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'Cryptic' Tintin titles

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yamilah
Member
#1 · Posted: 27 Jan 2007 20:08
Considering original 'Coke en Stock' is used as a password* in The Red Sea Sharks adventure, other Tintin covers might be worth examining, e.g. -among others- the data that amount to the number of four*, as its seems this number is relevant in Tintin:

Data pertaining to the covers' images:
- four colours feature on the spines (only for original and English versions, as far as I know).
- four animals are outlined on the covers to America (buffalo on teepee), The Blue Lotus (dragon), The Crab with the Golden Claws (crab in letter 'o') & Prisoners of the Sun ('snake' on pot).
- etc.

Data pertaining to the covers' texts:
- four colours feature in the original titles of Blue Lotus, Black Island, Red Rackham & Black Gold.
- four names of precise characters feature on the covers to King Ottokar's Sceptre, Red Rackham Treasure, The Calculus Affair & The Castafiore Emerald.
- etc.

Please find what type of objects are mentioned in four titles.
This rather simple -not to say childish*- question can be answered by anyone, with no time limit!
labrador road 26
Member
#2 · Posted: 27 Jan 2007 20:39
four colours feature in the original titles of Blue Lotus, Black Island, Red Rackham & Black Gold.

Black is mentioned twice but that does not make it two colors, black is black.

four animals are outlined on the covers to America (buffalo on teepee), The Blue Lotus (dragon), The Crab with the Golden Claws (crab in letter 'o') & Prisoners of the Sun ('snake' on pot).

Why contend with that albums, what's wrong with the animals on the cover of Red Rackham. As far as I can tell Milou is also an animal and he is on almost every cover.

four names of precise characters feature on the covers to King Ottokar's Sceptre, Red Rackham Treasure, The Calculus Affair & The Castafiore Emerald.

Isn't Tintin a precise character, or doesn't the titles Tintin in Congo, Tintin in America and so on count?

I would say that your theory is full of holes.
Richard
UK Correspondent
#3 · Posted: 28 Jan 2007 00:45
yamilah
- four colours feature in the original titles of Blue Lotus, Black Island, Red Rackham & Black Gold.

And the original title for The Crab with the Golden Claws was The Red Crab, so colours were potentially mentioned five times. And gold - or golden - is considered a colour. So six colours at any one time!
edcharlesadams
Trivia Challenge Score Keeper
#4 · Posted: 28 Jan 2007 00:57
If I might join the naysayers...

four colours feature on the spines (only for original and English versions, as far as I know).

I suppose you're counting red, blue, green and yellow - but the spines on my copies of The Red Sea Sharks and The Shooting Star are more orange than yellow, I'd say - especially when placed next to Tintin and the Picaros for comparison.

Ed
Balthazar
Moderator
#5 · Posted: 28 Jan 2007 10:25
I agree with Ed that Hergé used two very distinctly different yellow colours for his spines - the amber orangey yellow and the paler yellow which looks more like what printers would call process yellow.

Regarding colours mentioned in the books' titles:
Maybe yamilah is counting 'gold' as the colour in Land of Black Gold rather than black (which, as labrador road 26 points out, would be a repeat of a colour already mentioned). But if 'gold' is valid as a colour, then maybe 'emerald' should be counted as a colour as well!

Regarding animals on the covers, there's also a bird depicted on the Blue Lotus vase, and there's a bird on the clothing of the Indian chief on Tintin in America. There are birds (I think), and certainly part of a horse, depicted on the cover of Cigars of the Pharaoh. And, as labrador road 26 has pointed out, there are dozens of animals - various species of fish and invertebrates - on the Red Rackham's Treasure cover. And why mention the only the crab on The Crab With the Golden Claws but not the camels?

Sorry, yamilah, but almost every part of your 'evidence' that four has a special significance in the book covers doesn't make any sense whatsoever, even within the terms of your own examples! You've only been able to come up with the number four for each catagory (colours or animals) by selecting four instances of that catagory and simply overlooking all the other equally valid instances.

To give a similar example of selecting evidence to fit a pre-decided answer:
We could all make the windows of any large office building spell out our initials if we mentally drew the necessary lines between certain windows and simply ignored all the other windows, but this wouldn't be evidence that the architect of such a building had covertly embedded our initials into his work!

I can't help thinking that playing along with your question, by finding "what type of objects are mentioned in four titles", is only going to fuel your delusion in this matter, and I feel uncomfortable about doing that, so I won't.

There is so much to genuinely analyse in Hergé's masterful Tintin book covers in terms of his design, composition, art, colour, content etc, that surely it trivializes his work to overlook all this and only look for silly non-existent number codes instead.

Sorry to have to be so negative, yamilah, but it's for your own good. Please come over to the land of reason!
Tintinrulz
Member
#6 · Posted: 28 Jan 2007 13:45
Also it takes the Tintin books out of the world of entertainment and into the world of something boring and serious like politics and maths.
jock123
Moderator
#7 · Posted: 28 Jan 2007 18:25
Balthazar
And why mention the only the crab on The Crab With the Golden Claws but not the camels?
Well I reckon it is meant to be that the instances given are of images of animals on covers - pictures within pictures as it were - rather than "actual" animals within the picture, like the camels or Snowy. However, it is as you say missing the bird on the vase (although that may be rationalized away as being one of the four covers mentioned); more importantly it completely misses the animals shown on the tomb walls in the Cigars cover. There is a small leaping animal top right, and the hooves of something larger protruding from under the title box, adding at least a further two images of animals...
I think you are right in your assesment that gold is intended as a fourth colour, but that if so, emerald must be included as a fifth.
ClaroQuerido
Member
#8 · Posted: 28 Jan 2007 18:36
Tintinrulz said:


Also it takes the Tintin books out of the world of entertainment and into the world of something boring and serious like politics and maths.


I'm going to have to pull you up on that. For me 'serious' and 'boring' are not two concepts that necessarily go together, in fact most times what is most serious I find most interesting. I am not into 'Politics' or 'Maths', but for the sake of people who are into them, I have to say that your comment sounded pretty narrow-minded and dim-witted to me.

I agree that 'yamilah' should, to put it one way, 'get out more', and that they are over-analyzing, or erring in their analysis, but they have every right to bring entertainment, as you say, "into the world of something boring and serious like politics and maths," and who are you try to stop them? Do you think every drawing and line in Tintin is meant purely for 'entertainment'?
Balthazar
Moderator
#9 · Posted: 28 Jan 2007 19:37
ClaroQuerido
For me 'serious' and 'boring' are not two concepts that necessarily go together, in fact most times what is most serious I find most interesting.

Yep, I'd completely agree with that. Like you (and unlike Tintinrulz I guess), I don't think there's any conflict between something being entertaining and something being intellectually stimulating. As you say, something is often entertaining and interesting because it's serious and intellectual. There's a lot of politics in Tintin stories and Hergé makes the subject very entertaining. And there's a lot of maths - geometry at least - in his visual compositions (covers and story panels), which make them so powerful and readable. It's all worth analysing, in my opinon, and I think it's very entertaining to expand your understanding and knowledge by doing so.

Personally, my only problem with the way yamilah is analysing the Tintin books in this case is
a) that the 'evidence' being put forward to support the theory is simply factually innacurate (as we've all pointed out);
and b) that the theory yamilah puts forward seems to have nothing to do with anything that the author/artist actually put into the work - a common problem with much cultural criticism and analysis these days.

I think it's because I enjoy analysing Tintin books so much that yamilah's style of analysis sometimes gets my goat. I'm not complaining about too much intellect being applied in the post that started this topic, but too little!
jock123
Moderator
#10 · Posted: 28 Jan 2007 23:32
Actually, having considered how this will go, I can guess that emerald won't be allowed because it wasn't in the original French title, was it?

Should we instead go for Pantone 174?
Update: The perils of posting when tired! I meant to type "...pantone 714?"

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