Author: Seb Palmer

Bravely topical at the time, now just beautiful period-piece fun.

A classic Tintin adventure that finds our earnest hero travelling to Syldavia for the first time (he returns in Hergé’s lunar themed double bill), in the company of the mysterious Professor Alembick, sigillographer. Embroiled in tense cross-border politics, court intrigues, and a general ripping good yarn, our doughty young reporter and his faithful canine sidekick Snowy escape numerous jams on their quest for good wholesome adventurous fun.

Whilst the artwork was, as noted by other reviewers elsewhere – I originally posted an earlier version of this review on Amazon’s UK website – reworked when colourised postwar, nonetheless Hergé’s gift for beautiful crisp drawing and strong clean layout was, by this stage, more or less fully formed. The courtly costumes are great, as are the pseudo-historical ‘tourist guide’ spreads Tintin reads on the plane to Syldavia.

Hergé’s storytelling is also growing stronger; although the episodic cliffhanger moments, suited so well to the original serialised format these were first presented in, may occasionally appear contrived to adults, returning to this material, the joins probably won’t be visible to young readers.

This was an early youthful favourite of mine, so I’ve a partisan soft spot for it, but it is now, like almost all Hergé’s Tintin books, simply a wonderfully innocent period piece. That it manages to remain innocent despite Tintin’s royal(ist) imbroglio, and the political parallels between the Syldavia/Borduria dispute and the dark period of European history just then unfolding (this was originally written and published in the late 1930s) is fascinating. 

Hergé certainly appears in a bolder and more favourable light here than he would if you only read Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets, or Tintin In The Congo. Especially when one considers – though we have the benefit of hindsight – the dangers posed by the forces of fascism at this time (just before and during WWII), who might’ve chosen to take potentially fatal offense.

But ultimately, like all the Tintin adventures, this is, first, foremost, and fundamentally, good old-fashioned fun.

Seeing Tintin in the UK is great for those of us in the UK, and there are some beautiful pictures here that capture aspects of British and Scottish life and landscape now largely lost, but still discernible here and there. Like Tintin in Tibet, The Black Island features a lovable hairy gorilla type creature in a prominent role, allowing Hergé to play with our perceptions of nature vs. nurture, brutality, fear and tenderness. All of which typifies the breadth and depth of enjoyment one can still draw, even as an adult, from these ‘picture books for kids’.

Troubled soul, rock n roll poet, troubadour and cowboy, Phil Lynott was (and still is) a big noise in the OST of my life.

Over lockdown, during this bizarre Covid-19 pandemic period, I’ve ‘finally discovered’ Facebook. I mention this up front, despite it not being the central point of this post at all.

The central point of this post is much more about, well… lots of stuff, actually. Some of the things it’s about are: blogging; me and other folk; life in general; social interactions; goals (or lack thereof), and prob’ much more besides.

First, a brief return to the FB motif. I’ve always had an initial reaction against cyber-era ‘social media’. From the very early days, when a buddy would visit us and disappear online, before the www was even ‘a thing’, when the monster it has become now was little more than a hatching egg, to now, when things like Tik Tok and Twitter strike me as symptomatic of goldfish brained narcissism.

However, despite my innate antipathy, and perhaps due to the enforced isolation of the last year or two, FB has become a welcome way to maintain some semblance of relationships. Far from such convivial ideals as fabulous dinner parties, or swanky soirées with the cultural elite, if such things appeal, yes. But human interaction, of sorts.

I’ve also now got two blogs. This one, and my ‘mini-military’ wargaming and model-making (and military history book/film reviewing!) one. I’m very errotic in how I post on both, oscillating ‘twixt feast and famine, manic depressive or bipolar style binges alternating with long layoffs.

But this inability to stay with one thing in a continuous way is key to me being me, or so I’ve come to believe. And I view the specialisation that the modem world promotes (and rewards) as, pretty much, anathema. Peter Burke quotes sci-fi author Bob Heinlein saying ‘specialisation is for insects’ in The Polymath!

One of the many issues – the downsides (of course it has up sides too!) – with professional specialisation is that it ghettoises our lives and our minds. Such that it becomes increasingly difficult to know what others are really doing, and people wind up in little self-contained self-referential bubbles.

I think a major desire behind doing this blog is a fervent (if possibly forlorn?) wish to connect with people, but hopefully on or through a very broad spectrum of interests and activities. To have conversations. Some might be backslapping agreement orgies, others tense and slightly spiky debates. But an exchange of information, ideas, views. All of that stuff!

Being a bit of a ‘lone wolf’ and recluse, I don’t get too much social intercourse! Nor am I embedded in any institutions that might nourish the full breadth, or even just little bits, of what interests me. So setting out my stall, my wares, here might give me a space to find such things as community and conversation? I hope so!

It’s often said that social media outlets are, and may only ever be, rather facile. I think they quite clearly are, a great deal of the time. But I don’t think it’s inevitable that they always will be, or must be. Indeed, whilst I can and do enjoy the convivial banter that is internet small talk, I’m generally more interested in pursuing things a little deeper.

But can one get really deep? Is this in actual fact impossible online, esp’ when one is widely diverse in one’s interests? I believe, personally, that it is not impossible. But I may be wrong! Clearly if one dedicates all ones’ time to just one, or at max’ a couple of things, one can, rather obviously, explore that thing, or those few things, more thoroughly. But there’s also a danger that over-specialisation sees experts disappear up their own fundaments, and lose relevance to others, even in closely related or neighbouring fields.

These ideas are addressed, although perhaps ironically in no great depth – given, again, the breadth of his subjects/study – in Peter Burke’s aforementioned The Polymath. But for now I feel content to set this issue of depth to one side (to be returned to again in future, most definitely), in favour of addressing some other topics.

The next item on my improvised agenda again relates to variety, and picks up, whilst simultaneously moving off from, the theme of depth. And this I’ll describe as ‘range’: I’m quite happy for posts here to sometimes be the briefest and lightest, and others, intense serious and involved. This blog is me, online, not just one aspect of me, unlike AQOS, my mini-military blog, which does have a specialist focus. But even there I want to range from light and/or silly to dark and/or profound!

So, as examples, I want to post series here covering all or parts of a given musicians’ works. Or the equivalent for a visual artist, or whatever. Book and film reviews might be quick and flippant, or long and serious. A current series is short reviews of the entire Tintin adventures, plus some related ancillary stuff. But running parallel with that are reviews of and thoughts about more philosophical stuff.

It’s my hope and belief that such variety is good in life, and I want that richness and variety in both my life, and this blog. Hopefully that also means that there’s something here for many types of potentially interested readers, in many different moods and registers.

Truth be told, I don’t think this blog is visited much, as yet. I try and promote it, mainly on FB. But I worry that it’ll bore friends! Plus a common reaction is ‘who wants to know what you – a nobody (this bit is inferred, rather than said out right) – thinks about whatever?’ But, you know what, at present I simply don’t care about that. I have my interests, and I want to pursue them. So I do.

AQOS has been going a while now, and gathered a certain amount of its own momentum. I hope and trust the same might happen here? If it never does, then there almost certainly will come a time where I cease to be bothered with doing it. Or then again, maybe not? Who knows!?

Having given some reasons for why I bother doing this bloggery stuff, I now want to address further related ideas, such as monetisation, other possible motivations, or root causes, etc. Starting with the latter, I think that writing for Drummer got this whole shebang started. My monthly Recycled column, a classic (or obscure) album, written about with an emphasis on the drumming, was just gravy to me. Getting paid to wax lyrical about music that (for the most part) I loved!? A dream gig!

This lead in turn to posting reviews of favourite albums on Amazon UK’s website, and then books as well. And then Amazon Vine ‘recruited’ me, off the back of the growing number of ‘helpful’ votes other shoppers/users would leave. I’m still an enthusiastic Amazon Viner (ranked, at the time of writing this, in their top 300 reviewers). But that’s a topic for another post.

With Drummer mag defunct, and AQOS established and ongoing, I figured I really ought to have a more personal but complete and more broad-based blog, attached to my sebpalmer.com domain. AQOS is a Google Blogger thing. So I figured I’d try using WordPress for my own broader personal blog.

Typing all this now reminds me that sebpalmer.com was originally my illustration website. I need to update and upgrade that aspect of the website, as it’s lain dormant and unchanged for too many years now. And, more importantly still, I want to be making and promoting/selling original art. But once again, these last two are subjects for another post.

The final thing on tonight’s agenda relates to two aspects of this blog: why I do it at all; and what I’ll call ‘flashpoints’. I’ve already said that I hope this blog will evolve in such a way as to connect me to people, hopefully through shared interests, and with a view to mutual (intellectual) enrichment. Like so many nowadays, I can both glean a lot of value, or waste a lot of time and energy, online.

This sharing of myself and my interests is neither purely altruistic, nor (at all!) monetised. I did say earlier that I’d address ‘mammon’! So I’ll do that now. Sure, I’d like this activity to in some way help me generate an income. Not because I especially or particularly want that, but because under current social circumstances that’d make life a lot easier. But I do have issues with money. Monetising activities can poison them, in my view. But that’s it for now, on that topic. I’ll return to this line soon enough.

So, last of all, ‘flashpoints’. What I mean by this term is when something one says or does causes a reaction, and that then sets in motion a chain of further reactions. I’m going to very deliberately not mention the most recent nodal point for such an event.

Instead what I want to do is note an irony: let’s say I admire twenty different art works, and I post about them all individually online. It might be that my top five favourites elicit little or no response. Whilst a piece much further down my list, in terms of my interest in it, sets off a clamour of reactions.

I then react to those reactions. And maybe that leads to several discussions, whether amicable, hostile, or mixed. The biggest irony for me in such situations has nothing to do with the things the flashpoint might be alleged to be about, or to represent, but is instead about how this process misrepresents one’s actual interest in the series of artworks.

As nobody, or very few, react to what I’m most interested in, those things can pass unnoticed and unremarked, whilst, at the same time, things of much lesser import (to me) get amplified, due to them prompting multiple reactions. And thereby they appear to take on undue significance.

This post is, by now, long enough, I think. And yet I’ve still not addressed myriad things – such as goals – I had in mind when I started it. But those many things will have to wait for another post!

I love the hapless ill-fated villains in Tintin And The Broken Ear, Alonso and Ramon. There’s also a talking parrot, an amnesiac, and general Alcazar makes what I believe is his first appearance.

As usual there’s some beautiful ‘bandes dessinées’ artwork from Hergé, the lushly rendered jungle being very evocative, and he pays his usual attention to detail, basing the ‘Arumbaya fetish’ on a real statuette from an ethnographic museum that, I believe, he discovered in his home locality.

I think this one is perhaps really a four-star only affair. But as it was one of the very first Tintin adventures I acquired, and subsequently one of the first to fall apart from repeated readings, it has a special place in my heart.

The story is fine, if a bit of the run of the mill type, as Tintin adventures go. But it also belongs to the ‘first quarter’, one might say, during which the Tintin albums were growing into full maturity. So, despite the fact I did, I wouldn’t advise the Tintin newbie to start here.

Still, good solid globe-trotting adventuring fun, and, like all of ‘em, essential for the true Tintinologist!

In Tintin’s fifth adventure Hergé gives his readers a first small but welcome taste of continuity and grander plot-structuring, starting the story with Tintin in India, and picking up some of the threads of the last adventure, Cigars of The Pharaoh. Whilst not quite as fully realised an idea as it will later become, this gently points the way to the later run of two-part adventures.

There’s also some continuity in terms of characters, with Rastapopoulos (who debuted in the previous adventure) reappearing, and two new characters who will recur later in Tintin’s adventures making their entry, namely Dawson (here police chief in the international settlement in Shanghai, and cropping up again later as an arms dealer in Red Sea Sharks), and  Chang, who Tintin will search for in Tibet.

Whilst the artwork is still not Hergé’s best, it is improving (although the extensive redraws the series went through by Hergé and his team make this aspect harder to track accurately), as is his storytelling prowess. This said, he falls back on Tintin’s war against drug-smuggling again, as a central plot theme, but at least the transparently patched together episodic nature of his adventures in Africa and America is replaced by a more structured narrative.

Hergé’ and/or Tintin’s relationship to other races and cultures remains a little tricky in places, but he’s making improvements. Some black characters shown in frames depicting the League of Nations still resemble antiquated golliwogs (so not much different from his In The Congo stuff), and his portrayal of the Japanese is quite harsh. But he makes an effort, especially on page 43, to draw attention to the issue of cross-cultural understanding, in what looks now a rather heavy-handedly didactic series of frames in which Tintin and Chang discuss the inaccuracy of each other’s cultural stereotypes.

But all in all, the transformation from the ill-drawn, ill-scripted, patchily episodic propaganda of In The Land Of The Soviets to the much higher standards of The Blue Lotus is both massive, remarkable, and more or less complete. So much so in fact that by the time Hergé gets to his fifth instalment in what was to be 24 finished stories (not counting the unfinished Alph-Art), the series from then on would maintain a more less consistent level of excellence: after the sharp climb of the first five books, there would be a steady but gradual shallow slope of improvement.

Certainly a must for any serious Tintin-ophile, and arguably the first ‘classic’ adventure.

With a relatively smooth continuity between Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus Hergé gives his readers their first glimpse of what later became the classic Tintin ‘double-bill’ format. 

In COTP which, like the later adventure The Crab With The Golden Claws, is basically a drug smuggling yarn, Hergé introduces the smoothly plausible but deviously villainous movie-mogul Rastapopolous, who will return in several future Tintin adventures, including, naturally enough, the Blue Lotus, it following on from COTP as it does. 

COTP’s Dr/Prof, Sophocles Sarcophagus, is a kind of experimental forerunner of Cuthbert Calculus, particularly in his absent-mindedness and mis-hearing or misapprehending things. Like Shooting Star’s Decimus Phostle and (prof/doc?) Alembick (KOS), Sarcophagus allows Hergé to experiment with the ‘mad professor’ type. In this instance the scientist does become literally mad, and is left that way, whereas Calculus is just ‘dotty’, absorbed in his own world of experiment and inquiry, and not at all lunatic. We are also introduced to Thomson and Thompson for the first time.

Hergé’s craft is clearly developing, inasmuch as these two adventures are better plotted, drawn and generally realsed than either Congo or America. But his skills are evolving, and this work, whilst very enjoyable, is not yet on a par with his best (the next three double-bills, Calculus, Tibet or Flight 714). Although substantially reworked, as was much of his early work, traces of Hergé’s earlier ‘long-body’ style remain apparent, and at this point contextual/background detail is more cursory on the whole than in later adventures. 

Having said all this, it’s still long on good old-fashioned fun. 

This was the second Tintin book I got as a child, so I have a certain nostalgic attachment to it. Looking back now it’s not amongst the best of Tintin’s adventures. But, it being a very early work, that’s not so surprising.

As well as taking on the mob – although his main adversary in the adventure ends up being the fictitious Bobby Smiles, the very real Al Capone is the mobster behind the criminal network Tintin is initially pitted against (following on from mention of Al Capone in Tintin in the Congo*) – our young reporter is embroiled in, amongst other things, an oil discovery, leading to a surreal sequence in which a city springs up instantly around him, and numerous other scrapes.

These allow him to narrowly escape being killed by Indians, lynched by rednecks, turned into dog food, or drowned in the bay by mobsters, and numerous other grisly ends. In this early adventure the serial nature of the original story is more apparent than in later, smoother works.

I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point, but for those who know and love Tintin it’s an essential part of the saga. There was much better to come, but this story retains a place in my heart and my collection, both for old times’ sake, and for its own early Tintin-era charm.

* These being, as far as I know, the only times Hergé refers to a real person in the Tintin books.

I was inspired to do this project by the amazing living hornbeam construction at Het Loos, in Belgium. Monty Don visits it in his excellent series Around The World In 80 Gardens, which is how I learned about it.

Our entire garden would fit inside one of the green corridors you see in the picture atop this post! Ours is necessarily a more modest affair, being a small near square construction.

So far it’s just the basic framework. I did the floor in weed suppressing fabric and wood chippings. Alas, local moggies, inc. our beloved Tigger, have been delighted with the sudden appearance of a huge kitty-litter tray. Consequently one has to watch one’s step.

I have the cast-iron ends of a nice garden bench, found and filched from the local dump. Literally plucked from the scrap metal skip. Yet another project in the pending list is finding suitable timber to put that back together.

The idea is to have it inside the green room, as a place to sit and enjoy the dappled shade it’ll one day supply. Hopefully by then I’ll have found a way to stop cats defecating in the wood chips!?

 

Interesting as much for its ‘issues’ as its strengths. Neither the best of Hergé’s artwork – the original edition; it has now been redrawn! – nor storytelling, Tintin In The Congo is most notable for the ways in which it reveals itself to be a product of its times.

The second Tintin adventure, following the anti-Communist propaganda of Tintin’s debut In The Land Of The Soviets, the modern version of Congo is so heavily redrawn that it doesn’t quite sit easily, visually speaking, in its ‘proper’ chronological place. Tintin’s body shape is a key giveaway: early unaltered strips have a less naturalistic feel, with a longer torso and strangely compressed legs.

I was very sad to discover that the version I have is, in an issue related to the redrawing, a somewhat sanitised or Bowdlerised one. Without spoiling it for you, whilst Tintin and Snowy do little to endear themselves to the conservation and wildlife movements, an infamously shocking rhinoceros/dynamite episode (from the early version) is, sadly in my view, toned right down.

The characterisation of native Africans is likewise potentially shocking to the modern viewer, belonging firmly to a bygone ‘golliwog’ era. But despite the rather patronising caricature approach, it’s largely (although not exclusively) the Europeans of the story who are actually the chief villains.

A mixed but interesting chapter then, and a curio worth having (and enjoying), in the extensive Tintin catalogue. Not the best, but nonetheless essential for any real Tintin fan.