Discounting Snowy, there’s not one person who seems to know Tintin from before The Adventures of Tintin began, and yet he’s famous in-story for his early adventures by the time we get to Cigars of the Pharaoh.Tintin. Indeed, given how closely Tintin remains in contact with the people he’s met over the course of his adventures (come Tintin in Tibet, he’s still corresponding with Chang from The Blue Lotus), it’s remarkable that there’s never a hint of contact between Tintin and any member of his family or a social circle that existed before the first book. We don’t know anything about any family he might have had. Captain Haddock stops fighting Tintin: I was captured by a gang of thugs There is a pause Haddock begins to cry comically Captain Haddock: tearfully Oh, the filthy swine Hes turned the whole crew against meFind many great new & used options and get the best deals for 3 The Adventures Of Tintin Secret of the Unicorn Captain Haddock Figure at the best online.However, we know next to nothing of him. Captain Haddock: trying to shake Snowy off Arrgh Tintin: No, No Youve got it all wrong Im not an assassin.
You can understand why Hergé would adopt such an approach – Tintin exists purely as a vehicle for adventure, a blank stand-in for the reader, unencumbered with a complicated pre-existing history or a complex moral psyche.Franchise: Tintin. Captain Haddock stops fighting Tintin: I was captured by a gang of thugs There is a pause Haddock begins to cry comically Captain Haddock: tearfully Oh, the filthy swineYou could even make the case that, despite spending more than twenty books with Tintin, we don’t even know the character’s first or last name (depending on whether Tintin is a first name, a last name, or even a nickname). Captain Haddock: trying to shake Snowy off Arrgh Tintin: No, No You've got it all wrong I'm not an assassin. Haddock is initially depicted as a weak and alcoholic character under the control of. He is one of Tintin's best friends, a seafaring pipe-smoking Merchant Marine Captain.
Tintin: Well this is a fine mess. Created by the Belgian cartoonist Georges 'Herg' Remi Captain Archibald Haddock first appeared in the album The Crab with the Golden Claws, and soon became a regular companion for Tintin in his later adventuresThe Adventures of Tintin. The clumsy, temperamental, whiskey-loving captain who has a heart of gold.
He’s quick to anger, he smokes a pipe like nobody’s business, and he drinks like a fish. Indeed, over the course of the adventure, Haddock is incredibly unreliable and prone to outrageous and dangerous actions, to the point where he seems like more of a liability to Tintin than an ally – seemingly of the verge of killing the young reporter on more than one occasion.While Tintin is the very model of a boy scout, Haddock is a man with any number of flaws and vices. When he’s introduced in The Crab With the Golden Claws, he already has a very significant back story, with his ship effectively hijacked by his sinister subordinates, who keep the good captain liquored up and incapable of action. Captain Haddock is quite different.
While Haddock plays an increasingly large role in each iteration, he never completely eclipses the lead of the series, the reporter who lends the adventures their name.However, Hergé does afford Haddock a very rare privilege, only not really extended to the rest of the cast (or even to his lead). At these points, Tintin is very much the focus of the story. He’s part of the crew in The Shooting Star, for example, and he’s part of the expedition in Red Rackham’s Treasure or The Prisoners of the Sun. While Tintin is more than capable with a gun, Haddock is a character who seems very easily provoked.Haddock spends the first few adventures as one of the supporting cast, arguably no different from Thompson and Thomson, for example.
That’s not a criticism, but an observation. Tintin is undoubtedly the lead of earlier stories, a kid with a completely unambiguous sense of right and wrong, with a very simplistic view of world affairs. In The Shooting Star, we meet Chester, a former shipmate of Haddock’s “for more than twenty years.”There’s a genuine sense that Haddock existed in this fictional universe before Hergé drew the first panel to feature the good captain, and a sense that he has roots – which is more than you could say of Tintin.I think that Hergé focused on Haddock’s evolution as a way of reflecting his own uncertainties. In The Secret of the Unicorn, we discover quite a bit about Captain Haddock’s lineage, including his distant ancestor.
In The Red Sea Sharks, Tintin and Haddock break up a slavery ring, proving them friends to Africans. In light of everything which has happened, it is of course a huge error to have believed for an instant in the New Order.”Being extremely diplomatic, the Hergé Foundation also describes Tintin in the Congo as “a naïve depiction of the colonial times and paternalistic views as they existed in Belgium in the early 1930s.” The portrayal of Jewish characters in The Shooting Star (and the suggestion that master villain Rastapopoulos was a Jewish stereotype) also brought the writer under fire, as well as allegations of collaboration with the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium.In many ways, a lot of Hergé’s later books feel like conscious responses to these insinuations and allegations. For many, democracy had proved a disappointment, and the New Order brought new hope. He had a brief flirtation with fascism, which he later denounced as foolishness:“I recognise that I myself believed that the future of the West could depend on the New Order. On the other hand, Tintin’s moral absolutism reads very strangely when one returns to Tintin in the Congo or Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.After the Second World War, Hergé found himself taking a lot of flack for some of his earlier comments and stories, something that he acknowledged. There’s a lot of absolutes, and some understandably so – drugs are bad, gangsters are bad.
In Tintin and the Picaros, Tintin wilfully abandons Haddock and Calculus to a trap, refusing to accompany them to South America. Tintin in Tibet portrays Tintin as something of an irrational loon, risking life and limb based only on the faintest hope his friend is alive, with no objective proof to back it up – it’s only thanks to the existence of the Yeti that he is proven right.In The Castafiore Emerald, Tintin’s paranoid fantasies about plots and conspiracies over-complicate what should be relaxing “down time”, perhaps illustrating how out-of-touch he is. Tintin himself doesn’t necessarily come out particularly well in the last few books, as Hergé seems to embrace the criticisms leveled at him and his creation. It has been argued that Tintin in Tibet was the first story to treat Tintin as a real character rather than merely a vehicle for adventure, and The Castafiore Emerald, Flight 714 and Tintin and the Picarosare all attempts to take apart and examine classic Tintin stories.And I think Haddock emerges as the hero of the series at around this point, a character who – while not always entirely right – seems to have better judgment and a keener sense of humanity than Tintin. The last few adventures in the series are far more introspective than what came before, and demonstrate an artist reflecting on the impressive body of work he has left behind him. Bianca Castafiora, the opera singer, has several unfortunate run-ins and misunderstandings with various evil-doers (in stories like The Calculus Affair or The Red Sea Sharks), perhaps standing in for Hergé’s own earlier artistic mistakes.Hergé even tried to steer the books aways from political subject matter, to the point of having Tintin leave that planet in Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.
And yet Haddock stays with Tintin. Haddock, on the other hand, strongly suspects (along with everybody else) that the kid must have died in the crash. He has absolute faith in his attempts to find the lost little boy.
Though he is far less fond of Bianca Castafiore than Tintin, to the point where he claims to hate her, Haddock is the person who flies to her rescue in Tintin and the Picaros, while Tintin remains at home. You’ve done everything humanly possible…”Even more than Tintin at this point in the series, Haddock seems driven by fundamental human decency, while Tintin grows increasingly detached. Indeed, Haddock seems more concerned about Tintin’s safety and comfort than about Chang, suggesting that he’s only going this far so Tintin is not alone, reassuring the reporter, “C’mon Tintin, old lad. Tintin is guided by faith in a belief, but Haddock is anchored by his faith in his friend.
Calculus has produced a “cure” for alcoholism, which he “tested” on Haddock without the latter’s consent. That said, even Haddock is oblivious to the fact that nothing has changed.However, there is one key scene in Tintin and the Picaros where it seems most obvious that Haddock holds the moral high ground. It seems that Tintin partakes in the coup as a means to an end, and only because he’s an old friend of Alcazar’s.
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