The Adventures of Tintin Comic Ebook Collection

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I love The Adventures of Tintin Comics since I was a kid. My first collection was the Secret of the Unicorn which my uncle gave to as present. Now I have all the collection in PDF format, including the rare Alph-Art.


The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of comic strips created by Belgian artist Hergé, the pen name of Georges Remi (1907-1983). The series first appeared in French in a children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle on 10 January 1929. Set in a painstakingly researched world closely mirroring our own, the series has continued as a favourite of readers and critics alike for 80 years.

The hero of the series is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided in his adventures from the beginning by his faithful fox terrier dog Snowy (Milou in French). Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash, cynical and grumpy Captain Haddock, the bright but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (Professeur Tournesol) and other colourful supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (Dupond et Dupont). Hergé himself features in every comic, as a background character.

The success of the series saw the serialised strips collected into a series of albums (24 in all), spun into a successful magazine and adapted for film and theatre. The series is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, with translations published in over 50 languages and more than 200 million copies of the books sold to date.

The comic strip series has long been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ligne claire style. Engaging, well-researched plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories within the Tintin series always feature slapstick humour, offset in later albums by sophisticated satire, and political and cultural commentary.


The List of Tintin Titles

01 Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
02 Tintin in Congo
03 Tintin in America
04 Tintin and the Cigars of the Pharaoh
05 Tintin and the Blue Lotus
06 Tintin and the Broken Ear
07 Tintin and the Black Island
08 Tintin and the King Ottokars Sceptre
09 Tintin and the Crabs with the Golden Claws
10 Tintin and the Shooting Star
11 Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn
12 Tintin and the Red Rackhams Treasure
13 Tintin and the Seven Crystal Balls
14 Tintin and the Prisonres of Sun
15 Tintin and the Land of Black Gold
16 Tintin and the Destination Moon
17 Tintin and the Explorers on the Moon
18 Tintin and the Calculus Affair
19 Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks
20 Tintin in Tibet
21 Tintin and the Castafiore Emerald
22 Tintin and the Flight 714
23 Tintin and the Picaros
24 Tintin and Alph-Art
25 Tintin and the Lake of Sharks
26 Tintin in Thailand
27 Tintin the Freelance Reporter
28 Tintin and the Mysterious Visitor
29 Tintin They Explored the Moon
30 Tintin and the Voice of the Lagoon


History

Tintin is a reporter, and Hergé uses this to present the character in a number of adventures which were contemporaneous to the period in which he was working (most notably, the Bolshevik uprising in Russia and the Second World War) and sometimes even prescient (as in the case of the moon landings). Hergé also created a world for Tintin which managed to reduce detail to a simplified but recognisable and realistic representation, an effect Hergé was able to achieve with reference to a well-maintained archive of images.

Though Tintin's adventures are formulaic presenting a mystery which is then solved logically Hergé infused the strip with his own sense of humour, and created supporting characters who, although predictable, were filled with charm that allowed the reader to engage with them. This formula of comfortable, humorous predictability is similar to the presentation of cast in the Peanuts strip or The Three Stooges. Hergé also had a great understanding of the mechanics of the comic strip, especially pacing, a skill displayed in The Castafiore Emerald, a work he meant to be packed with tension in which nothing actually happens.

Hergé initially improvised the creation of Tintin's adventures, uncertain how Tintin would escape from whatever predicament appeared. Not until after the completion of Cigars of the Pharaoh was Hergé encouraged to research and plan his stories. The impetus came from Zhang Chongren, a Chinese student who, on hearing Hergé was to send Tintin to China in his next adventure, urged him to avoid perpetuating the perceptions Europeans had of China at the time. Hergé and Zhang collaborated on the next serial, The Blue Lotus, which has been cited by critics as Hergé's first masterpiece. Interestingly, The Blue Lotus includes a reference to the European stereotypes associated with China, in a context that causes them to appear ridiculous.

Other changes to the mechanics of creating the strip were forced on Hergé by outside events. The Second World War and the invasion of Belgium by Hitler's armies saw the closure of the newspaper in which Tintin was serialised. Work was halted on Land of Black Gold, and the already published Tintin in America and The Black Island were banned by the Nazi censors, who were concerned at their presentation of America and Britain. However, Hergé was able to continue with Tintin's adventures, publishing four books and serialising two more adventures in a German-licensed newspaper.

During and after the German occupation Hergé was accused of being a collaborator because of the Nazi control of the paper (Le Soir), and he was briefly taken for interrogation after the war. He claimed that he was simply doing a job under the occupation, like a plumber or carpenter. His work of this period, unlike earlier and later work, is politically neutral and resulted in stories such as The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure; but the apocalyptic The Shooting Star reflects the foreboding Hergé felt during this uncertain political period.

A post-war paper shortage forced changes in the format of the books. Hergé had usually allowed the stories to develop to a length that suited the story, but with paper now in short supply, publishers Casterman asked Hergé to consider using smaller panel sizes and adopt a fixed length of 62 pages. Hergé took on more staff (the first ten books having been produced by himself and his wife), eventually building a studio system.

The adoption of colour allowed Hergé to expand the scope of the works. His use of colour was more advanced than that of American comics of the time, with better production values allowing a combination of the four printing shades and thus a cinematographic approach to lighting and shading. Hergé and his studio would allow images to fill half pages or more, simply to detail and accentuate the scene, using colour to emphasise important points. Hergé notes this fact, stating "I consider my stories as movies. No narration, no descriptions, emphasis is given to images".

Hergé's personal life also affected the series; Tintin in Tibet was heavily influenced by his nervous breakdown. His nightmares, which he reportedly described as being "all white", are reflected in the snowy landscapes. The plot has Tintin set off in search of Chang Chong-Chen, previously seen in The Blue Lotus, and the piece contains no villains and little moral judgment, with Hergé even refusing to condemn the Snowman of the Himalayas as "abominable".

Hergé's death on 3 March 1983 left the twenty-fourth and final adventure, Tintin and Alph-Art, unfinished. The plot saw Tintin embroiled in the world of modern art, and the story ended as he is about to be killed, encased in perspex and presented as a work of art, although it is unknown whether he really dies at the end of the story.

The Characters

Tintin and Snowy

Tintin is a young Belgian reporter who becomes involved in dangerous cases in which he takes heroic action to save the day. Almost every adventure features Tintin hard at work in his investigative journalism, but he is seldom seen actually turning in a story without first getting caught up in some misadventure. He is a young man of more or less neutral attitudes and is less colourful than the supporting cast. In this respect, he represents the everyman.

Snowy, a white Fox terrier, is Tintin's four-legged companion. They regularly save each other from perilous situations. Snowy frequently "speaks" to the reader through his thoughts (often displaying a dry sense of humour), which are supposedly not heard by the human characters in the story except in Tintin in America, wherein he explains to Tintin his absence for a period of time in the book.

Like Captain Haddock, Snowy is fond of the Loch Lomond brand of whisky, and his occasional bouts of drinking tend to get him into trouble, as does his arachnophobia. The French name of Snowy, "Milou," has nothing to do with snow or the colour white. It has been widely credited as an oblique reference to a girlfriend from Hergé's youth, Marie-Louise Van Cutsem, whose nickname was "Milou".

Another explanation to the origins of the two characters is possible. The first 3 adventures of Tintin visit places originally visited by photographer-reporter Robert Sexé, recorded in the Belgian press from the mid to late 1920s. At that time Sexé had made numerous trips round the world on a motorcycle, in collaboration with Grand-Prix champion and motorcycle record-holder René Milhoux, and these trips were highly publicized at the time. Sexé has also been noted to have a similar appearance to Tintin, and the Hergé Foundation in Belgium has admitted that it is not too hard to imagine how Hergé could have been influenced by the exploits of Sexé. In 1996, a biography of Robert Sexé by Janpol Schulz was published, titled "Sexé au pays des Soviets" (Sexé in the Land of the Soviets) to mimic the name of the first Tintin Adventure.


Captain Haddock


Captain Archibald Haddock, a seafaring captain of disputed ancestry (he may be of English, French, or Belgian origin), is Tintin's best friend, and was introduced in The Crab with the Golden Claws. Haddock was initially depicted as a weak and alcoholic character, but later became more respectable. He evolves to become genuinely heroic and even a socialite after he finds a treasure captured by his ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock (François de Hadoque in French), in the episode Red Rackham's Treasure. The Captain's coarse humanity and sarcasm act as a counterpoint to Tintin's often implausible heroism; he is always quick with a dry comment whenever the boy reporter seems too idealistic.

Captain Haddock lives in the luxurious mansion Marlinspike Hall ("Moulinsart" in the original French).

Haddock uses a range of colourful insults and curses to express his feelings, such as "billions of blue blistering barnacles," "ten thousand thundering typhoons," "troglodyte," "bashi-bazouk," "kleptomaniac," "ectoplasm," "sea-gherkin," "anacoluthon," and "pockmark," but nothing that is actually considered a swear word. Haddock is a hard drinker, particularly fond of Loch Lomond whisky, and his bouts of drunkenness are often used for comic effect. Hergé stated that Haddock's surname was derived from a "sad English fish that drinks a lot."Haddock remained without a first name until the last completed story, Tintin and the Picaros (1976), when the name Archibald was suggested. Tintin and Alph-Art maintained this suggestion by having him introduce himself as such.

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