The Cigars of the Pharoah

Adventures of Tintin, Africa, Asia, classics, comic, historical, Twentieth Century, young adult Add comments

Sep 132009

By Hergé
Read: September 2009
Rating: Transitional

One can definitely feel the transitional quality of this volume. It FEELS like a Tintin book, but the story is quite choppy, and for good reason–originally, it was running as a serial. There is a consistent story arc, but it’s not like later books where everything is geared toward that one mystery.

Controversies

I didn’t see much in the way of cultural insensitivity, but, then, I’m not overly familiar with the Arab culture depicted in most of the book. Rastapopoulus’s movie is obviously that, a movie made by an outsider. I’m more aware to the Indian side of things, where the depiction of the fakir raises some brows. Then again, he is a villain.

On page 13 there’s a depiction of a black man working as a deckhand, drawn in black face style (giant lips, BLACK skin, etc).

Tropes:

Funnily enough, this is the only book where Thomson and Thompson’s disguises are at all effective!

As for chloroform, not this time. Knockout gas takes out Tintin early on,

The book ends happily, until the next volume… For obvious reasons, I dove straight into The Blue Lotus.