For the casual reader of Tintin, Tintin's origins are vague. The series starts with him looking in his late teens, and ends, 23 adventures later, much the same. It's hard to decide how old he is at any one point in the series. It's just fairly clear that he's not old enough to be a professional policeman, and, yet, he accomplishes much of a policeman's duties with much more ease, and, in a few cases, much more comedy.
The first three books are, by far, the most funny. The author, Georges Prosper Remi, more frequently referred to simply as Hergé, incorporates humor, especially in the first, TIntin in the Land of the Soviets, that is not at all unlike that which was so frequently put into Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons. Tintin somehow manages to quickly reconstruct a hand-run railway trolly, with some miraculously in-shape parts from an also conveniently located junk yard, into a working car.
The tone of Tintin's adventures seldom revisits this perhaps slightly joyous view of things, but Herge's humor, in following adventures, does not wane in the least. While the first and second's scripts might have been written by a ten-year-old, the following nearly two dozen are fantastic in their own way.
Snowy, Tintin's faithful wire fox terrier, often inserts his opinion into the well-organized cloud of speech bubbles, seldom affecting things that way. Later on, he shows some distaste the adventures Tintin so frequently finds himself in. Snowy's faithfulness is marred only by his fantastic delight in both alcohol and bones, in several instances leading him to put either himself or his master in danger.
The fun really starts on the ninth adventure, when Tintin first meets Captain Haddock, an old sea dog who's drunk likely twice as often as not. He is first found, in the series, as captain of a ship whose cargo largely consists of opium, and this, without his knowledge. As the story goes on, the captain's friendship to Tintin grows, while his love for alcohol either grows, or stays the same. In the end, he is permanently prevented from drinking ever again, something which caused the Captain to form a great dislike toward Professor Calculus, whose ears function more like that Broken Telephone people always try to use, for some reason.
Herge's Tintin is also famous for another reason. Herge is sometimes credited for having created a style of comic artistry, in which the entire frame is filled with detail, no matter how far in the distance the frame goes. On occasion, Herge spoils readers with fantastic full-page frames, capturing the action or beauty of a scene with more color and space. His later works, specifically Flight 714, become decidedly more serious, while still maintaining the occasional comic relief, mostly from the secondary characters.
The reasons to read Tintin are numerous and fantastic. Likely half of the vocabulary Captain Haddock uses throughout the series is composed of insults. Professor Calculus' constant misinterpretations of peoples' words is a guaranteed bellylaugh inducer, and, if I were to decide, children all over the world would be reading these books. If Herge hasn't created a classic in Tintin, I've read half as many.
!Noah!
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