To The Last Page

The one where nothing happens After the personal drama that lead to the creation of Tintin in Tibet , one of Tintin's least typical but finest adventures, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Hergé had hit some kind of creative block by the time it came to writing its follow-up. If that's the case then The Castafiore Emerald is the comics' equivalent of Fellini's 8½ , the artist gathering together a huge cast of familiar characters, and without having recourse to the formula of the conventional narrative format, knowingly and self-reflexively have them run through the standard old routines and mannerisms. Nothing significant seems to happen, but it's still a hugely entertaining experiment that does open-up and shed some light on the creative process. The familiar process of running jokes are the narrative thread that links everything together in The Castafiore Emerald when the Milanese opera diva famous for her rendition of the Jewel Song from Faust (" Ah,...