Following the racism of Tintin in the Congo, there’s a more developed social conscience here. Hergé still hadn’t hit his stride by the third Tintin book – it abandons any form of a plot for a series of improbable escapes. Some of the unfinished sketches at the end present surprising possibilities – a hashish smoking, modern art-connoisseur Captain Haddock and the unlikely return of arch-nemesis Rastapopoulos. The draft sketches have been released as an album, but the plot-line is left unfinished. But it’s disorienting to see our hero demeaning a “rotten little train” and blowing up a peacefully grazing rhinoceros with dynamite.Īlph-Art was incomplete at the time of Hergé’s death, but it’s a radical departure from his other work. It’s a step forward from Land of the Soviets in terms of storytelling and it’s been available in colour for longer. Even more troubling is that, compared to Hergé’s later, carefully researched works, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is effectively an anti-Marxism pamphlet in the form of a comic book.Ĭongo is another formative work from Hergé – again, it was developed as propaganda, extolling the benefits of Belgian colonialism. Noone reads Tintin for realism, but the incident when Tintin carves two aeroplane propellers from a tree, using only a penknife, pushes credibility. The illustrations are rudimentary and it wasn’t issued in colour until 2017, but it’s the flimsy plotline that’s more of an issue. Hergé’s first Tintin story is primitive compared to his later work. My favourites largely come from the 1940s and 1950s the series had matured and Hergé had developed important support characters like Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus. Here are my rankings for the 24 Tintin adventures. There’s also at least one link between the Tintin series and popular music – 1980s synth-pop band the Thompson Twins took their name from the series’ accident-prone pair of detectives. This is usually a music blog but, given the name “Aphoristic Album Reviews”, comic book albums qualify. The boy reporter never filed a story but enjoyed plenty of action, thwarting forgers and scaling the Himalayas.

The series captures 20th-century history, providing a lens on events like the Cold War and the 1931 Manchurian Incident. During that time, Tintin evolved the first volume, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, is clumsy anti-communist propaganda, while later volumes are better researched and less xenophobic. The final, unfinished Tintin book, Tintin and Alph-Art, appeared in 1986, three years after Hergé’s death. Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, published the first Tintin adventure in the Catholic magazine Le Vingtième Siècle in 1929.

Rin tin tin book review