Hergé: Tintin: The 7 Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun

     Hergé: Tintin: The 7 Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun. Seven crystal balls explode and put seven explorers into deep comas. Tintin and Capt. Haddock set out to solve the mystery, and find it in a remnant group of ancient Incas in Peru, who jealously guard the ancient religion and customs. The explorers had desecrated holy sites in the pursuit of archeological knowledge.
     Well, I didn’t like Tintin much when I was a kid, and I don’t like him much better now. Hergé allows himself the most awful errors, such as a brown bear in the middle of a Peruvian jungle. The errors show the more because Hergé otherwise includes accurate depictions of local artefacts and clothing, and flora and fauna. His characterisation is of the most primitive kind, consisting mostly of caricaturing draughtsmanship and tics of speech whose first mild charm soon begins to grate. His crude humour contrasts with his subtle wit, to the credit of neither. I think he hasn’t made up his mind whether he’s writing fantasy or adventure stories, nor is he clear about his intended audience: children (mostly boys), or adults?. He does move the story right along, so that one keeps reading just to find out what will happen next; but that sense of narrative is his only virtue. A collaborator might have helped him develop his ideas into well structured and characterised tales. But when he was writing, the graphic novel was still seen as a merely a longer comic strip. Very few people took it seriously, perhaps not even Hergé himself. *½ (2006)