In "The Crab with the Golden Claws", Tintin is walking along with Snowy, who investigates an empty tin of Crab and gets it stuck on his face. Tintin pulls it off and throws the tin into a rubbish bin, then goes to meet Thompson and Thomson in a pub, where they tell him that someone is minting fake 50 pence pieces. They are so good that even the two policemen have been fooled. But in the evidence is a piece of paper showing part of the same logo of the crab tin. Tintin looks for the one he discarded, but it is gone.
At home, he finds fine writing on the piece of Crab paper saying Karaboudjan, which just so happens to be a ship in dock. Sailors on the boat attempt to drop a crate on him but miss. Meanwhile, Thompson and Thomson show up to search the boat, and Tintin asks to come along, but once on the boat, he's diverted and imprisoned. As the ship heads out to sea, Tintin realizes he isn't going anywhere for a while, but manages to overpower one of his guards and get into the hold. There, he finds that the cargo is champagne and tins of crab. But when he is found again, they tell him he will soon starve in there. He laughs and opens up a tin of crab... to discover it contains opium!
Well, this puts a different complexion on things, and Tintin escapes into the Captain's Cabin. The Captain is a man named Haddock, an old drunkard hired so that if the ship was seized, he would take the blame for the smuggling of the Opium. But when Tintin tells him what has been going on, he confesses that he doesn't take part in the running of the ship. That's the job of the mate. Since Haddock was hired, all he's done is sit in his cabin and drink. They escape together, but Haddock's mania for drink causes Tintin no end of problems, from setting their boat afire to nearly getting them killed in the desert. Can Tintin find and take down the Opium Smugglers, and can he save Captain Haddock from himself and his drinking problem?
In "The Shooting Star" a meteor crashes into the sea after several scientists think it will destroy the earth. Tintin, Captain Haddock, and a scientist named Professor Phostle set out to find it and bring it back to France for the sake of science, but another group of scientists, backed by a Sao Rican Bank official, want to be the first ones to the meteor and stake claim to it for the sake of their own country's science.
While Tintin and crew are first into the water, the Sao Rican group uses its pull to cause trouble for the English and French crew no matter where they go. They are denied fuel for their ship, attacked, sabotaged and more, all to deny them the meteorite. But Tintin manages to be first to the meteorite and plant the flag of his own crew on the the floating meteorite. But can he survive on the surface until the rest of the crew of Haddock's ship comes to pick him up, or will the meteorite be too dangerous even for him to survive?
In "The Secret of the Unicorn" Tintin follows the Thom(p)sons to the market, where there have been a rash of wallet thefts. There, he buys a model of a boat for Captain Haddock, but soon after he buys it, two men approach him, trying to buy the model, but Tintin declines to sell it, wanting to really give it to the Captain.
Back at his apartment, Snowy knocks over the ship, breaking the mast. Luckily, Tintin is able to repair it. Haddock, coming to visit Tintin, is awed when he sees the ship and tells Tintin he must go to Haddock's home to see something. That is a painting of a battle taken place on the boat of Captain Haddock's ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock. The Ship that is in the painting, The Unicorn, is the same one owned by Captain Haddock's ancestor.
When they return to Tintin's apartment, it has been broken into and the model stolen. Tintin thinks one of the men who offered to buy it off him stole it, and goes to the home of the nearest man, named Sakharin. He has a model of the boat, but its mast is unbroken, so Tintin knows he isn't the thief. He returns home again to find his apartment ransacked, and while cleaning up, he finds a small roll of ancient parchment that he concludes must have been in the model.
The Parchment contains a riddle that claims there are three Unicorns, and when they come together, they will show where a great treasure is hidden, by which Tintin reasons out that there were three models, and each holds a clue to the trasure. But can he and Captain Haddock work out the clues, and catch the people behind the stealing of the model and the ransacking of the Apartment?
This set of adventures was much better than some of the early Tintin adventures. They are entertaining without being overdone, with the exception of the first story, which beats Captain Haddock's liquor problem to death with a stick over and over and over again. At the end of the story, the Captain quits drinking and becomes the head of the Sailor's Temperance League, but that doesn't even quite last until the end of the story.
Liquor remains a problem for Haddock all through the series, and Tintin seemingly is willing to take advantage of that fact, often plying the captain with drink to get his help in one of Tintin's adventures. This is in direct contrast with "The Crab with the Golden Claws", where Tintin takes a very dim view of the Captain's Problem, being as it gets them both in so much trouble. It's also not a very heroic thing to take advantage of the substance abuse problems of people who are supposed to be your friends (Haddock) to get them to go along with you.
And while its treated somewhat seriously in the first story, where Haddock is just an old, washed-up drunk who is looked down upon by his first mate, who is manipulating him, in later stories, his drinking is played with more humorously, but reading it left something of a bad taste in my mouth.
These aren't bad stories, but knowing of Captain Haddock's liquor problems, its hard to see them as funny in the later stories, and Tintin ends up looking bad when he gets Haddock drunk in order to obtain the other man's cooperation or help. Other readers may not have a problem with this, but YMMV.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment