The Adventures of Tintin

The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin) is a Belgian comic strip, created by Hergé (Georges Remi) starting in the late 1920s and into the 1970s. They were originally written and published in French, but have been translated into many languages and are popular around the world.

Plot and characters

The stories center around a young reporter from Belgium named Tintin, who travels the world and has many exciting adventures with his dog, a white wire fox terrier named Snowy (Milou, in French) and later (starting with The Crab with the Golden Claws in 1941) his friend, Captain Haddock, a bearded drunk with a temper. Other popular characters include Professor Cuthbert Calculus (Professeur Tryphon Tournesol) an absent-minded and mostly deaf (but he insists he's hard of hearing) scientist and inventor, and Thomson and Thompson (Dupond et Dupont), two silly detectives.

The Books

The stories are a mixture of many different genres, including adventure, satire, and social commentary and changed over time. The first story, Tintin in the Land of Soviets came out in 1929, and the last fully completed story, Tintin and the Picaros, came out in 1976. Another story, Tintin in Alph-Art, was never officially finished following the death of Hergé in 1983. There have been many unofficial books, but most of those are parodies or not part of the official series. The books in the official series are:

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets - (1929-1930)
Tintin in the Congo - (1930-1931)
Tintin in America - (1931-1932)
Cigars of the Pharaoh - (1932-1934)
The Blue Lotus - (1934-1935)
The Broken Ear - (1935-1937)
The Black Island - (1937-1938)
King Ottokar's Sceptre - (1938-1939)
The Crab with the Golden Claws - (1940-1941)
The Shooting Star - (1941-1942)
The Secret of the Unicorn - (1942-1943)
Red Rackham's Treasure - (1943-1944)
The Seven Crystal Balls - (1943-1948)
Prisoners of the Sun - (1946-1949)
Land of Black Gold - (1948-1950)
Destination Moon - (1950-1953)
Explorers on the Moon - (1950-1954)
The Calculus Affair - (1954-1956)
The Red Sea Sharks - (1958)
Tintin in Tibet - (1960)
The Castafiore Emerald - (1963)
Flight 714 - (1968)
Tintin and the Picaros - (1976)
Tintin and Alph-Art - (1986); (2004). While investigating art forgery ring Tintin is captured; it was Unfinished at the time of Hergé passing leaving one hundred and fifty pages of pencil sketches for the story. These were edited by a team of experts, including Benoît Peeters, Michel Bareau and Jean-Manuel Duvivier, resulting in forty-two pages of sketches. It was published posthumously (despite its unfinished status) in 1986 by Casterman in association with La Fondation Hergé. In 2004 Yves Rodier wrote the closest to a finished cannon version as there is. He uses all of the parts from the manuscript: the original art and the notes and writes and draw roughly in the same style Taking up from page 43 to page 62. SPoiler alert: Endaddine Akass is revealed to be Roberto Rastapopoulos [last seen in "Flight 714 to Sydney"] who tries at the end to kill TinTin and Haddock only to be trapped in his own rope and falls over a cliff to be killed when he strikes the rocks below;Tintin is given Rastapopoulos villa in Italy; in comic relief Captain Haddock loans the keys of the Italian villa to Jolyn Wagg for a month due to Wagg flattering a classical statue of Haddock by artist Nash (who saved Tintin and Haddock lives). When Haddock realizes what he has done he leaves the statue in a farmer's field as a scarcrow!^[1]

Other media

There have also been plays, films, and animated cartoons based on the stories. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have made a movie about Tintin. There are also Tintin Shops in Europe, which sell books, toys, and other items based on the books.

Related pages

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

References

↑ Tintin and the Alpha Art

Other websites

Official site
Fan site^{[permanent dead link]}
(in French) Objectif Tintin Archived 2006-10-04 at the Wayback Machine

[1] Tintin and the Alpha Art

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