The Adventures of Tintin, Vol 5 by Herge

I am still not your Tintin expert - I'm in the middle of my first reading of this series, seventy years or so after it was published and a good forty years after I was in the target demographic - but I did just read The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 5, the first major post-war chunk of the adventures of the Belgian boy reporter (ha!), so I can, I hope, tell you a few things.

I've previously gotten through the earlier omnibuses: one, and two, and three, and four. I have not yet found the first two, semi-forgotten books Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, which are generally considered to be racist and/or dull and/or not up to Herge's later level; I may get to them eventually, though the library copies I originally expected to read seem to have been quietly removed from circulation since I first thought about reading Tintin.

This volume starts off with Land of Black Gold, the story interrupted by WWII - Herge started it in 1939, was interrupted in 1940 by a small Nazi invasion of Belgium, and did six other books before getting back to this in 1948. [1] I didn't know that until I read it on Wikipedia a few minutes ago, so major props to Herge and/or his estate for smoothing that transition out. Then it dives into what I see is the last two-book story in Tintin's history: Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, in which a pre-teen Belgian boy, his sea-captain buddy, and their absent-minded professor accomplice become the world's first astronauts in a program run by a random Eastern European country, because comics, that's why.

Black Gold does feel pre-war, with some vaguely escalating tensions in the background - mostly seen commercially, in oil prices - but the focus of the plot, as I think was always the case with Tintin, is on individual evil people rather than The Land of the Evil People or SMERSH or anything like that. Oh, the evil people are organized, and come from somewhere, but it's not the named, re-used Land of the Evil People, it's just a place where these particular Evil People came from. This one is also deeply colonialist, obviously - how could it be otherwise?

And then Professor Calculus has been recruited by Syldavia to run their space program, because a small Balkan monarchy of course has a space program in 1948. (Admittedly, everyone wanted a space program in 1948, at least on the V2 level, and fictioneers are not obliged to let reality impinge too heavily on their worlds.) A rival country - unnamed but probably Borduria, unless I missed something - attempts skullduggery both before the launch (in Destination) and during the trip to the moon (in Explorers), but, as always in Tintin, is foiled by the forces of good and right and spiky-haired Belgianness.

This series is still the same kind of thing: everything I said about the earlier books still applies. They are very wordy for adventure stories, which makes this small-format omnibus a less than ideal presentation. These pages should be large, to be savored and to let the word balloons be somewhat less overwhelming. The comic relief is deeply slapstick, entirely silly, and mostly successful. The plots aren't complex, per se, but they are complicated, full of additional wrinkles and problems as Herge rumbles through his stories and makes sure he has sixty-some pages of stuff for Tintin to overcome each time.

I expect I'll finish up the series, and maybe even find the old suppressed books if I can, because I am a completest. But if you didn't grow up with these, they're just OK. Solid adventure fiction for boys, yes. Deathless classics of any kind, no.

[1] It's all much more complicated than that, and I say "books" when I mean "serialized stories in a series of different magazines, which were then collected into books not always in the same sequence and then re-edited and revised multiple times over the next few decades, including but not limited to during different rounds of translation into English." But they're books now.