The Crab With The Golden Claws – Hergé, 1940-41 [Revised 1943] ★★½

The Captain Comes Aboard

Positively shocking what they let children read these days. Why, here’s a comic book that revolves around narcotics trafficking, a hero who hijacks a plane and steals a car, and his new buddy a raving alcoholic. Played for laughs, no less!

What kind of people are these Belgians, anyway?

A middling entry in the Tintin series, written at a time when author Hergé was forced to struggle with a new format and the strictures of Nazi occupation, The Crab With The Golden Claws nevertheless gave an enormous boost to the franchise as a whole, more so than any other volume (though most are better than this.) For it introduces its most beloved and enjoyable character, Captain Archibald Haddock. Yes, Mister Blistering Barnacles himself.

Here’s the thing: The Crab With The Golden Claws is such a patchy product on its own that Captain Haddock’s arrival is handled with none of the élan you hope for or expect given his place in the series. Not only as mentioned is he an out-of-control alcoholic, but he’s also a buffoon, so needy of drink that he continuously endangers Tintin and his pooch Snowy in already-tricky situations.

The Crab With The Golden Claws brings together the Tintin power trio for the first time, left to right Haddock, Tintin, and Snowy. Only the dog seems happy, for some reason. Image from http://kurohouseofcraft.blogspot.com/2014/05/tintin-mini-diorama-clay-crab-with.html.

It’s played for laughs, which may make it worse. Those of us who read Tintin books expect Haddock be a source of dry wit, of practical advice who occasionally offers his young friend a steadying hand. He likes a nip of the hard stuff, yes, but he’s never so abject as we see him here. It all gets a bit cringy and deflating.

Tintin: Think of your reputation, Captain! What would your old mother say if she saw you in such a state?

Haddock: M-m-my old mother?

Tintin: There, there, Captain!

Haddock: Boohoo…Boo…hoo…hoo…Booh…hoh.

Tintin: For goodness’ sake be quiet…

Haddock: Boo…hoo…Mummy!

The Crab With The Golden Claws won’t get points for originality, either. As noted by critics cited in its Wikipedia entry, Crab is basically a rewrite of an earlier Tintin story, Cigars Of The Pharaohs, recycling the same basic scheme and setting. Tough as Haddock may be at times to take, he’s the one notably original element to this whole book.

Our story opens with Tintin and Snowy walking along a street. Snowy gets his nose inside an empty crabmeat tin. Later, old friends Thomson and Thompson show Tintin evidence from a drowning case they are investigating. It includes a label scrap Tintin recognizes from the can Snowy found. A strange name is written on its back. His follow-up in turn attracts the notice of a team of opium smugglers, who take matters into their own hands by kidnapping Tintin aboard their vessel, the Karaboudjan.

Tintin's nose for trouble leads him and Snowy to the Karaboudjan. He needs to watch his step. Image from http://scriptoriumdaily.com/tintin-top-ten/

Haddock, it turns out, is the ship’s captain. Unaware of the illegal cargo, he sits in his cabin getting drunk while his first mate, Mr. Allan, runs the operation. Making his escape with Snowy’s help, Tintin introduces himself to Haddock by accidentally kicking him in the head. Even with a gun pointing at him, a besotted Haddock objects to Tintin calling his boat a “vile tub.” Once Tintin explains about the opium, Haddock sobers up fast, at least for the moment.

What did Haddock give “The Adventures Of Tintin” that the series hadn’t had before? For one thing, he was someone human for Tintin to talk to, who unlike Snowy could carry on conversations. Haddock also provided comic relief and an able ally, though much more the former than the latter here. When he gets a bottle of booze, or in desperate need of same, he’s a danger to himself and especially Tintin.

This transformation occurs several times in the story, enough to become repetitive and grating. Haddock’s so clearly well-meaning in the main, immediately trusting of and deferential to his new companion, that his bungling becomes too flip.

People may object to having his addiction played for laughs; though there is an element of tragedy to the way we are introduced to him – manipulated and abused by a first mate Haddock mistakes for a friend – his alcoholism often serves as punchline. At one point, he even confuses Tintin for a bottle of champagne, and tries to pull off his head!

Haddock mistakes Tintin for a bottle of champagne. It's one time in the book Haddock has an episode from lack of booze, rather than too much of it. Image from http://en.tintin.com/albums/show/id/33/page/0/0/the-crab-with-the-golden-claws.

The Crab With The Golden Claws does benefit from an aggressively action-filled plot, much of which shows up in the 2011 Adventures Of Tintin film directed by Steven Spielberg. Tintin and Haddock get in shootouts, car chases, and a running fistfight inside a series of hidden tunnels where the opium is stored. We even get to watch Haddock go on one of his legendary extended rants of insulting non-sequiturs, triggered in this case when someone destroys a bottle of booze in a gunfight:

“Rats! Ectoplasms! Freshwater swabs! Bashi-bazouks! Cannibals! Caterpillars!”

Hergé was in a strange period at this point in the series. As the Nazis had seized Belgium the year before he began Crab and closed down his employer, Le Petit Vingtième, he was forced to get a new distributor, Le Soir. The change meant wider circulation, but also a more ragged pace as Le Soir was a daily publication. War shortages cut into the creative process as well.

This choppiness results in a shorter read; four of its 62 pages consist of giant single-panel illustrations as there was not enough story to fill it out. Hergé chose these single panels well, as they are graphically dynamic and advance the story without the use of speech balloons. The art here otherwise impresses less than it did in the prior entry, the lush and clever King Ottokar’s Sceptre.

One of the more visually dynamic episodes in Golden Claws is Tintin and Haddock's adventure aboard a seaplane, an episode repurposed in the 2011 film The Adventures Of Tintin. Image from https://www.heavy-weather.com/collections/tintin/products/tintin-poster-canvases-from-the-crab-with-the-golden-claws

German occupation affected Tintin in other ways, too: Gone are the German and Soviet villains of earlier outings. Oddly, a visit is paid to the French Foreign Legion in Morocco; perhaps because France by 1941 was out of the war, too; partly occupied, partly under a Nazi puppet regime. Wikipedia suggests the appearance of a Japanese character on the trail of the opium was Hergé making amends for the harsh way he depicted the Japanese in The Blue Lotus; it’s possible this is rather because Japan was a German ally and less likely to cause censorship difficulties than another type of foreigner.

Snowy sneaks gulps from Haddock’s whiskey glass while the captain isn’t looking, and helps save the day in the end. Thomson and Thompson also lend a hand, having transitioned by now into full-on buddies of Tintin. Tintin himself remains as much a boy scout as ever.

I do admire the title of this book. It was supposed to be The Red Crab, to connect up with prior titles The Blue Lotus and The Black Island. But the opium plot lends a double meaning to the term “golden claws,” which also reference a pair of necklace ornaments worn by the chief villain.

The real prize of this book is Haddock, its diamond in the rough. At first Hergé may not have known just what he had created, but he caught on quick, building Haddock up to a point where he would eventually become the co-lead character of the series, giving it added humor as well as a heart it had not previously enjoyed. It is hard to see this from The Crab With The Golden Claws alone, being as Haddock is played so much as a one-note joke, but a seed was planted that would quickly sprout.