Book Review: Tintin: King Ottokar's Sceptre by Herge

Tintin: King Ottokar's Sceptre by Herge

Tintin takes Snowy for a walk in the park and discovers a briefcase. Looking inside for whose it is, he discovers the owner, Professor Alembick, lives nearby. Alembick is a sigillography expert. He collects and studies seals, like those used in medieval times to seal important documents. He has found a rare seal of Ottokar IV, a king of Syldavia. Alembick will travel there and do research at the national archives. Something odd is afoot--when Tintin leaves, someone secretly takes his picture. Tintin follows the man to a Syldavian restaurant where more suspicious events happen. A mysterious conspiracy revolves around Alembick. Tintin decides to travel with him to Syldavia. At the national archive, King Ottokar's Sceptre, symbol of the Syldavian king's authority, is stolen. It's up to Tintin (with bumbling help from Thomson and Thompson) to aid current King Muskar XII in recovering the sceptre.

This adventure is fun and well plotted. The action proceeds through several localities and gives Herge a chance to draw bigger, more detailed towns, cities, and castles. The back of the book has about twenty pages of supplemental material on Herge's life and inspirations for the story (including some fascinating guess work on where Syldavia is in Europe). The editor includes photographs from Herge's collection that match drawings in this book. The book is a fun adventure and is educational!

Book Review: The Black Island by Herge

The Black Island by Herge

An unregistered plane landing nearby arouses Tintin's curiosity, but the pilot and passenger want no witnesses so they shoot him. Tintin recovers quickly and sets of in pursuit. Tintin is off on another adventure, eventually winding up on the eponymous fictional Scottish isle. The story moves from set piece to set piece almost too quickly--Tintin gets injured or put in jeopardy several times and recovers so quickly that he doesn't lose the trail of the bad guys. Even for a Tintin story, the pacing seems to be a bit of a stretch. Otherwise it's an enjoyable adventure and seeing him in Scottish clothing is fun.

Book Review: The Adventures of Tintin Vol. 1 by Herge

The Adventures of Tintin Vol. 1 by Herge

As you might guess from the title, The Adventures of Tintin Volume 1 includes the very first adventures of the young reporter as they appeared in Le XXe Siecle, a Catholic Belgian magazine published in the 1920s and 1930s.

The first adventure has Tintin going to the Soviet Union to report on conditions there. Several agents try to stop him, providing some action and jokes. When he makes it to the USSR, he discovers a lot of duplicity and abuse by the government. Soviet officials show off a factory that's operating at 100% efficiency, smokestacks smoking and metal clanging inside. Tintin sneaks in and finds two guys burning hay and banging metal sheets together. On a bread line, the distributor only gives loaves to people who enthusiastically admit they are communists. Other people are literally kicked to the curb empty-handed. Tintin goes in and out of jail, eventually returning to the West and delivering his report. The book delivers a surprisingly grim view of the USSR, though mostly justified if we remember the Ukrainian Famine, among other abuses. Even so, the grimness is lightened by the action and the absurdly competent Tintin, who can beat pretty much anybody in hand-to-hand combat and can rebuild or repair planes, trains, and automobiles. He's also a master of disguise. As a kids' hero, that makes him pretty awesome.

The second adventure has Tintin going to the Belgian Congo. The story begins with a caveat:

In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Herge reflects the colonial attitudes of the time. He himself admitted that he depicted his Africans according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period. The same may be said of his treatment of big-game hunting and his attitude towards animals. [p. 145]

Tintin and Snowy start out for the Congo on a ship, where they have comic run-ins with a parrot and a stowaway. The stowaway becomes an ongoing villain for the story, sometimes tying Tintin up to feed him to the crocodiles or send him down the river. The adventures are another mixed bag of comedy, action, and improbable feats by Tintin. The fun is a little marred by the black-face, primitive locals, but the book is still fun enough for a kids' comic book.

Overall, they are a nice diversion from my regular reading.

Tintin: Red Rackham's Treasure

Here's a quick review I just did on Goodreads.com. The Tintin movie has already come out here in England but I don't think we'll get to see it before DVD. Enjoy!

Red Rackham's Treasure by Hergé
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second or third Tintin book I've read, all completely out of order. That really isn't so important since most of the adventures are self-contained stories. Apparently, this one is a direct continuation of "The Secret of the Unicorn," and indeed our heroes attempt to find Red Rackham's Treasure on the sunken vessel "The Unicorn." The story is fast-paced and entertaining, though Tintin is the least interesting character. Captain Haddock (friend of Tintin and descendant of the captain who sank the Unicorn) and Professor Calculus (a bumbling scientist based on real-life scientist Auguste Piccard) exhibit a lot of the humor and pathos found in the story. It's an exciting tale and elements of it are used in the Spielberg film version that is coming out this Christmas season.

The edition I have (published by Little, Brown, and Company in May 2011) has a lot of interesting material in the back about the author's sources for the story and the images he uses. He kept pictures and articles from newspapers, magazines, etc., and his archive had over 20,000 items by the time he died! The information makes the reader appreciate even more the quality of workmanship put into this comic.

View all my reviews on Goodreads.com