4 out of 5

Collects Tintin’s first three books: in America, Cigars of the Pharaoh, and The Blue Lotus

Though it starts up something like a Three Stooges comic, by the second book Hergé already shows leaps of progress in terms of storytelling and art style, the former of which branches out even more in book three, where the many, many plot threads require pages jammed to the very brim with informative, yet easy to read panels.

The progenitor of the ligne claire style, Tintin sticks to a fairly predictable 12-panel layout to tell, in this collection, three 60ish page tales of calamity and adventure wherein the seemingly ageless title character (and pal Snowy, with his French ‘wooah’ barks), a ‘reporter’, randomly decides to eradicate crime in Chicago or, hey, travel to Shanghai on a whiff of opportunity to quash an opium ring.  ‘in America’ has a very loose sense of whimsy to it, Americans cast as a boiling pot of crooked gangsters and Indians and Tintin just stumbles from narrow escape to narrow escape, sometimes via pure luck, sometimes due to his quick thinking or ever-handy gun and sometimes (often) a mixture of both.  The layouts in book one are the most ‘classic’ in terms of a Looney Tunes sense of setup and mishap, the backgrounds often just serviceable landscapes to tell us we’re in the mountains or desert or etc.  Hergé holds on to the whimsy and some slapstick humor for ‘Pharaoh’ and ‘Lotus,’ but suddenly our settings feel much richer (from India to China) and more researched and more attemptedly respectable.  And there’s more mindfulness of Snowy.  Often in book one, the dog will disappear when its convenient and then randomly reappear at his master’s side, but later, he’s treated more as a character and not just a chattering foil…  Which is a nice, pre-Garfield touch, animal’s words being transcribed for us, the reader, and characters responding in a somewhat ambiguous way as to whether or not they, also, understand those words.  This is played on a bit in ‘Pharaoh’ when Tintin ‘learns’ how to speak elephant through an instrument proxy, but it’s some clever scripting on Hergé’s behalf that gives us another character to indirectly relate information  without having to halt the flow of things to explain a talking dog.  The art, as mentioned, gets more complex from book one to two, the characters often place in detailed surroundings that required constant redrawing from tiny panel to tiny panel and book three achieving almost a manic mash of tiny action as the panels pile up on some pages, upward of fifteen.  The word balloons have that classic, European squared look to them, with some flair in their squiggly corners, and Hergé has a good grasp of how to pace his dialogue and size the balloons so they are never intrusive, even though the books are, for sure, definite reads and not just skimmable pictures.

And as a read – it’s rewarding.  As lighthearted as it looks, there’s an air of literature to these even though they boil down to something like action pulps.  It’s a bit all over the map with its story (Hergé finding all sorts of random ways to keep Tintin involved in the action), and I have a hard time imagining all of the globe-trotting intrigue as being directly interesting for a younger audience (I don’t think the book looks exciting to young eyes), but if a moment with Snowy grabs the imagination, then perhaps the book’s hooks will be in.  But who cares about those effing kids.  For me, (totes an adult, dog) it’s the perfect book to balance out the candy coated stuff with the more obtuse stuff I read, and the L,B and C stitched binding with a square, fully-openable spine and mini-trade sizing make it perfect for toting along.