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.
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 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.
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!”
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.
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.
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