Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens, 1838-39 ★★½

Great Characters, But a Bit of a Mess

Everything that’s right – and wrong – about early Charles Dickens comes to roost in his third novel, less celebrated now but as popular then as anything he wrote. If Nicholas Nickleby often misses the mark for today’s reader, that speaks more to time’s passage than lack of talent.

A big takeaway from reading Nicholas Nickleby, far more than its story or characters: Dickens’s boundless imagination.

Explorers On The Moon – Hergé, 1952-1954 ★★★★

Fantasy Becomes Prophesy

The fantastical aspect of Explorers On The Moon is not what Hergé did with his extraterrestrial adventure, but what he didn’t do.

No moon men. No cities hidden beneath lunar craters. No princess kidnapped by green-skinned space pirates from John Carter’s Mars.

No, Hergé plays it straight. The result: more of a mind flip now than some cosmic fairy tale would have been then, as he pretty much nails what a moon flight entails before anyone ever went and did it.

Destination Moon – Hergé, 1950-1953 ★★★

A Small Step to a Giant Leap

Nobody ever watched Star Wars to see Luke Skywalker fix moisture vaporizers. Nor do they want an entire movie of Clark Kent hunting for phone booths. What to make of a Tintin story that amounts to set-up for a boffo coming attraction?

Destination Moon still works fine. While the story itself is kind of static and anticipatory, the vision and craft of creator Hergé and his growing team of skilled collaborators are on vibrant display. You expect lush visuals and lovely details, and you get those, but something else, too: Real-world verisimilitude in comic form.