After completing all 23 of the volumes relating the exploits of Tintin, reporter for Le Petit Vingtieme, I feel like I should have something witty or profound to offer up to the Readers of this Space who surely do not turn here for banal evaluations offering up mundane comments lacking a literary or intellectual flair, and yet, I find myself oddly suffering from a lack of said insights worthy of relating, and thus I am furiously trying to mask the lack of content in this post with a surfeit of subclauses, hopefully dispelling any hope the Reader might have had that this might be one of those substantive blog posts about which one has heard and perhaps even seen in other domiciles in the large village of blogspot.com. All of which raises a deeply interesting question: Why?
Herge’s Tintin is a landmark in comic history. He spent over five decades working on these books—which is, when you think about it, a very long time to be writing about the exploits of a young reporter from Belgium. The art of the books is interesting—the pictures are crisp and remarkably detailed for small panels. The plots are fun, pitting Tintin and friends against a host of evil ne’er-do-wells. The body of work as a whole has attracted a decent amount of critical attention, even resulting in the title of Tintinology. (I do not believe there is a comparable Batmanology, for example.) And, yet, while I enjoyed reading through Tintin, while I suspect there might be some hidden depths to these books, I had a hard time thinking of them as rising above good genre fiction. Not as good as Isaac Asimov at his best, but much better than Asimov at his worst (yes, that's a really wide range (and, yes, I am reading Asimov right now, so that is why he popped so readily to mind (and, no, I won’t tell you now, you will just have to wait until I finish and then Write up a Review))).
All Tintin books are not created equal, however. There is a huge break in quality between King Ottoman’s Spectre and its immediate follower, The Crab with the Golden Claws. In other words, the books get vastly better when Captain Haddock shows up. Then there is another ratchet upward when Professor Calculus comes along in Red Rackham’s Treasure. The books get better in just about every way as the series goes on; the characters get better, the plots are more interesting, and the art is more refined. This is definitely not a series to be read in order—anyone starting with Tintin and the Soviets or Tintin in America is unlikely to read any more. (There is a bit of a headache though in the fact that there are several stories spanning two books, so starting with volume 2 of one of the two-book series will probably be a bit bewildering—so don’t read Red Rackham’s Treasure, Prisoners of the Sun, or Explorers on the Moon until you have read the immediate preceding book.)
Another oddity of Tintin is that Tintin in the Congo has not been released in the paperback format in which you can get the rest of the series. This was the second Tintin book—I didn’t track down a copy because the early books were not all that good, so I assume this one is pretty sloppy too. But, the book wasn’t dropped from the recent publication run because of a failure of literary merit, but rather because the way the Africans were portrayed is apparently exactly how one would expect a European writing in 1930 would portray Africans. Now the odd thing is that racial stereotypes are prevalent in all the rest of the Tintin books too—and yet they are all reprinted. I suppose unless I read Tintin in the Congo, I’ll never be able to tell how the racial stereotypes in it could conceivably be of an order of magnitude greater than those in, for example, The Blue Lotus.
So, where does this leave Tintin? Nice reading if a) you like comics, b) you are interested in the history of comics, c) you like good, stories with interesting art, d) you want to read some comic books that don’t have superheroes in them, or e) you happen upon one and pick it up for a pleasurable way to pass an evening. I’m glad I read them all, and I will certainly revisit Tintin from time to time over the coming years—he’s not a bad companion for an evening after a long day at work.
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