Broken Windows

Not the movie

The Adventures of Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh, by Hergé. Originally published by Casterman, 1934 (French); by Methuen, 1971 (English). 

The close relationship between Tintin’s early volumes and the film of its day is a pronounced one. The greatest values (and strengths) of the the Old Hollywood system—structure, clarity of storytelling, redundancy of given information—form the skeleton of Hergé’s masterwork, a framework so robust that it sometimes outcompetes the stories’ other, subtler virtues for the reader’s attention.

It’s a blending of influences that lends certain strengths; the narrative of Cigars of the Pharaoh, (the series’ fourth volume) gains from Old Hollywood a balance of clarity and complexity, an intricate, globe-spanning plotline emulating and often elevating the tropes of adventure fiction, detective stories, and those aforementioned films—all places where an engaging, twist-laden plot is valued as the greatest possible asset. And that means a lot of ground gained for narrative complexity in these stories, but there are times when that means ground lost for artistic expression.

That’s not a jab, exactly. Tintin excels at everything it attempts; the density of the story, the sheer quantity of things happening trumping nearly all its predecessors (successors, even) in any medium. Cigars of the Pharoah boasts more fights, kidnappings, heists, and twists than some of the most successful genre work out there—and, marvelously, manages to fit all those pieces into just sixty-four pages. Each piece of the story unfolds with near-perfect coherence, ensuring that the reader understands at all times exactly what Hergé wants them to.

With all the book’s meticulous structuring, though, it’s hard to shake the feeling that some of the opportunities for more personal, even frivolous flourishes of artistry got pushed aside. It’s not like they’re absent—this is comics, so the depiction of action, the sequencing, the figure-drawing all carry a sense of whimsy that is very much Hergé’s. He comes in throughout the book in the small tics that permeate it: stars that show impact, the fine, curled lines that illustrate characters’ movement—but despite all that, though, there’s hardly a panel in Cigars devoted to pure whimsy; it’s rare that there’s anything that doesn’t directly motivate the plot.

It’s a welcome relief, then, when Hergé casts a playful interlude into the mix. (The previous volume, Tintin in America, seems to be made almost entirely of them). For the most part, here, though, those bits of fancy are mostly kept separate from the plot points, two pieces of the work fighting for page-space rather than working in harmony.

So, in Cigars, as with most all great commercial work, the place we see the most tinkering is with the framework of the existing structure, the inversions of the existing tropes and the subsequent layering of irony upon it. That’s not exactly surprising—like every artist, Hergé must familiarize himself with that existing structure before he can skillfully manipulate it. Though Cigars is certainly charming and its writing very strong, the familiarity of the plotting makes looks a bit rote when pushed up against the always free-feeling illustrations; in fact, it seems to be all that holds them back.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Blue Lotus, by Hergé. Originally published by Casterman, 1936 (French); by Methuen, 1983(English).

The point at which the bits of whimsy overpower the the work’s careful structure, though, is where Hergé’s voice appears most full. As Hergé gains skill at developing the complexity of his plots, he also comes to take them less seriously, gaining the confidence to turn them, and the work along with them, into something far more personal. The initial merging of the artist’s previously warring tendencies doesn’t work perfectly at first, but it’s a pleasure nonetheless when it begins to happen—it still grants us entry into the more playful corners of Hergé’s mind, and a bit of roughness isn’t much of a price. And it’s from there, a point of far greater confidence, that the series, too, becomes more confident in its commitment to experimentation. The artist’s questions surrounding colonialism, satire, cultural exchange, and travel are interrogated in a way that is matched only by a heightened, ever-increasing penchant for new formal plays—all of which lend a remarkable and appropriate sense of unity to a series that promises to its reader a veritable abundance of adventures.

It’s a fitting revelation, then, when at the end of The Blue Lotus (the volume that follows Cigars, and completes its narrative), it is the series’ film producer, who has been secretly manipulating the story for its duration, is revealed as the villain our hero, Tintin, has searched for all along. Tintin is comics, after all, and, having the ability to be the inimitable product of a single mind, is different and fundamentally opposed to anything you might see at the movies—at least once it chooses to be.

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