The above is one of my favourite ever single frames by Hergé. It’s just perfect. It’s funny, dramatic, beautiful. I just love it!
Visual perfection. The clear line. Perfect compositional and colour balance. And a whole story and ethos, distilled into a single image. Breathtaking.
It’s funny, for me, now, thinking about Capt. Haddock’s penchant for whiskey. What part might his character have played, if any, in my own troubled relations with booze?
The funny drunkard is an ages old comedy trope. And a good and reliable one. But once one passes through the personal hell of severe alcoholism (or what passes for that in one’s own limited ways), it changes this perception.
Or is that Thomson and Thompson? There are subtle difference; moustache shape, exact form of buffoonery.
Snowy is a great foil for a Tintin. As is Haddock. And lots of other characters. Including Nestor, the unflappable manservant or valet, inherited from the unscrupulous Bird Brothers, along with Marlinspike Hall. ‘No, this is not Coutts, the Butcher’s!’ Ah, me. Simple pleasures.
We all know or occasionally meet folk like insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg. Boorishly assuming, in love with their own trite and repetitive anecdotes and jokes, and unaware when they’ve overstayed their welcome. And yet we tolerate them. Perhaps aware we may all have the potential to rub folk up the wrong way at times?
An intriguing character. Quite ambivalent in some respects. Whether running a South American country or moonlighting as a knife-throwing act, he’s manly, gruff, and not entirely of good moral character. A rogue and an adventurer. But… well, you know…
Hergé… what can one say? I can’t be bothered to even try here, right now, to be honest. I’m too exhausted. I’ll simply register my great admiration for and appreciation of his great body of work. A life well spent, no matter how tortured an artistic soul he might’ve had.