The Adventures of Tintin by Herge.

I met Tintin through a cartoon show of the nineties that was broadcast on TV, and where it didn’t show many episodes. A story of searching for a pirate’s treasure was likeable back then. It will far later in the future that I found out that adventures of Belgian journalist are based on comics created by Georges Prosper Remi, who used his initial backwards and published his works under the name Herge. He scripted twenty-four stories about Tintin, which albums were released from 1930 to 1986.

In the issues from the thirties, Herge is a raw and inexperienced author. A protagonist in the first, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930), isn’t surprised to an exploded train, though he was supposed to hear a blast if a bomb activated in a parallel coupe. Tintin remains in a misunderstanding and thinks that must leave with his dog Snowy at this station. There comes a German policeman who arrests him, a person who looks as a victim instead of a criminal. A lead hero is only getting accused in a police station in that he exploded the train and made hundreds of its passengers to disappear and just thrown into a prison. Then he simply escapes when a guard opens a cell, and Tintin beats a law enforcer till making him consciousness behind the scenes. I hadn’t great hopes to that writing. Herge rejected that comic book too.

Nevertheless, Tintin in the Congo (1931) didn’t improve and it was steeped in surrealism, which would be reasonable if it was happening akin to Tom & Jerry. Why didn’t Tintin who had a mosquito net and didn’t use it for Snowy, who was beaten by these insects? Why did world rival reporters want to bribe Tintin though he was going on a usual hunt? Extreme situations in which the Belgian reporter gets trapped come from nowhere: he initially has one cartridge in his gun and he was almost killed if not monkeys wouldn’t start to throw coconuts, copying Tintin’s that committed before act. Accident after accident, and the next one can already follow after the end of the previous. Herge didn’t know about animals’ behavior, as Tintin kills fifteen antelopes at one spot whereas he always believed that he was shooting at the same one. Some monkey kidnaps Snowy, and Tintin’s solution was in slaying of other primate to use this animal’s skin as a costume despite its inside isn’t empty in actuality. He meets with a first monkey and exchanges his hat for Snowy, then he takes a headdress from a top of that creature and doesn’t want to give a gun that a beast asks for. That ends in grabbing each other, and Tintin knockouts his adversary. Some pages after that, the protagonist drives a car that gets stuck on rails, but a coming train derails and lies on the ground after colliding with an automobile, which stays on the same position and undamaged. I couldn’t accept that reading. I moved on many pages forward for see that Snowy compresses a lion’s tail with his teeth, which piece tears away when he hits the ground on a way of a beast’s running. The lion meets with villagers of the Congo whom he could attack, but the next picture shows he is captured on a leash.

Herge never made a study of a subject or simple things. The first image of Tintin in America (1932) is that a policeman shows a salute to a gangster with a mask who just robbed a bank and walks while carrying a gun and banknotes. Herge believed, as he showed in in The Broken Ear, (1937), that a museum’s guard does cleaning after working hours of a place, taking an ancient showpiece and using a dust sweeper.

The author didn’t know how to trap and save heroes from danger situations. A Belgian journalist and Snowy are kidnapped in their American adventure by closure of iron shutters in a car, but a luck of an exploded tire and having a saw, which is used for making an exit on a vehicle’s roof saves him, though a criminal was near the automobile and he was supposed to hear and see, but it is already amazing that Tintin’s saw, intended for wood, could cut through a metal.

No inventiveness was in another fast-quitted reading Cigars of the Pharaoh (1934) where Tintin is arrested on a ship and put into a room with a window. He and Snowy jump out from a second floor into a staying boat without moving that wooden vessel and its paddler.

Herge takes a little of maturity in the following issues but doesn’t make any riddance from all his bad. I made a glance into the nineties’ show, seeing it almost follows the original source. My liking it was a long time ago when I had a different look. I opened The Secret of the Unicorn (1943), the one that adaptation I watched. Tintin still lives in coincidences. He walks in a flea market and discovers an attracting ship model, which he buys, but in that exact moment, two men come in difference of seconds and ardently want to acquire this thing. There will reveal this item contains a hidden message. It will be accidental luck that Snowy will jump, his movement will break a mast, and a piece of parchment will fall from there and roll under furniture.

Comics couldn’t be successful because Herge wasn’t a true artist. Original the first to the tenth volumes were black-and-white and contained elements, which depicted installed standards of those times, as Tintin in his Congolese adventure teaches local kids a geography lesson by telling about their home country “Belgium”. Herge in doing a color revision in 1946, which was executing a request of his publishing house Casterman, had change of format from 110 to 66 pages and removal of colonialism references. Scandinavian publishers in 1975 asked the comic writer to take away a scene in which Tintin drills a hole into a rhinoceros and shoves a dynamite in there. Herge accepted and kept that animal alive. There he suddenly claimed about having a regret with all that hunting, which was soon after release of the initial black-and-white issue. An asking comes to here: “Why he didn’t that in 1946?” For commercial purpose, a color remaking of Tintin in America in 1945, the Belgian comic writer removed a social exclamation that US government treats Indians terrible and a scene with two Han hoodlums who want to eat Snowy while he added a scar face in depiction to Al Capone because an influence of a Chicago mafia boss became low to that time; and therefore a fear about a potential reprisal has gone. Herge listened and executed changes for American publishers, as there were requests on substituting Negro characters with other races.

I would desire to sympathize to the comic books because the heroes (Snowy, captain Haddock and, foremost, Thomson and Thompson) and adventure conceptions were attracting.