Week 4: The Comic Book

The reading assignments for me this week was basically one huge blast to the past, and you can’t imagine how delighted I was when I discovered that Tintin was among the comics listed this week. As I child, I absolutely loved the entire series, and I have many fond memories of reading the comics when I was younger.

For one, it was introduced by my mother, who also loved the series and wanted to share it with her children. She’s not an avid comic reader, but she greatly enjoyed the Tintin series due to the interesting plots and whimsical characters. When I was a little kid, I used to borrow the comics from the library; I ended up liking them so much that my mother agreed to buy me the whole series. Since my first real experience with Tintin involved me having to read them from a library, I never really read them in order at first, and therefore didn’t have a proper sense of continuity. Often, I would be confused when they brought up characters or events that happened in prior books. It wasn’t until I had the whole series that I could enjoy reading everything in order.

While I greatly enjoyed the series as a whole, my definite favorites were The Seven Crystal Balls and its sequel, Prisoners of the Sun. Looking back now, I appreciate them because they were the most interesting (the plot had been largely about a group of archaeologists falling into comas under the influence of voodoo after returning home with foreign, sacred memorabilia), but as a child I’d liked them the most because they were the funniest.

I also liked The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure because those two books were the first to introduce Captain Haddock. I had once mentioned in class that Donald Duck eventually became my favorite in the Disney Franchise; the same applies for Captain Haddock of the Tintin series. The two tempestuous, socially awkward, but surely good-hearted characters gradually endeared me over the more two dimensional characters, Mickey Mouse and Tintin.

My favorite part about Tintin has always been the interesting plotlines and especially the humor interjected throughout the story. Tintin’s Explorers of the Moon, for example, had never been a favorite, per se, but I enjoyed the difference of setting in this one. As most of Tintin’s adventures occur on Earth, the fact that the majority of the main cast were able to travel to the moon to have explore it is a nice change of pace. Professor Calculus was also a prominently featured character in this story as well, and the absentminded professor has also always been one of my favorites.

I simply can’t stop mentioning how glad I am to be rereading Tintin. There are so many fond memories attached to the series that I’m happy to be given a chance to revisit it all over again.