Blistering Barnacles! A Quick Look at Tintin

When I was a little kid, my dad had a stack of little comic books with the name Tintin on them. Every once in a while, I would find that stack and read one or two of them. They are fun, colorful adventure stories, each generally taking place in some unfamiliar country.

Later on, I bought a big collection of them, which included twenty-two completed comics and one that Herge wasn't able to finish before he passed away.

Back then, I had no notion of order, so I just read whatever book caught my fancy. Strongest in my memory are "The Shooting Star," "Tintin and the Picaros," and "The Castafiore Emerald."

Now that I have the collection, I thought it would be fun to read through them all from start to finish and talk about them in depth, but as I read through them I started to realize that, while they are fun stories, they are a bit repetitive and fairly simply-plotted. So, I pulled back a little and decided to give a few high points.

First off, they are great to look at. Herge's full color, clear line style is very nice. The first book is very rough, but Herge gets in the groove by the third or fourth one. Actually, some of the mechanical designs are quite detailed.

While the plots are a bit simple and repetitive, they are fun, and filled with goofy characters. Tintin is the PoV character and straight man, and he's surrounded by a variety of silliness, from the often-drunken, frequently-cursing Haddock, to the always-confused Thomson and Thompson, to the deaf and frustrating Calculus, to the overbearing singer Castafiore, and more. They add a lot of hilarity to the stories.

The plots frequently revolve around some object or person on the run, and typically the action follows a pattern of moving, something going wrong on the move, trying to solve the problem or find a new mode of transport, repeat. There is plenty of intrigue, to the point that some of the early stories has every single official corrupt and on the bad guy's payroll. Later stories get a bit more complex, often relying on characters misunderstanding each other, and culminating in the hilarious symphony of errors that is "The Castafiore Emerald."

If you're ever getting on a plane or a boat and see Tintin, Get off. Now.

I've got a bit more historical background in the video above, so give that a watch for a brief biography of Herge and a few more details on some of the stories.

Grab a copy of the collection here:
https://a.co/d/2iLydIE