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.