The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn - Hergé

The one that Spielberg is making into a film

The Secret of the Unicorn marks the beginning of Tintin's adventures in their prime and Hergé at the top of his craft, and as such, it seems like as good a place as any to start Steven Spielberg's long cherished ambition to bring the young investigator to the screen. There are certainly strong and thrilling Tintin adventures prior to this - Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Broken Ear and King Ottokar's Sceptre - but they are patchy and episodic, only really looking their best when the artwork was redrawn years later by Hergé studios for the new 62-page album format. The purest Tintin adventures, and the best, are the mid-period double-length features, The Secret of the Unicorn & Red Rackham's Treasure, The Seven Crystal Balls & Prisoners of the Sun and Destination Moon & Explorers on the Moon.

Like the other double-length adventures, The Secret of the Unicorn would appear to have the disadvantage of being the set-up album, but Hergé uses the extra length afforded by the increased page-count to give the story more room to breathe, achieving a good mix of action and intrigue, interweaving several complementary plotlines in a sophisticated manner, while playing with the usual slapstick and humour. The Secret of the Unicorn is a wonderfully balanced Tintin adventure in this respect, with a good traditional buried treasure storyline.

It starts off typically enough with a coincidental find that Snowy is observant enough to remark has all the hallmarks of leading to a new adventure. Tintin buys a model of an ancient sailing ship at a market as a present for Captain Haddock, just in front of two other customers who are also eager to buy it. It turns out that the model is actually a replica of the Unicorn, the ship sailed by the Captain's ancestor Sir Francis Haddock, sunk in 1676 after an encounter with the pirate Red Rackham, taking the pirate's treasure with her to Davy Jones' locker. Haddock doesn't receive his gift however, as the model is stolen from Tintin's apartment, but not before Tintin has discovered a parchment hidden inside the main mast, one of three parchments hidden in other replica models, together pointing to the location of the sunken Unicorn and Red Rackham's treasure.

The historic sea-faring and piracy exploits out of the way, The Secret of the Unicorn settles down to the familiar Tintin adventure and mystery. The artwork isn't quite as polished here as in later Hergé studio work, but it's impressive in its openness, simplicity and expressiveness. It's uncommon for there to be any back history provided on the characters in Tintin books, so the adventures of Captain Haddock's ancestor fighting pirates off the Barbary Coast are an unusual feature, but wonderfully drawn in large detailed panels that integrate well into the Captain's storytelling. A similar sophisticated interweaving is achieved in the Thomsons' wallet thief investigation, each of the three threads, like the three pieces of parchment, coming together to form a perfect whole and admirably lead the way towards Red Rackham's Treasure.