Cigars Of The Pharaoh – Hergé, 1934 [Revised 1955] ★★★

Learning Elephant in Four Easy Pages

The magic of life one experiences as a child dissipates too quickly, to the point where it can be hard to recall, let alone recapture. At least I have found it so. Finding artists who don’t seem at all encumbered by adulthood that way is thus a rare pleasure. Such is my feeling for Hergé.

This, the fourth Tintin book, is the first where Hergé emerges not as a mere cartoonist but something more. It is not a particularly clever adventure, though it holds up better on that score than did his prior volume, Tintin In America.

What Cigars Of The Pharaoh has is charm, and a firmer sense of what it is about and where it is going. The art is on point, complementing the story wonderfully. Though it moves around too much for its own good, Cigars carries a sense of eavesdropping on a bright child’s dreamworld, one where innocence and menace not only co-exist but complement one another.

And you get to meet for the first time those intrepid detectives who are as closely defined with the series as Tintin himself. I refer of course to those bowler-hatted, identical-twin gumshoes, Thomson and Thompson, or Dupond et Dupont, if you are following the series in its original Belgian form.

The story begins aboard a passenger ship, the MS Isis, where Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy await landfall in Port Said, Egypt. As the pair stand along the railing, they encounter a confused Egyptologist, Professor Sophocles Sarcophagus. With a name like that, it’s a cinch the professor is on the hunt for ancient mystery. Sure enough, he is, specifically the lost tomb of Pharaoh Kih-Oskh. Tintin senses a story, Snowy some needed adventure, so they opt to join the strange professor on his expedition.

The adventure begins even before they exit the Isis. Tintin bumps the wrong fellow, a surly and suspicious American movie producer named Rastapopoulos. Soon, Tintin finds himself arrested when heroin is smuggled into his cabin. After he and Snowy make their escape, the pair follow Sarcophagus into the desert. There they quickly discover the pharaoh’s tomb, but lose Sarcophagus and are captured by smugglers using the tomb as their hideout.

Tintin and Snowy discover the terrible secret of the Pharoah's tomb. Inspired by the legendary curse of King Tut, it serves as a final resting place for overcurious Egyptologists. Will Tintin and Snowy soon join them? Image from http://en.tintin.com/news/index/rub/0/id/3803/0/the-logos.

From there, Tintin and Snowy are lost at sea, stranded in the Arabian desert, and on the run in India, smugglers and police hot on their heels.

The first of the Tintin books as the world has come to know and love them, Cigars Of The Pharaoh is a pure joyride. Hergé wrote later adventures of better construction and surer logic, but for cover-to-cover momentum and a whiff of wonder, Cigars is still something to savor.

Not all the elements one associates with classic Tintin are quite in place here. Professor Sarcophagus is a thin, vague character, clearly a rough outline for a future Tintin companion, Professor Calculus. Like Calculus, Sarcophagus is portrayed as clumsy and absent-minded, just not as endearing. His fate is one of Cigars’ unresolved loose ends; apparently Hergé planned for him to re-emerge in the next installment, The Blue Lotus, before dropping him entirely from the series instead.

Thomson and Thompson’s arrival in the series is better delineated, but still odd. They are the ones who are tipped that Tintin has heroin in his ship cabin, and give dogged chase thereafter. They are bumblers here, but not quite the comic relief they later became. In two instances in Cigars, they actually manage deft rescues, one of Tintin and the other of Snowy.

Thomson and Thompson make their first appearance in Cigars Of The Pharaoh, seen here in a helpful costume description which shows how to tell them apart. Thomson without the P has the mustache that juts out; Thompson's is more rounded. Apparently the author was inspired by a real pair of identical twins, his father and uncle. Image from http://costumeplaybook.com/comic-books/adventures-of-tintin/2974-thomson-thompson-cosplay/.

Later in the series, their goodhearted character would be better established, as would their propensity for affecting heroics despite themselves, rather than through careful planning like here. 

Tintin books either charm you with surreal escapism or boggle your mind with the bizarre twists they take. Cigars Of The Pharaoh does both quite well. There’s a sort of dream logic involved, one most people lose when they get to the bill-paying part of life, but which author Hergé retained and made central to Tintin’s appeal. If Tintin needs to hurdle a wall, he climbs a tree and uses a fat man’s stomach for a trampoline. If he finds himself lost in an Indian jungle, he befriends a tribe of elephants by learning to speak their language.

This latter feat is accomplished in just a few panels when Tintin constructs a makeshift woodwind from an old log to replicate the blasts from an elephant’s trunk. “It isn’t all that difficult,” Tintin explains to Snowy. “Of course, the main problem is to get a good accent.”

The elephant subplot, like many others here, is established only to be dispensed with quickly, in this case in just four densely packed pages. Then Tintin and Snowy, reunited with a brainwashed Sarcophagus, are off to the next phase of the story, this being a mystery involving some shadowy suspects camped out in a nearby bungalow. Their escapade now becomes a bit of an Agatha Christie mystery involving a sinister fakir with a hypnotic gaze.

The actual story of the Cigars, when Hergé gets around to telling it, is fairly thin, more so than Tintins of later vintage as I remember them. Written originally in 1932-34 as regular installments for a Belgian children's magazine, and later modified and condensed for this book, Cigars is hardly a story at all, but a catawampus succession of amazing incidents loosely connected by a common protagonist.

One aspect of this book that draws criticism, even from fans, is this looseness. Exactly halfway into the story, Tintin and Snowy commandeer a single-engine airplane in Arabia, and eventually crash-land in a jungle in India. This seems quite a trek, even for Tintin.

Back aboard the Isis, Snowy pines for Marlinspike, which is a stretch given that palatial estate and its owner, Captain Haddock, have not yet been introduced to the series. Another contiguity gap occurs in Arabia, where an Arab sheik is befriended after he reveals himself a fan of Tintin books, with a smiling attendant holding up a copy of Destination Moon. As the fan website tintinologist.org points out, this is odd given the fact Destination Moon comes much later in the series!

If the art of Tintin was only okay, perhaps the left-field storycraft would chafe after a while. But it’s here Cigars really shines. The cover image of Tintin walking through a corridor of mummified Egyptologists is one of the most famous in the series, and the rest of the book is replete with other arresting masterpieces of perspective and line. Just the scenic backdrops alone are easy to get lost in, desert fortresses and cityscapes early on, followed by a majestic Indian palace and a labyrinthine tunnel network in the second half.

Tintin and Snowy attempt one of their many thrilling escapes in Cigars Of The Pharaoh, a scene memorably aided by Hergé's richly-detailed clear-line drawing style. Image from http://thebristolboard.tumblr.com/post/42057565507/panel-from-tintin-cigars-of-the-pharaoh-by.

Each page has its own power to suck you in, as it were, given the sharp detail and the way successive panels carry you along to the next big cliffhanger.

The story has a wonderful double-finale, the first when Tintin discovers the smugglers’ secret lair and manages to bring them to justice with help from the Thompsons, the second where Tintin rescues a maharajah’s son. There is a marvelous set-piece in which the smuggler leaders, each outfitted in menacing purple robes like “a jungle Ku Klux Klan,” individually enter a small room so the infiltrator among them, our hero Mr. T, can be thus unmasked. Waiting to see how Tintin gets out of this one is a nifty surprise, and works better than the mummy sequence at the outset in establishing Hergé’s emergent brilliance as a scenarist.

I wasn't in love with the story, and missed some of the key recurring characters not yet introduced at this point in the series. I much prefer the Thompsons as blundering allies, not the sometime adversaries they are here. Sarcophagus, who seemed a friendly bloke whatever plans Hergé had for him in the sequel, is left mad at book’s end, a victim of “Rajaijah, the poison of madness;” which is played off as a joke but a minor downer if you care about such things. The villains and their smuggling subplot are ill-defined throughout; Rastapopoulos’s place at the head of the ring is strongly suggested but never clearly stated nor explained.

There are other Tintins which hold up better, as adventures or as friendship-building exercises. What Cigars is great at is grabbing your attention and holding it through to the last page. You may not understand much of what happened or why, but if you are like me, you will be eager to pick up The Blue Lotus and discover what becomes of Tintin and Snowy next.