The Adventures of Tintin (vol. 1): In the Land of the Soviets by Hergé (1930). Translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. Little Brown, 2007. 144p., $10.99.
The Adventures of Tintin (vol. 24): Tintin and Alph-Art by Hergé (1986). Translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. Little Brown, 2007. 62p., $10.99.
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tintin creator Hergé, Little Brown has rereleased these two volumes in paperback editions. Formerly only available (as far as I’m aware) in the US as special hardcover editions, these are the alpha and omega of The Adventures of Tintin series. In the Land of the Soviets shows Tintin just emerging, still partially formed and not his later self, and Hergé still forming his artistic skills (only 23 when the volume was started in January of 1929). Tintin and Alph-Art, on the other hand, finds Tintin fading into the ether with Hergé dying before he finished laying out the book.
I should state right off that neither book is for the casual fan. Neither would stand up to scrutiny as an individual work, rather, each best serves to stand in the good company of the other volumes as contrast to the many masterworks of the series.
In the Land of the Soviets is a great shock to the reader of other TIntin volumes. The black and white art is crude and the plot is extremely repetitious. The story has Tintin and his dog Snowy (Milou) travelling to the Soviet Union as a reporter. At first, the communists want to stop him from getting into the country, and then, when that fails, stop him from leaving, for fear that he will discover their secret. The secret is that the whole Soviet enterprise is a failure and a trick. Tintin finds a factory that is empty but for a man burning trash to make smoke come from the smokestacks and a man banging on metal to simulate the sounds of machinery. Tintin attends an election where everyone is forced to vote communist without any choices. Tintin sees a bread line where a boy is refused food because he is not a communist. The work is blatantly propagandistic and anti-communist (as befits the conservative Catholic paper in which it was originally published). The action is an unending series of chase, capture, and escape peppered with a few of Tintin’s discoveries about the “truth” of the Soviet Union.
Unlike his later self, where he is still extraordinary but more tempered, Tintin here alters between superhero and fool. He performs nearly impossible feats, like fighting a bear bare-handed and winning, and ridiculously stupid mistakes, like driving a speedboat into a tree. Hergé seems to want it both ways, probably a limit of the mostly single character story. Unlike later Tintin volumes, there is only Tintin and Snowy. He has no friends or companions, nor do any of the villains become more than cardboard cut-out “commies.” Tintin is left to perform the heroics and the comedy, and neither are the heroics exciting nor the comedy funny. It is no surprise that in the 30′s Hergé let this book fail out of production for nearly 40 years. It is a work of juvenalia.
The art shows some glimmers of Hergés later skill with the form, but for the most part is crude. The linework is thick and unvarying, and settings are almost non-existent (later Hergé would use extensive research for his settings). Often the characters seem to stand on the bottom panel border with an awkward side perspective (which he does continue to use in later volumes, but less so and more successfully). He makes frequent use of repeated compositions and backgrounds to little effect. Page layouts stick to a six panel grid with the only variation being the occasional double wide horizontal panel. Word balloons are often organized in such a confused way that one reads them out of order. One can see progress across the course of the book, but it would be another few volumes until Hergé (and Tintin) really came into their own. The Blue Lotus, the fifth volume from 1936, is much more sophisticated on every level from art, layouts, and compositions, to plot, background detail, and character.
(An amusing image of Tintin and Snowy, drunk.)
53 years after In the Land of the Soviets, Hergé died, leaving behind the unfinished 24th volumes of The Adventures of Tintin, Tintin and Alph-Art. The volume as published here is a combination of text translation and untranslated sketches. The translation is written out like a script with dialogue interrupted by brief descriptions of action. Unfortunately there is no clear connection between script and the pencil sketches that accompany them (they are not even done as opposing page translations). No page numbers or panel numbers/locations are used in the script so the reader can clearly relate dialogue and action to the images. The pages are often reproduced at such a size that the sketchy dialogue is hard to read even if you can read the French. I can understand not wanting to integrate the translation onto the art but not providing any clues to the connection between two is a very poor idea that makes for a less satisfying reading experience.
The story involves an art forgery ring that Tintin discovers through a string of events. Hergé was always interested in modern art (and did paintings himself), so in an effort to maintain his flagging interest in the series, he wanted to incorporate this into the series (so it is said). As far as the 42 pages sketched out go, this adventure is not that different from previous volumes. Hergé did seem to be taking the opportunity to include a host of characters from previous adventures that all seem to show up at different points in the story. It’s almost as if he knew this was going to be the last volume.
(Captain Haddock has a nightmare on the first page, one of the most “finished” pages in the book.)
The actual sketches in this volume vary greatly in how finished they are. The first couple pages are fairly finished looking pencils (at least they look finished to me, perhaps not for Hergé), with backgrounds filled in and all the characters easily identifiable. But for most of the pages the sketches vary from panel to panel, with some panels nothing more than two circle heads and dialogue to panels with a car accident that are drawn in some detail with ink (perhaps a marker). Hergé leaves many panels on an extremely sketchy level if they were standard talking heads or simple scenes, while less-standard panels are sketched in with more details. He tends to leave Tintin as an extreme minimalist sketch (circle head, nose, poof of hair), while new characters are sketched in at least once with detail to establish their look. Hergé’s pencils are quite lovely once some detail has been applied to them. They have a looseness that is all but erased in the finished volumes.
(An inked sketch from a later page.)
In the end, though, this book is little more than a historical item, a glimpse at what might have been, ending with a panel of Tintin being lead by his antagonist off to death by being encased in plastic and sold as a work of art. Hergé died and Tintin remains a piece of art, mostly frozen in time. Though not completely frozen, as a number of attempts were made to “finish” this adventure, the one I’m finding the most mention of being Yves Rodier’s 62 page version (which you can read in English translation here). Rodier’s story is fairly interesting on its own, though, in the end, doesn’t quite read like a real Hergé volume. Rodier even takes the liberty of setting Tintin up with what appears to be a date with a young woman, an arena to which Tintin never even approached in his many adventures. And one can’t neglect to mention the forthcoming Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson Tintin movies (there seems to plans for 3 of them).
(Tintin’s and Hergé’s last panel.)