From his luxurious seat at Marlinspike Hall, Hergé’s tufted, virtually sexless reporter investigates mysteries ranging from the criminal (counterfeiting) to the science fictional (a mysterious meteorite that causes things to grow at an astounding rate), in the company of a drunken ex-sailor, a half-cracked scientific genius, two identical bumbling detectives, and of course his white, apparently sentient dog Snowy.
Tintin is a weird mix of comedy, mystery and adventure — you never quite know what you’re going to get when you open one of those skinny, oversized volumes. (Though you can be pretty confident that Tintin is going to say “Crumbs!” and that Captain Haddock is going to get drunk and fall down.) Hergé’s art is an utterly inimitable mix of cartoonishness and photographic hyper-realism, inked in luminous, oversaturated colors, which renders Tintin‘s timeless, ambiguously European (Tintin was Belgian) world utterly believable. We’ll see how well Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson can reproduce it onscreen when the movie comes out in 2011.
Before he wrote Watchmen, Alan Moore picked up an obscure 1950s superhero and rewrote him as one of the greatest tragic heroes anywhere in comics. Miracleman — originally called Marvelman— is a middle-aged journalist named Mike Moran who is in the process of gradually remembering that he was once, and still can be, a superhero. As he rediscovers his powers, and figures out what happened to his memory, he reinvents every tired cliché of the Superman-style hero into something strange and new and somehow deeply sad.
In 1990 Moore handed Miracleman over to Neil Gaiman (yes, that Neil Gaiman — seriously, it’s like watching Bach and Mozart improvise a fugue together) whose run on the title is as strange and astonishing as Moore’s in a totally different way. It’s infuriatingly difficult to find Miracleman today, because the rights to the character are part of a long and bitter legal dispute. But if you find him, read him.
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
