The Blood of Tintin

This being my first time actually reading any Tintin comics (I saw the movie), I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The near-constant presence of guns and drugs in these comics was a bit surprising, but I found that what threw me the greatest loop was the pacing. Divorced from their serialization, the strips and panels inside this volume are subjected to some pretty serious narrative / dynamic compression and acceleration. These formal forces make these comics compulsively readable, but they also flatten out their individual narrative and emotional arcs.

Tintin in America sets up Hergé’s narrative formula: set up hurdles for Tintin and Snowy and then watch (and record) their progress. By the eighth panel, our two heroes are trapped in a cab with a gangster. By the fifteenth, they’ve escaped, and by the twenty-ninth, an assailant armed with a boomerang has knocked out the crooked cabbie. It’s a winning formula, one that lets the reader, like the characters inside the comic, leap and bounce all over the place. Exhaustion, however, has to set in at some point, at least for the individual parsing the comic. It’s the fatigue of knowing, with almost complete certainty, that Tintin and Snowy will escape nearly all harm that befalls them, and that the bruises and scratches they are inflicted with will be healed post-haste, if not instantaneously. In these comics, the gutter serves as some sort of magical healing agent. It’s what makes the bullet that grazes Tintin’s shoulder in The Blue Lotus so surprising, and so necessary. Finally, we see our hero bleed, renewing, perhaps only temporarily, our faith in the stakes present in these comics.