The Shooting Star – Hergé, 1941-42 ★★★½

A Touch of the Surreal

Meteors hit the earth every day, science tells us; one as large as 66 feet in diameter will land about once each century. Ten volumes in, it was high time for a big one to collide with the world of Tintin.

How does Tintin handle this cosmic crisis? With his usual doughty good humor and more than a touch of the surreal. The Shooting Star may well be one of the more out-there entries in the entire “Adventures Of Tintin” series (giant mushrooms? melting streets?) but manages a satisfying landing despite all that and more.

The Shooting Star sends Tintin on an expedition to the Arctic Ocean to locate a detached chunk of the title entity, observed landing there. The story reunites Tintin with Captain Archibald Haddock, introduced in the previous Tintin story and now proud president of the Society of Sober Sailors, which marks quite a change.

Wonder how he’ll hold up?

Haddock is taking no chances while preparing for a long ocean voyage, as his fellow members of the Society of Sober Sailors look on. Image from http://en.tintin.com/albums/show/id/34/page/0/0/the-shooting-star.

The Shooting Star is unusually structured. The first ten pages present a nightmare scenario where a glowing object in the sky grows bigger and bigger, prompting Tintin to visit a local planetarium. There, boomerang-headed Professor Phostle explains the object is in fact “a ball of fire!...A VA-A-A-A-AST ball of fire” about to bring about the end of the world.

Naturally, Professor Phostle couldn’t be happier:

“I, Decimus Phostle, have determined the moment at which the cataclysm will befall us! Tomorrow I shall be famous!”

After this opening section ends with something considerably less lethal (which sends the old brainiac into a book-throwing rage), the story becomes another of Tintin’s grand-quest stories. Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy join a large adventure party who travel on Captain Haddock’s vessel, the Aurora. Their quest: find what remains of that ball of fire, which contained a potentially valuable and unearthly mineral the recovering Phostle names after himself. Also interested are some rival Americans led by the shadowy cigar-smoking capitalist Bohlwinkel.

Reservations about The Shooting Star’s place in the Tintin pantheon usually center around Bohlwinkel, drawn by Hergé as a kind of lampoon Jewish character originally named Blumenstein. According to Wikipedia, he was a Wall Street financier before Hergé relocated him to the fictional Latin American country of São Rico.

Funny, he doesn't look São Rican. Bohlwinkle confers with one of his lackeys early in The Shooting Star. Image from https://www.pinterest.com.mx/pin/853150723131368880/. 

Hergé may have revealed some insensitivity to Jews, particularly while living and working under Nazi rule as he did while creating this wartime entry, but he really disliked Americans and their capitalist ways, something established back with Tintin In America and maintained in subtle ways across the course of the series. Here not only do you have Bohlwinkel; there is also the vessel competing with the Aurora, named the Peary presumably after the American admiral who reached the North Pole. Another ship in Bohlwinkel’s employ is called Kentucky Star.

American Tintin lovers like myself do well not to get put off with these digs, as the rest of this book compensates by being a lot of fun.

Tintin and Snowy walk the impressively-detailed deck of the Aurora amid looming icebergs. Over their heads mounted on a launch is the Aurora’s special seaplane, modeled after the Arado 196 German wartime aircraft. Tintin urges Snowy to “fill your lungs with fresh air” whereupon a giant wave drenches them both. A few pages later, Snowy is nearly washed overboard in a storm Captain Haddock dubs a “nice little breeze.” It’s good to see the man in his element.

The Aurora en route to the Arctic. Image from https://comicvine.gamespot.com/aurora/4055-58778/.

A series of panels reveal various levels of sickness felt by expedition members as the Aurora crosses a choppy ocean. Mealtime in the mess hall brings a banquet of mashed potatoes and a question from Captain Haddock:

“Hey, steward, what’s the meaning of this? The menu says ‘Sausages and mash’! Right: where are the sausages?”

Cut to a panel of a sleeping, bloated Snowy on deck, a mostly-eaten string of sausages beside his smiling mouth.

The Shooting Star presents us with the first solid, consistent adventure in the Tintin series since The Black Island. It is a sprawling tale of intrigue and exploration that lays on fresh thrills and laughs with every page. 

Hergé managed to do this under the iron boot of Nazi occupation by ignoring same.

Captain Haddock has several highlight moments in The Shooting Star. Here, he manages a narrow escape. Image from http://classiccomics.org/thread/4256/adventures-tintin-reviews-confessor?page=12.

The voyage he undertakes is on a sea bereft of any mines or U-boats. There is a stop in Iceland, in 1941 British-occupied territory still formally owned by Denmark, a German-occupied country. Neither fact is brought up, at least not in the version we know today. The only problem Tintin and his Aurora mates face is getting gasoline, as the only fuel available in Iceland is under Bohlwinkel’s control.

Complications keep coming up and give The Shooting Star energy and drive. Contrivances are kept to a minimum as the adventure unfolds in realistic ways, at least until we get to the end and the meteor fragment, the top of which somehow manages to stand above the waves. Perhaps it landed on an iceberg?

Surrealism crops up with Tintin and Snowy’s exploration of the meteor, just as it did in the opening. When I read this in my youth, I wasn’t as taken by these unworldly episodes as I am now. The idea of Tintin finding his home city so hot in the dead of night that he is burned from touching a window pane lends a cosmically unsettling feeling to this story, as does the unforgettable vision of a city street alive with fleeing rats. Poor Snowy has to be detached by Tintin from the suddenly-gluey asphalt of a melting street.

A reference to Nazi occupation? Tintin observes a rat parade as the meteor closes with the Earth. Image from http://en.tintin.com/news/index/rub/100/id/3752/0/signup.

Darren at Them0vieblog.com offers a convincing analysis of The Shooting Star being influenced by Belgium’s occupation. It must have lent a weird aura to life for both Hergé and his immediate audience, the readers of Le Soir where it first ran in black-and-white. A meteor strike was little different than the everyday anticipation of Allied bombs. Darren writes:

The sense of dread in the story isn’t anchored in a particular moment, or a particular political event, and I think that’s to the credit of Hergé. The tension and the sense of impending doom could just as easily apply to any number of modern political events that current readers might have lived through, and that’s a sign of the story’s staying power.

Tintin’s arrival on the meteor fragment, in which he uses the ship’s seaplane to steal a jump from the Americans (later airbrushed by Hergé into non-nationally-identifiable adversaries), is a wonderfully bizarre conclusion to the story. Tintin survives a rain of giant apples and a gigantic, menacing spider in his effort to first plant a flag atop the meteor, then escape when the object begins to slide into the ocean.

The meteor-fueled mushrooms do more than grow big. They also explode, as Tintin and Snowy discover. Image from http://www.niceland.com/inspired-by-iceland-the-adventures-of-tintin/.

The book builds upon Tintin’s relationship to Haddock. He’s not yet the comrade he would become, but far steadier and more reliable company than the basket case he had been in The Crab With The Golden Claws. He’s sober this time, though not above indulging a drop of the hard stuff and his signature ranting when the chips are down:

“We’ll show those P-P-Patagonian p-p-pirates what we can do!...The l-l-lily-livered l-l-landlubbers!”

The rest of the cast is fairly nondescript. Professor Phostle, something of a precursor to series mainstay Professor Calculus who is still waiting in the wings, manages to be rather amusing but hard to root for. He takes too much pleasure in the prospect of doomsday to ever quite be trusted or liked. He’s also largely useless once the voyage is underway.

Bohlwinkel is a lackluster villain, smirking by a radio awaiting reports from henchmen. The other expedition members barely register, which is disappointingly lax of Hergé given the effort he puts in to introducing them. As many of these characters hail from Axis countries (along with neutral nations Sweden, Spain, and Portugal), I wonder if this was a product of the same post-war editing which scrubbed Bohlwinkel of his Jewishness and the other bad guys of their Yankee-ness.

One of many changes made in later editions of The Shooting Star involved the flag of the villains. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shooting_Star.

We do get an interesting secondary player in a former man of science who has gone off the deep end and embraced religion. His appearances here are played for laughs but also add to the unsettled mood. “Oyez, there will be a plague!” he shrieks.

Later he reappears aboard the Aurora with further warnings, calling Tintin “a servant of Satan” before being taken away. He even manages to torment Tintin in his dreams.

Thomson and Thompson manage just a brief cameo, seeing the Aurora off. Snowy remains very active, enjoying his winter togs (“I’m going to cause a sensation!”) and pitching in as only he can. He uses more than his head while defusing a lit stick of dynamite.

Snowy proves a literal wingman to Tintin in a characteristically hairy moment late in The Shooting Star. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/403635185325953025/.

In summary, The Shooting Star is not essential Tintin but very good second-tier fare, both for establishing the strengths of the series thus far (Tintin is relentless both as investigator and adventurer) and in how it expands upon Tintin’s friendship with Haddock, a component critical to the development of the series.

Add to that the uniquely bizarre trappings regarding the business of the meteor and Hergé’s dynamic draftsmanship throughout, which makes terrific use of its many unusual settings. The result is a story that, while not especially memorable, keeps you fully engaged and amused from start to finish.