Tintin Forums

The other day I was reading Picaros, and I noticed something I hadn't before:
Alcazar never opens his eyes. Perhaps his revolutions would go a lot better if he had them open. If he kept a lookout, perhaps he would have found it a bit easier to keep from being overthrown. Perhaps in his knife-throwing act the blindfold was really unnecessary, because he had actually been without sight throughout the entire act.
Now, this is slightly off topic, but is Alcazar's first name Zazar (how he signed the letter to his wife) or is that just a nickname?

I always thought it was just a nickname.

I noticed this aswell in The Broken Ear but he he can still see so its ok.

Me too, It seemed to me that it was just a nickname.

His wife calls him Alcazar.
And there's a frame where he opens his eyes. It's after Tintin told him things like ".......?....................???.......??". He looked like he was thinking very hard and then a light bulb came on above his head with a "CLICK" and his eyea were open.

Although I see the humour of the situation of a character who has worked as a knife thrower “never opening his eyes”, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen the way that Hergé drew them to indicate anything more than Alcazar being heavy lidded (think Marlon Brando as “Don Corleone” in The Godfather), not walking around unable to see.
I’ve no more trouble with this than other characters only having solid black or empty ovals for eyes - no indication of lids or whites or irises or pupils.
It would be just as hard to work out how Tintin closes his eyes (he does on occasion, and lids suddenly manifest themselves, like some sort of nictating membrane), but I just accept it as part of Hergé’s visual repertoire.

As to the name (by the way, if you are worried about this being “off-topic”, why didn’t you just make the topic broader? “Thoughts about Gen. Alcazar” would have been enough to cover anything…!), I’m sure it is meant to be a soppy pet-name - it’s a joke that a rough, tough cigar-chomping guerilla leader like Alcazar, would a) use baby-talk names, and b) that anyone would think that Peggy would respond to such nonsense anyway…

Of course, it really is just a funny thing with any comic characters, that some of them don't have mouths (like Dilbert) (whose mouth does appear when he is greatly upset) and others that never open theirs (the Bird Brothers and Red Rackham). They all have funny things like that, and I really do just accept the fact that Alcazar doesn't open his eyes. It's just part of a cartoonist's artistic license.

I agree with Jock that Alcazar just has heavily lidded half-closed eyes.

As for his use of Zazar in his note to Peggy, I think it's definitely meant to be a nickname abbreviation of Alcazar - a soppy "pet-name" that Peggy called him by when they were still in love. As NikkiRoux points out, Peggy now calls him Alcazar; clearly their in-love baby-talk days are over, at least as far as she's concerned. I'm sure Alcazar uses their old private nickname Zazar in the note in the hope that this kind of lover's sweet talk will soften her reaction to discovering that he's slipped away to Tapiocapolis without telling her first. It's a nice detail of subtle character comedy by Hergé.

Another thought on this nickname: I wonder if the Alcazar to Zazar format of doubling up the last syllable to make a nickname is common in French, and if this adds weight to the theory that the name Tintin may originally have been understood by readers as a nickname version of Augustin or Martin.

That's an interesting idea but I think that Zazar is just his nickname because it sound lke a baby name. There isn't really any other part of Alcazar that sounds baby like. Al Al? Caz Caz?

However, Tintin does kind of look like a Martin, if that makes any sense at all haha.