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.

The story, while not gripping, does pull you in. There is a bit of mystery, a hint of suspense, and a good deal of slapstick comedy to keep fans satisfied. Yes, a lot of standing around rooms talking about stuff, too; Tintin and his gang prove passive observers too much of the time.

I don’t think this is top-drawer Tintin; certainly not on a stand-alone basis. But it doesn’t need to be. As a lead-in, it sets a solid, sober tone.

Tip for business travelers: Don't discuss confidential matters in crowded compartments. You never know who is listening. An early scene from Destination Moon. Image from http://tintinfashion.blogspot.com/search/label/Destination%20Moon.

The story opens with Tintin, his dog Snowy, and best friend Captain Haddock returning to Haddock’s mansion home, Marlinspike Hall, apparently fresh off their previous adventure, Land Of Black Gold. Butler Nestor greets them with news that Marlinspike’s other resident, Professor Calculus, has been mysteriously called away.

Haddock: Calculus is in Syldavia! What’s the crazy fellow doing there?

Tintin: It’s very odd. He asks us to join him… Shall we go?

As if that is ever a question in these books! Two days and two panels later, the pair fly off to the middle European nation of Syldavia, site of prior adventure King Ottokar’s Sceptre. Last time it offered medieval skullduggery; here it’s future shock.

Not to spoil anything, but it involves the Moon.

Tintin stands by at the radio at launch as Snowy looks on in a scene from Destination Moon that was memorialized on a Belgian postage stamp in 2004. Image from https://www.123rf.com/photo_23929925_belgium-circa-2004-stamp-printed-in-belgium-dedicated-to-tintin-and-destination-moon-circa-2004.html.

The story takes a while to reveal this, which may account for the plodding feeling I get while reading it. To be fair, I felt this more on later re-readings than the first time, when I was much younger and more easily-impressed. Hergé does keep the wheels turning with misdirection plays and hints of something ominous ever on the horizon. But more than any prior or later completed Tintin story, this is prelude more than adventure.

Most of the book finds Hergé setting up the hows and whys of Calculus’s unique mission. We spend a lot of time learning how spacesuits work, what makes a rocket fly, and even a cross-dimensional representation of what a manned spacecraft would look like – drawn when Yuri Gagarin was still in high school.

The emphasis on practical mechanics over fantasy rambles of yore requires an adjustment. Yet it works in a low-key way.

Calculus: Four years ago rich uranium deposits were found in the heart of the Zmyhlpathian mountains – that is here. The Syldavian Government immediately embarked on the building of an atomic research centre… I’m just completing plans for a nuclear-powered rocket in which I propose to land ON THE MOON!

Professor Calculus is off on another of his long speeches in Destination Moon. Here he reveals himself as not only a forceful speaker, but a surprisingly capable driver. Image from https://www.bdaddik.com/en/vehicles-vessels/1838-collectible-car-tintin-the-blue-jeep-cj2a-destination-moon-n1-29001-2002.html.

Calculus goes on to explain to a disbelieving Haddock that he naturally expects his friends to accompany him. With some resistance, they do.

Destination Moon certainly moves the series in a different direction. The surreal fantasy element that built through the 1940s has entirely disappeared. Political intrigue continues to be a theme, yet of a vaguer sort. We don’t really know who the bad guys are, and the good guys are a shadowy lot, too. One appears to be a traitor; much of Destination Moon is concerned with identifying him before the mission is compromised.

Calculus: Oh misery! Misery! All is lost! Our secrets, our discoveries, lost! Everything will drop into foreign hands! This is appalling!

With Hergé saving most of his ammunition for his follow-up, Explorers On The Moon, the story we get here involves a lot of walking through corridors. Tintin and Haddock journey through the Sprodj Atomic Research Centre observing a massive atomic pile and a test rocket. They get their own green uniforms and are fitted for moon suits. Even Snowy gets one, “a duffle coat with a windscreen,” the pooch dubs it.

The lack of action is compensated for by nifty illustrations like this, an atomic pile where nuclear fuel is harvested for the big blast off to come. Image from http://tintinmovies.blogspot.com/2010/12/destination-moon.html

Calculus’s problematic hearing is temporarily cured, making him less of a butt of humor than prior entries. In fact he’s rather imposing here, a figure of genuine authority for the first time in the series. It’s left to Haddock and Thomson/Thompson to bring the silliness, which they do with sometimes saggy results. Charming as they are, you can feel Hergé really straining to work them for comic relief.

Tintin explores the mountains around the centre for signs of infiltration, running into a gang of bear cubs who hit him up for sandwiches. It’s so gormless and out of place that it reminded me of the gags at the very beginning of the series, in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets, back when Hergé was more babysitter than artist.

Tintin scholars do call out this ropiness of storyline, but with the strong visuals of a working atomic facility in full hum, it’s hard to cavil too much about those bears. The main adventure comes when a pair of enemy agents infiltrate the centre via parachute, not a riveting plot element as it literally drops out of thin air and goes nowhere, but it is followed by a rocket hijacking via remote control which does put all of the technical know-how we have been gleaning into sharp focus.

We have liftoff! The rocket used in Destination Moon is based on the German V-2 rockets that were fired on England, right down to the checker-pattered fuselage (useful in tracking launch motion.) Image from https://them0vieblog.com/2011/10/16/tintin-destination-moon-review/.

The best sequence in the book is the reveal of the big rocket, the one built to send Calculus and company to the Moon. Mentioning that here is not much of a spoiler, since a frame from this sequence fills the cover of the book. But the panel-by-panel reveal is something special, unfolding in the form of an uncharacteristic tantrum by Professor Calculus, who finally has enough of Haddock riding him:

“Slaving for two months non-stop, working myself to the bone, all to hear myself called a goat! It’s too much!”

Calculus is so transformed in this story that at one point we witness him lift a hulking guard off his feet and deposit him on a coat hook. This is kind of fun, but disorienting given how Calculus just ambled along in prior books, content to not hear most of what everyone said. This time, he is more of a bossy know-it-all.

Tintin's Moon adventure made its debut in the pages of Tintin magazine in 1950. The covers promote a fantasy element that fans would have expected. The reality would be different. Image from http://en.tintin.com/albums/show/id/40/page/0/0/destination-moon. 

If the story seems a bit tired, character interaction remains energetic throughout. Not only is Calculus more developed, but Haddock’s constant apoplexy at all that is unfolding around him make him more than ever a kind of reader surrogate for this book. Tintin gets into one big scrap, and even get to launch the test rocket, yet he’s mostly left working the role of narrator, explaining to his friends (and us readers) what is going on.

Of course, the main reason people read this is for the sequel. Explorers On The Moon is the book many cite as a milestone in the Tintin series for the way it imagineered a manned lunar voyage well before even a satellite was sent there. As much as Destination Moon wows with its technical expertise and emphasis on the possible, it is not the book which actually achieves its title destination. You only get the liftoff here.

As the first part of a double act, Destination Moon is clever and enjoyable in the main. A lot more fat than The Adventures Of Tintin typically delivered around this time, yes, but some nutritional value, too. Just be sure to stick around for Part 2.