Tintin

The hospital bed is a very dank one. No one has told me that recovering from a serious and life threatening urinary tract infection was going to involve me peeing almost uncontrollably. I am irritated beyond normal. Hungry. Thirsty.

1986.

My father swings into the tiny room and hands me a brown cover proudly stamped with “Shankar Book Bureau, Malleshwaram”. I ask him what it contains.

“Open it and see”, he twinkles. 

I pick the book out and on top is “Herge” and “The Adventures of Tintin” and just below is a big yellow box with “Flight 714” set in wonderful type. Framing the background is a cave with large spikes through which a ragged bunch of people with guns have emerged. They look startled by the sight of two large stone statues. Tintin. Captain Haddock. Snowy. Dr. Krollspell. Laszlo Carreidas.

I open the first page. The top panel contains a gloriously detailed drawing of a Boeing 707. 

“I keep telling you. We are in Java! Djakarta!”
“How very strange. I’d have sworn it was Djakarta.”
“This IS Djakarta, ten thousand thundering typhoons!”
“Rangoon? You must be joking.”
“Blistering barnacles! Djakarta! Djakarta! DJAKARTA!!! Can you listen to what I say?”
“Botany Bay?…Then why didn’t you say we’d arrived?”

I am laughing so hard that my mother has to tell me control it else my abdomen might split open.

I finish the book in an hour. Read it again. And again. And again.

Three days later I am out of the hospital. In possession of eight more Tintin books. “No, son, you can’t just fake illness and get to the hospital in hope that we’ll get you more books”, the mother points out as I am wheeled out.

Six months later, I have the entire collection. 

*****

I recently watched the movie adaption of Tintin recently. As a good fan, I loved it the first time I saw it. The second time? Not so much. Did the non-stop action tire me out? Perhaps. Did the over the top rambunctiousness of Haddock put me off? Perhaps. I kept thinking about this until yesterday when this article came by my way.

Jessica Hendrix in the LA Review of Books writes a most beautiful piece on Herge, his comics and eventually the movie. Half way through piece is when I stopped and re-read. And re-read:

He was born 15, and supposedly stays that way, though it is hard to imagine he’s any age at all. He has no last name, no parentage and no past, no desires and no sexual identity. Even his appearance has little to say about him: his face is just a circle, with two black dots for eyes and a black, semi-circular wedge of mouth. He could be anyone, and frequently is: In The Broken Ear, the villains Alonso and Ramon see him disguised in every face they meet. His amorphousness also allows for virtue: by being nothing, he can be a kind of ideal.

Moneyball.

Even further down:

Then there are ways in which Tintin is simply incompatible with film, as his own creator realized. After seeing an animated version of The Temple of the Sun, Hergé wrote a young fan: “I don’t like Captain Haddock in the film. He doesn’t have the same voice as in the book.”

And in closing:

Look at his face as Hergé drew it: there’s such babyish clarity to those round, rosy cheeks, that thumb-like nose, the expressive parentheses of his eyebrows, and so much complexity, too. Like Barthes’ degree-zero of writing, Tintin is the nursery of a new language of line and shape, the very artificiality of which makes it possible to imagine something real. He’s almost nothing, and as long as he stays that way, he can be anything at all.

In three short paragraphs, my confusion and my own thoughts about the movie laid out clear.

*******

I pick up Flight 714 again and turn to a random page. Carreidas is angry about the loss of his hat. Haddock and Allan engage in words. Rastapopoulos is laughing rip-roaringly. In my head, I imagine their voices. I say it aloud, silently. I chuckle.