Tintin And The Picaros – Hergé, 1975-76 ★★

Tintin Takes his Time

The last completed Tintin adventure is a minor dud, not terrible but deflating. You do get some of the character-based charm and striking visuals characteristic of prime Tintin. What’s lacking is engagement.

Eight years had passed since the prior album, and with that long gap you sense an author tired of his creation. Hergé still has enough in the tank, though; the finale blends humor and suspense, a Tintin trademark.

Getting there is the problem.

The story returns us to the fictional Latin American nation of San Theodoros, which Tintin and his dog Snowy visited in The Broken Ear. Tintin’s old friends Bianca Castafiore and the detectives Thomson and Thompson are prisoners there, accused of somehow conspiring against San Theodoros’ nasty regime.

A sign of San Theodorean brutality: You can't even buy a cigar without facing a cordon of armed soldiers. Image from https://twitter.com/calibreobscura/status/1063189911665328129?lang=no.

Its leader, General Tapioca, even accuses Tintin and his friends of being part of the plot:

“Let them tremble, I say!…Cowards, skulking in their dusty mansion…puppet-masters in this vile conspiracy!…Tremble, crooked Captain Haddock!…Tremble, treacherous Tintin and crafty Cuthbert Calculus!”

Tintin And The Picaros reintroduces Tintin to old acquaintances. It gets us back to South America, a region which spurred Hergé’s design creativity back in Prisoners Of The Sun and does so again here. The accent on humor is strong, but what’s with the main characters?

Tintin is now into yoga and doesn’t want to go on pointless adventures, even when his friends are in trouble. Snowy, once Tintin’s closest companion, now has little to do but stare at the floor. Haddock suddenly can’t stand the taste of whisky or any other alcoholic beverage (“Some anamorphic aardvark switched my whisky for this…this cleaning fluid!”) which causes Calculus to giggle mysteriously.

No whisky for Captain Haddock. If you find this sort of thing funny, you are in luck. Haddock does it a lot in Tintin And The Picaros. Image from http://en.tintin.com/albums/show/id/47/page/0/0/tintin-and-the-picaros.

All this takes a while to come into focus. For the first twenty pages, the story is a protracted build up to a big confrontation which never happens, Haddock and Calculus versus General Tapioca, who challenges them to come to San Theodoros and prove their innocence. It’s all just a trap, as Tintin explains when he magically appears at Haddock’s door.

That may seem a spoiler, except the title of this book, not to mention the whole run of the series, makes clear Tintin will play a key role here. The Picaros are the rebels in this story, led by General Alcazar, Tintin’s friend in The Broken Ear (though he gave Tintin and Haddock the brush-off in the later Red Sea Sharks). Alcazar wants to overthrow Tapioca and help save Bianca and the Ts, but to do that he must overcome the habitual drunkenness of his men, a bad habit encouraged by Tapoica’s airdrops of Loch Lomond whisky.

“Caramba!” Alcazar exclaims. “How can one mount a revolution with that bunch of drunks?”

Alcazar (on the left) takes in what happens after Tapoica drops some crates of whisky on a rebel camp. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/215328425914202939/. 

For amusement, Hergé gives Alcazar an annoying spouse and has obnoxious insurance man Jolyon Wagg drop in on the rebel encampment with a tourist group:

“Are these real guerrillas?”

“It’s terrifically Tarzan, dear, don’t you think?”

It’s not all that, actually, but once Hergé knocks off his bad habit of repeating the same story exposition every other page, it moves better than that dreadful Flight 714 did. More critically, it gives Tintin something real to do, which is helping Alcazar without compromising his ethics by ensuring the overthrow be as bloodless as possible.

Any Tintin book that sneaks in a guest appearance by Asterix is going to score points with me. Apparently Snoopy is in there too, somewhere, though I can’t find him. Both show up as costumes – along with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Groucho Marx – in San Theodoros’ big Mardi-Gras-style street celebrations.

The rebels sneak into San Theodoros's capitol disguised as revelers. Among the eye candy visible here are posters on the left advertising the pending executions of Thomson and Thompson. Image from https://crossover.bureau42.com/zasterixtintin.html.

The outdoor carnival also includes floats and festive signs, which keep the visuals engaging. Backgrounds are one part of the Tintin adventures which kept improving over time – just compare how San Theodoros looks here with the way it did in The Broken Ear.

Once they get outside, that it. For much of the book, they are cooped up either in Marlinspike or in the high-security modern-art-furnished house where General Tapioca has them effectively locked up.

Inspiration for the Picaros came from Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolutionaries, whom Hergé admired. But by the mid-1970s Castro had gone from rebel with a cause to Soviet-backed strongman. Hergé works this into the plot by making clear Alcazar has no regard for the poor of his country. He just wants power; we root for him anyway.

Alcazar gets hot with Tintin when the latter proposes a bloodless coup. He's got the Castro cigar and the army fatigues, though instead of Fidel's many mistresses just one fat, shrewish wife. Image from https://www.tumgir.com/tag/tintin%20and%20the%20picaros.

This sort of cynicism ill-becomes a Tintin story, and worse, trickles into the rest of Picaros. Back in The Broken Ear, Tintin spared a villain who later helped Tintin in turn, rewarding Tintin’s good nature. The character is reintroduced in Picaros and greeted as a friend, only to set up Tintin for assassination. No reason is given for this.

Haddock just can’t get his booze on for some reason, and spits out glass after glass until it is revealed Professor Calculus has dosed him with pills that render him unable to tolerate alcohol. Haddock is displeased about this, but it is Calculus who gets angry:

Tintin: “But I never knew you had…”

Calculus: “No, young man, I am not mad!…And I would ask you to show a little more respect towards a man of mature years!”

Hergé must have enjoyed drawing Calculus grimacing; he's angry a lot in Tintin And The Picaros. Here he meets some of San Theodoros' Arumbaya tribe. Image from http://en.tintin.com/news/index/rub/10/id/4337/0/tintin-in-cuba.  

Calculus was never my favorite Tintin character, but he really does a shark-jump this time, fuming in constant rage and unable to make out a word of what anyone else says. The professor’s long-tired deafness gag gets run into the ground.

Other Tintin characters had also turned into one-dimensional jokes by this point in the series – namely Thompson and Thomson and Bianca Castafiore – but Hergé finds a way of injecting them into Picaros just enough. In fact, he cleverly makes their rescue the main mission, keeping them on the sidelines but in the mix.

Also on the sidelines in 1976 was Tintin, out of action since 1968. He missed everything from the Paris riots to the real Moon landings to the entire Nixon Administration. The look of the book is very much in keeping with the 1970s. Tintin has shed his plus-fours for dungarees, and in one panel is shown wearing a motorcycle helmet with a peace-sign decal.

By 1979, when Tintin celebrated his 50th anniversary, he appeared on the cover of Tintin magazine as a sadistic captor keeping Hergé prisoner. Hergé by then had transitioned from active artist to legacy caretaker. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herg%C3%A9.

Even in his new clothes, Tintin looks like a fish out of water. Hergé’s attempts at modernizing his appearance only reveal how much Tintin was a character of another time, perhaps even timeless, but a bad fit in the bell-bottomed 1970s.

Picaros isn’t bad, just underfocused. There is a lot of high energy, some genuine moments of amusement amid the silliness, and cleverness in the storyline to compensate for a slow beginning and Hergé’s lack of buy-in.

Hergé drafted dialogue and panels for another adventure, but by then he was in his 70s and Tintin And Alph-Art would remain unfinished. What we do get for a swan song instead is a charming if half-baked adventure, not at all the worst in the series, or even that bad when looked at alone, but hardly representative of the brilliance of Hergé or of his effortless command on both his creation and his audience.