Tintin’s 88-years-old but new as ever

BENGALURU: Tintin is eighty-eight years old, can you imagine? He first appeared in serialised form in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, on the 10th of 1929, in the section for young readers of the French newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (i.e. The Twentieth Century). It is the twenty-first century now, and Tintin is as much a part of the childhood of my tiny nephews and nieces, as he was mine. Some things never change.

What can I say about Tintin that will be new to you? That inquisitive young reporter with the orange quaff and the talking dog has perhaps been a part of your life as well, just as he has been mine. In fact, most of you would have your own Tintin stories to tell, and I will be interested to hear about them and trade anecdotes.

Did you know that Hergé i.e. Georges Remi, the creator of the series considered Tintin in Tibet to be his favourite story? I am not surprised, it is a delightful story about friendship.

My personal favourite is the two part-series – The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. It’s perhaps the most thrilling of all Tintin stories, and has a supporting cast to die for! Along with Tintin and Captain Haddock and Snowy, this was one of the pieces where you find Professor Calculus at his finest. Also, General Alcazar returns after the escapades of The Broken Ear, which is another story that I rate very highly. Zorrino, the boy Tintin befriends, plays a key role, and is an important addition to the list of characters.

This is a thrill-a-minute ride, which I read in translation, serialised in a Bengali-language biweekly. Imagine the eager anticipation with which I would count days ‘til I would get to read the next two pages of the story!

My friends and I had memorized all the Billions-of-Blistering-Barnacles that Captain Haddock would inflict on the objects of his fury – I remember being chastised by a friend as a thundering typhoon, when I got out, first ball, in a cricket match. Don’t we all have such stories?

Tintin evolved as a character as Hergé did as a human – the first few stories of the series, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in Congo, would create a jarring tone in this day and age, with their racial stereotypes, their animal cruelty, and the nod to a colonialist mindset.

But Hergé started writing the series when he was 22, and if one reads through the series in chronological order as I once did, I found it fascinating how he developed as a conscientious human being and Tintin developed to become a paean to humanity, and stood for much more than just the content of the stories.
My boy is too little to read yet, but I am stocking up on the Tintins, my old ones have given way.