Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets – Hergé, 1929-30 ½★

Hergé’s Creaky Cornerstone

Sometimes the humblest beginnings lead on to great results. Such a cliché became a needed mantra while wading through this mess.

The earliest Tintin adventure to reach us in book form, Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets is a showcase for bad drawings and slack plotting so egregious it is a wonder author Hergé managed to raise himself to the level of bare competence, let alone unsurpassed magnificence in the field of comic-book art. It should be inspiring: The stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone. But what a chore to read!

It opens with us being told that Tintin, a “top reporter” for Le Petit Vingtième, is traveling to that new country, the Soviet Union, to get the inside scoop. For 140 pages, we watch Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy escape bombings, jail cells, and runaway vehicles while itemizing the many cruelties inflicted by communism.

“Yet another evil of the real Russia,” Tintin muses at a breadline. “Troops of abandoned children, roaming the towns and countryside, living by thieving and begging.” He then watches as a boy is kicked for refusing to declare himself a communist for a loaf of bread.

If pedantic politics are your thing, you may have a softer spot for Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets than I. Early Tintin adventures suffer from simplistic, gag-driven plots. They do not prepare you for the charmless monotony that unfolds here.

Tintin resembles a walking seat cushion in the early panels of Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets. The art does noticeably improve as the book goes on. Image from https://them0vieblog.com/2011/10/01/tintin-tintin-in-the-land-of-the-soviets-review/

First thing first: The art is hideous. Every human character has the face of a scarecrow. The black-and-white cartoons seem worthy of middle-school locker rooms, not a professionally-published magazine. Forget Hergé’s fabled ligne claire: Figures here are blocky and drawn with heavy lines, making it hard to tell what they are supposed to represent.

If you start having doubts about Hergé’s abilities reading Land Of The Soviets, its gaping narrative will clinch them. Thankfully this evolved radically, but in 1929 his approach was to run his protagonist through a series of cliffhangers, wrap up each with a vague joke, and occasionally have Tintin or Snowy impart some moral.

The book’s basic set-up seems practical, if not promising: Being a reporter, Tintin journeys to the Soviet Union to write about what is really going on behind what was not yet called the Iron Curtain. Tintin fans know well about his being a reporter; Land Of The Soviets marks the only time we see him toil at his profession for any length of time. With another story, perhaps, this would have been refreshing. Here, it makes things odder.

Though he misses the show trials and the war on Poland in the early 1920s, Tintin catches up on other Soviet low points, like unfair elections. Image from http://scriptoriumdaily.com/tintin-top-ten/.

Tintin is a marked man from the opening page. Even before leaving on his train ride to Russia, Tintin attracts the notice of a Soviet spy. How do we know he’s a Soviet? For one thing, he has a beard and wild hair like Marx and Trotsky. For another, he comes right out and tells us:

He must never get to Russia: He’d report what’s going on! [Pulling out a bomb] This in here will stop him for a long while…if not for keeps! One of the best remedies discovered yet for curiosity.

The ensuing explosion apparently kills everyone aboard the train except for Tintin, Snowy, and the spy. When the train arrives in Berlin, Tintin awakens to find police questioning him why he is riding inside a smoldering hulk and where the 218 other passengers went to.

Tintin doesn’t care; he just wants to drive on for Moscow any way he can, even while German police shoot at him.

This hell-for-leather dedication to his job is matched only by the Soviets’ determination to keep Tintin out. Rather than curry favor with another Western reporter, it is decided Tintin must be killed. Simply shooting him is considered, but dismissed as too messy. (“That’ll leave traces.”) A bevy of other ploys are tried instead.

That all of these fail will not be news to any reader: Tintin the character would continue to have adventures on through the 1970s. It’s the tired, saggy way they fail that surprises. Tintin races away in a motorboat to escape Soviet pursuers, crashes into the shoreline, does a somersault, and lands in the seat of a car, which he drives away. Tintin is shot by a firing squad, only to reveal he somehow fixed it so they were shooting blanks. Tintin is frozen in ice and carted away, but Snowy saves him by finding a box of salt buried in snow.

Sometimes the ploys are even more absurd. For instance, Tintin finds himself with a flat tire, so he trips up a passerby and gets him to chase him until the man is puffing so hard Tintin can use him to refill the tire.

“Thanks very much for lending a hand,” Tintin tells his victim.

Tintin and Snowy's encounter with a bear takes an unexpected turn. As usual in this story, Snowy gets all the best lines. Image from https://tomcatintheredroom.com/tag/tintin-in-the-land-of-the-soviets/

With all that’s wrong with Land Of The Soviets, it’s more a challenge identifying what’s right. Three notable aspects of the book stick out as harbingers of promise Hergé would develop in due time.

1.    Taking the scenic route: The Tintin series was notable for the way it used its stories as excuses for the artist in Hergé to showcase majestic vistas and a taste for the unusual. Here, while the artist has yet to arrive, moments of odd diversion serve notice of coming attractions. For example, Tintin and Snowy find themselves at one point trapped in a haunted house, which proves on inspection to conceal a secret Soviet warehouse.

2.    Focusing on the dog: Snowy gets a lot of attention in Land Of The Soviets, driving as much story as he ever would. Time and again he saves Tintin from the Soviets, sniffing out spies and so on. While Tintin himself is a colorless blob as written and drawn by Hergé, Snowy displays some of his familiar charm as he counsels his master at various tough spots: “Tintin! Are you dead? Say yes or no, but answer me!”

3.    Keeping it moving: Say what you will of its hairpin story turns and massive logic gaps, Land Of The Soviets never stops going. Much of this was to distract young ‘uns from pondering basic questions, like where Tintin was getting his food on the run and why he didn’t just leave this nasty land sooner, but the kinetic formula would be a keeper as the series came into its own. Hergé manages a clever design trick or two, like using cartoon frames as doors when Tintin holds off a posse of OGPU agents. For the most part his design principles in this embryonic state can be summed up as action, action, action. This would serve him better in time.

As to Hergé’s handling of the Soviets, a subject of some embarrassment in the years of détente following World War II, one can find fault with his research techniques, reportedly consisting of reading a single anti-communist book, Moscow Unmasked. At one point, Hergé has Tintin help some middle-class farmers, or kulaks, hide their grain from soldiers out to steal it or else murder them. This was actual Soviet policy in the 1930s, and widely ignored by the Western press as Hergé correctly shows at one point. The Soviet Union was indeed a cruel place in the early Stalin era, but many preferred to see and say otherwise.

Soviet leaders plot against the kulaks in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets. Image from http://silverandbronzeagesubjects.blogspot.com/2013/02/tintin-in-land-of-soviets.html

What place such an exposé has in a children’s story is, of course, another matter. A better comic book might have carried it off. This doesn’t.

The most fascinating part of Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets is having a Tintin story in its original form, when Hergé churned it out as regular installments for Le Petit Vingtième, rather than repurposed and streamlined for the 62-page color comic we are used to today. Not only is this in black-and-white; you can still see the issue breaks after every four pages by where the author left his signature.

Enjoy humble beginnings? They don’t get humbler than this.