Tintin's War on Drugs

Old friends and new fans of Tintin, the timeless, ageless Belgian boy reporter, are eagerly awaiting the Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson collaboration on three films based on Tintin's adventures (the first to appear in 2011 - more). Tintin lived in our world, a world that faces our problems, no matter how much imagination and creativity Tintin's creator, Belgian cartoonist Hergé (Georges Remi), brought to it.

So, it is not so surprising that Tintin fought a one-man (or one-boy) war on drugs, ably assisted by his dog Snowy. While drug abuse seems like a modern problem, it has been around for a long time. The fictitious Sherlock Holmes and the real Sigmund Freud shared an addiction (dealt with in the 1976 film, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution - more). The Shadow encountered drug smuggling in the 1937 radio episode, The Temple Bells of Neban. The classic anti-drug film, Reefer Madness or Tell Your Children came out in 1936 (more - and you can watch it online here), not long after Tintin's first (1929-1930) appearance, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (more).

Although Cigars of the Pharaoh (1932-1934) and The Crab with the Golden Claws (1940-1941) are not the only Tintin stories that refer to drug smuggling, both of them center on the issue. Even their titles refer to...

I do not want to give away too much. Even better, both of these books introduce major characters in the ongoing adventures of Tintin: the bumbling, almost identical detectives, Thomson and Thompson, and Captain Haddock, the recovering alcoholic who has the most colorful (but not obscene) verbal blasts ever recorded.

Cigars of the Pharaoh

Wickipedia article here| Tintinologist article here

You can find Google Video search results for Ellipse/Nelvana's animated version of Cigars of the Pharaoh here.

The Crab with the Golden Claws

Wickipedia article here | Tintinologist article here

You can find Google Video search results for the Ellipse/Nelvana animated version of Tintin in America here. The very first Tintin film, made in 1947, was based on The Crab with the Golden Claws (more). It is also one of the books on which the first Spielberg/Jackson collaboration is based.

Tintin's adventures with cigars and claws

Tintin is on vacation at the beginning of Cigars of the Pharaoh, but work catches up with him when he meets Dr Sarcophagus, an Egyptologist with a treasure map. Tintin rambles from an Egyptian pyramid to a padded cell in India, with a daring flight (in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, he demonstrated that he could fly an airplane) and a final mad chase through the Himalayas. There is a memorably surrealistic dream sequence in which modern characters are absorbed into Egyptian hieroglyphs.

My favorite sequence in all the Tintin stories occurs in this book. After Tintin cures a sick elephant, he is adopted as doctor to a herd of elephants, learns their language, and even makes a trumpet so that he can communicate with them. Unfortunately, this sequence is not included in the animated cartoon.

In The Crab with the Golden Claws, Tintin gets drawn into another sprawling adventure, involving a ship with an Armenian name, a Japanese man kidnapped in front of Tintin's home, another wild airplane ride, more desert adventures, and another unusual way to smuggle drugs.

Hergé seems to have had a particular fondness and talent for drawing different means of transportation, ships, boats, airplanes (including a seaplane), elephants, and cars. Tintin is always on the go, and there is always some new way for him to keep moving. Sometimes, as you look at Hergé's amazing drawings of speeding cars and careening airplanes, they take on an animation of their own.

Looking backward, looking forward with Tintin and Snowy

By the time of Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin and Snowy had had adventures in Russia, the Congo, and the United States, and both were expecting a well-deserved vacation. But both Cigarsand The Crab with the Golden Claws, are glorious messes, with the plots developing from Tintin being at the wrong place at the right time (or vice versa). Other adventures would be much more focused. But Hergé never could control his exuberance, taking Tintin and Snowy from under the ocean all the way to the moon.

These two adventures, however, mark a change in the relationship of Snow and Tintin, a change that you can read about here.

You can find my ongoing blog about Tintin here. You can also "Keep Up with Tintin News, Books, and Films" here.