat and Leather Boots).

the deaths in explorers haunted me as a kid, frank wolfe's anyway ("by some miracle i will escape too")

i still get anxiety shakes when i think about explorers on the moon, let along pick it up and read it

According to Hergé, he inserted the "perhaps by some miracle I shall esacape too" line on the orders of Tintin magazine. Suicide was still taboo in Catholic Belgium, even if heroic. Hergé later regretted adding this cop out, saying something along the lines of "Wolff was condemned and he knew it".

Yeah, I read that in Harry Thompson's excellent Herge biog.

That's where I got it from too, I think- but the original source is probably Entretiens avec Herge, for which an English translation is long overdue.

another theme in tintin--something gets broken, then fixed, then immediately broken again. happens to the thom(p)son twins all the time

Haddock falls over/walks into something.