Tintin In Tibet – Hergé, 1958-60 ★★★½

On Top of the World with Tintin

I don’t know about you, but when I see Tintin reviews that use terms like “spiritual,” “mature,” and “deeply personal,” I get nervous. I know what I like about Tintin, and those ain’t them.

So I came to Tintin In Tibet with trepidation, not only because it came while author Hergé began losing interest in his towheaded brainchild but also because it has the reputation for being very different from those earlier volumes that entertain me so.

Here’s the thing: Tintin In Tibet is different, yet very enjoyable. And despite what critics say, it’s still Tintin; at times jagged and at other times very efficient, yet consistent in delivering the same joys as yore. So dig in!

The story begins with deceptive quaintness as Tintin and Captain Haddock are on holiday in the French Alps. Haddock can’t understand Tintin’s enthusiasm for mountain hikes (“Mountains should be abolished,” he huffs) but Tintin is serene from his exertion, at least until he dozes off and is struck by a vision of a long-ago friend in peril:

“He was lying there hurt, half-buried by snow… He was holding out his hands and calling to me, ‘Help, Tintin! help!’ It was all so terribly real.”

Tintin awakens with a vision of his endangered friend, in a wonderful illustration that shows the balanced approach taken between drama and comedy. Only deaf Professor Calculus is unaffected by his cry. Image from https://imaginaire.com/en/for-geeks/tintin-carte-postale-tintin-au-tibet-tchang.html.

And so it was, Tintin discovers after reading a letter from that friend, Chang, and a newspaper article. For Chang was on a plane that crashed somewhere in the mountains of Tibet. Convinced the rest of his dream was also true, Tintin sets out to rescue his pal, taking along his faithful pooch Snowy and a reluctant Haddock.

This set-up does challenge us with an unusually dogmatic Tintin, quite certain that Chang survived the crash despite both what the newspaper says and logic dictates. But this is an involving opening delivered with both vim and humor.

The crash site. According to Wikipedia, the debris was originally drawn with Air India markings, until the airline understandably complained. Image from http://en.tintin.com/albums/show/id/44/page/0/0/tintin-in-tibet. 

How invested are we by Tintin’s quest? Readers may remember Chang as Tintin’s pal in The Blue Lotus back in the 1930s, but the guy hasn’t been mentioned since. Hergé stresses the point that Tintin and Chang shared a strong emotional bond, but Tintin endangering himself and his companions on a trek into the formidable Himalayas is a lot for us to accept, even before Hergé throws a yeti into the mix.

The magic ingredient that makes Tintin In Tibet work boils down to one word: friendship. That is, the friendship between Tintin and Haddock, which has been driving the series since the war years and arrives at its fullest expression here.

A sign that Tintin and his party are not alone. The guy at center in green is Tharkey, the Sherpa who leads Tintin, Haddock and Snowy and proves valuable in a tight spot. Image from https://www.fanboysanonymous.com/2014/01/great-snakes-of-tintins-censorship-and.html.

This comes through most clearly because Haddock is not sold at all on the wisdom of Tintin’s trip. More than ever, I think, he is here as the audience surrogate, the one who says what we the readers are thinking:

“Go to Nepal, go to Timbuctoo [sic], go to Vladivostok for all I care! But you’ll be on your own, remember; I’m not coming and that’s flat! And when I say no, I mean no!”

In the next frame, we see an airport in New Delhi two days later, with Haddock and Tintin waiting to board a connecting flight to Kathmandu.

The Indian part of the story is brief, but stands apart as a kind of playful romp, even more than the way India did back in Cigars Of The Pharaoh. That time Tintin learned elephant; here Haddock rides a sacred cow who won’t let the captain step over her.

Normally Haddock's the one at fault when he runs afoul of some local custom, but here he really is the victim of a mischievous cow. Image from a jigsaw puzzle box at https://www.gazette-drouot.com/en/lots/6533054. 

Such scenic larks are usually a Tintin staple; here the story becomes more somber and monochromatic as we reach the snowy foothills of the Himalayas.

That’s the challenge as I see it, once the story settles into the title destination in its second half. How much action and energy can Hergé get from this inhospitable place?

I also wonder about a guy who brings his little pooch on such an expedition, but that may just be me.

For me, the success of Tintin In Tibet is how it continuously finds ways of engaging me while pulling me deeper into the story. There are no comic sidetrips with Thomson and Thompson or Jolyon Wagg (all of whom are absent from this book) or Professor Calculus, who shows up only briefly in the Alps. As many note, there is not even a villain here.

Some of the nice panel work on display in Tintin In Tibet shows Haddock gradually running out of steam on his hike to the Himalayas as his whisky-fueled adrenaline wears off. Image from https://twitter.com/ben_towle/status/962718994078818304?lang=da.

We do have the yeti, who provides some menace and also amusement, particularly when we discover its taste for the Captain’s scotch. But he remains out of view for most of the story, more a perceived threat (especially by the Nepalese escorting Tintin and Haddock) than actual.

What we do get instead is a lot of hiking. Attention to detail is quite strong; Tintin and Haddock even wear sungoggles as protection from the snow glare as they look for signs of Chang.

That is, Tintin looks for Chang. Haddock is more concerned about that yeti who made off with his booze:

My whisky…you Cro-Magnon! …My whisky, you Mameluke, you! …Vampire! …Dipsomanic! …Body-snatcher!

An empty whisky bottle really hits Haddock where he lives. This is from a really fun site that translates Tintin into Scots, which may or may not be a language (even Scottish people disagree) but really fits the Captain to a T. Image from https://tintinscots.com/633-2/

Haddock’s ranting is so explosive it triggers an avalanche – and through it all, Haddock rants on. I’m amazed the porters hung around him as long as they did.

Considering how Tintin In Tibet is a more mature work, the humor is surprisingly solid throughout. Haddock gets himself into a few comic scrapes, yet he does so in ways that make more sense than just ducking off for a drop of the hard stuff or doing something stupid for the heck of it, which can be a frustrating source of Haddock humor in other books.

In fact, Snowy is more the miscreant in this story. A couple of times, we watch him weigh whether or not to do some bad thing while an angel and devil provide competing counsel. Snowy’s conscience is fairly advanced for a dog; just not that advanced.

Snowy has a problem of listening to the wrong dog as Tintin In Tibet unfolds. To be fair, on one occasion there was also a very large bone to consider. Image from http://en.tintin.com/albums/show/id/44/page/0/0/tintin-in-tibet.

But a heavier tone is always there: in Tintin’s driven manner; in the frequent reminders of the hopelessness of any rescue attempt; in the emphasis on cold and isolation.

In one scene, we watch Haddock and Tintin argue over which one of them should sacrifice himself to save the other. That’s a helluva box for Hergé to put us in, but he finds two ways to make it pay off, first by puncturing the tension with some amusing Haddock clumsiness, then following it with a nifty surprise reveal that feels lifted from a Spielberg movie before its time.

One of many large illustrations that demonstrate the attention to detail in Tintin In Tibet. We won't spend much time at all in Kathmandu, but you feel like a real visitor before the story moves on. Image from https://www.reddit.com/r/Nepal/comments/1d3jl1/tin_tin_came_looking_for_some_nepalese_indica/. 

Speaking of reveals, the book ends on one of the most poignant reveals in the series, a single wordless image that gently pulls the reader out of the story just as it ends. It boils down to that word again. So glad we don’t get a gag!

In short, while Tintin In Tibet does present weightier themes and a more grown-up Tintin than expected, the book fits in quite nicely with the larger mission of light entertainment established in earlier volumes. It’s not a departure so much as an augmentation.

I haven’t talked about the art, which is really fantastic throughout, or Hergé’s sense of pace or narrative, which is as polished as it ever was. This is a story about a boy on a mission, delivered by an artist on his own mission to revitalize what inspired him to create Tintin in the first place. The result brings together the passion and skill that made this series so much fun for so long.