The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin and the Picaros - Hergé

The one with Tapioca and the Bananas

Comfortingly enjoying life in Marlinspike Hall, there’s a marked reluctance on the part of Tintin and Captain Haddock to get involved in another mad adventure, and one perhaps senses in this a similar reluctance from Hergé, eight years after publication of the previous Tintin adventure Flight 714 to Sydney, to run his characters through the same old paces once again. Once they all get going however, it’s pretty much business as usual in Tintin and the Picaros, although it would prove to be the last completed Tintin adventure.

Hergé initially has a great deal of fun at the expense of his heroes prevarication. The opera singer Bianca Castafiore has been arrested in San Theodoros while on a tour of South America and charged with spying offenses. Despite pressure from press and television reporters and despite the gallant words of Calculus, Haddock is the last person that is going to the rush of the diva, believing correctly she is quite capable of herself. The pressure mounts however as General Tapioca turns it into a very public challenge offering safe passage if they come to negotiate in person. Normally, Tintin and co would be on the next plane for South America, but this time they are a bit more canny, and have clearly learned lessons from past, aware that the challenge is nothing more than an attempt to lure Tintin, as well as General Tapioca and his Picaros rebels, into a trap. Nevertheless they do make the journey and soon find their suspicions confirmed.

As recompense for putting Tintin and Haddock through the same old routines one more time, Hergé takes some pleasure in bringing back a few old faces, not only reigniting the struggle between Tapioca and General Alcazar from The Broken Ear for control of the Banana Republic, bringing back the associated characters of Doctor Ridgewell and the Arumbaya Indians, but connects their revolutionary activities with the Kûrvi-Tasch regime from the fictional Balkan state of Borduria first seen in King Ottokar's Sceptre and later in The Calculus Affair, bringing in Colonel Sponz. The connection is somewhat forced, but it makes for a great deal of entertainment, Hergé finding a new way to characterise and make fun of villains and dictators and their mad, absurd lust for power after Flight 714.

Entertainment is to be found also in a few familiar places, with Captain Haddock - much to his horror - taking an aversion to whisky (with Calculus snickering in the corner of the frames), and the hilarious cockney-speak foreign-language of the Arumbayas. The artwork is latter-day clear-line Hergé - not as pure as his early and mid-period style, wit rather too many large speech-bubbles, but attractively designed nonetheless in its South American jungle and Carnival settings.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Protos Experiment - Simon Clark

Image
Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley premiering at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition. Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the nove...
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten Present (Blood Crazy: Book 3) - Simon Clark

Image
In the spirit of Nick Aten, the protagonist from the first Blood Crazy book who is back again for the third (and final?) installment of the series and isn't afraid to make a pun, mix a metaphor or state the obvious, Blood Crazy: Aten Present starts out in an explosive fashion as Nick meets up with Jack Ranzic from Book Two: Aten in Absentia . It's an appropriate way for the leads of the first two books to meet up and Nick's forthrightness and down-to-earth qualities are appreciated, but otherwise neither of the two young survivors of the crisis that has overwhelmed the planet are in a better place by the time they unite in the third book in the series. Well, the Creosotes weren't going to disappear overnight, were they? Creosotes is the name that the groups of young survivors have given to adults over age of 19 who three years ago all turned overnight into shambling bloodthirsty monsters. It's a constant struggle for survival and despite some theories about the na...
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia (Blood Crazy: Book 2) - Simon Clark

Image
At the end of Blood Crazy we were left with the grim acceptance that the situation the world had been plunged into was irresolvable. With the adult population having been altered in a way that would drive them to tear their own children apart, everything had changed and the world wasn't ever going back to the way it was. Without giving away any spoilers, while some interesting theories were proposed to explain what had happened to trigger this apocalyptic situation overnight, it still meant that it would be up to small communities of survivors to rebuild society and find a way of defending themselves from the ever present threat of the “Creosotes”. That doesn't mean that there aren't more stories to tell and new revelations to be told, but it has taken almost 30 years for Simon Clark to get a sequel in print. It's a long time for some fans of the original novel (recently republished by Darkness Visible), but by the end of Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia , I'm sure fa...
Read more