The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin in America - Hergé

The one where Tintin is lynched

There's not really a whole lot to recommend about one of Tintin's earliest adventures. In terms of plotting, characterisation and artwork, Tintin in America - created in 1931 and completely redrawn for collected colour publication in 1945 - is rather primitive compared to the sophisticated later adventures, the story suffering from no clear single storyline other than Tintin chasing one particular criminal across America. The book reflects rather its serialised origins where Tintin and Snowy are put through sequences borrowed from every genre of Hollywood filmmaking, from gangster films to Westerns.

Tintin's reputation as a fearless reporter however is so well known that news of his arrival in America strikes fear into the hearts of Al Capone and his gangsters, who immediately try to capture and dispose of him the moment he arrives in Chicago. Escaping their clutches, Tintin however soon breaks up their organised crime activities, but has to chase one big-time gangster, Bobby Smiles across half the continent and through Red Indian lands.

There's at least no shortage of incident in Tintin in America, a mixture of crime-fighting, mishaps and adventuring through exotic landscapes that would become a familiar formula in later Tintin books. It gives Hergé the chance to indulge in classic US movie imagery and escapades, with gangsters and Indians, lynch mobs and runaway trains, with Tintin in cowboy gear sitting at a campfire or dressed as a bellboy. Even if all those incidents and imagery are well-worn clichés from Hollywood films of the period, and the artwork isn’t quite as refined as it would later become, there is at least some flair in how those sequences are storyboarded, with some terrific larger splash frames.

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