The Adventures of Tintin Volume 7 - Herge
I'm not exactly sure what the official title of this book is (something like Tintin 3-in-1 Volume 7) but it includes the stories "The Castafiore Emerald," "Flight 714," and "Tintin & the Picaros." I'd heard of Tintin before, maybe sometime in college, but never actually knew much about it. In The Read Aloud Handbook, which I recently read, the author has a section about comic books: mostly about how they're not as bad as you might suppose. But one comic he particularly praises is Tintin, because each story contains a tremendous number of words, comparable to a short book.
So, I came across this volume at the library and decided to check it out. Of course, being Volume 7, many of the recurring characters were supposed to be familiar to me already but weren't. From what I gather, there's Tintin (a reporter, though he's more of a MacGyver-like character, always getting into adventures), curmudgeonly Captain Haddock, the somewhat daft and mostly deaf Professor Calculus, and Tintin's dog Snowy. Still, the three stories here were a good mix and introduction to the world of Tintin. "The Castafiore Emerald" was a more slapstick comedy of errors; "Flight 714" ventured into sci-fi territory, and "Tintin & the Picaros" was about toppling a corrupt regime.
The text (translated from the French, I think) is fairly sophisticated, particularly for comics, and the humor ranges from visual jokes in the background to slapstick to odd little running jokes (wrong numbers always seem to go to Cutts, the butcher, for instance). I really enjoyed the book and plan to read some more in the future.
Fed to jonathan's brain | May 19, 2006
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