Tintin Forums

BlackIsland
I do not think on the level that everyone believes. Maybe this part of my country in NY State he is not that well known

The point of the thread is not how well known Tintin is in our real world, where he is a character in a book, but how well known is he in the fictional world he lives in and in which the adventures take place. He is a globe-trotting adventurer, first-man-on-the-moon, crime-busting reporter/ detective, but also seems rather unknown.

He is welcomed back to Brussels by an enormous crowd in Soviets, yet he can walk down a street and not get noticed in Shooting Star - there seems to be some discrepancy there, and Richard was looking for ways to explain this.

yet he can walk down a street and not get noticed

That sort of situation actually occurs in so many Tintin stories (it's actually quite rare that Tintin draws a crowd around him!). Indeed, many real famous people are able to travel around without being noticed...many people on the street would find it hard to believe that they had just passed by someone famous. In one case I actually passed by someone and then realized that that person was quite a good friend of mine and whom I had known quite well (!). It's hard to believe what one might see while walking down the street, eh...

That's my theory as to why Tintin can go around without being noticed. Still, this works in his favor because he never seeks fame.

jock123
there seems to be some discrepancy there

Couldn't a famous but often unnoticed i.e. 'invisible' hero, as well as objects moving by themselves, colour & shape changes, ubiquity, duplication, hybridism, chronological abnormalities and all the other Tintinverse's discrepancies just be related to a kind of 'spaciotemporal fault' which could emanate from the heroes' avatar counterpart, something that could tell 'a story in the story'??

yamilah
Couldn't a famous but often unnoticed i.e. 'invisible' hero, as well as objects moving by themselves, colour & shape changes, ubiquity, duplication, hybridism, chronological abnormalities and all the other Tintinverse's discrepancies just be related to a kind of 'spaciotemporal fault' which could emanate from the heroes' avatar counterpart, something that could tell 'a story in the story'??

No.

Thanks jock123 for your assertion...
Still 'oulipian cryptography' does exist, but I must admit there's no googling about it, except via 'cryptographie oulipienne'...

I'd say he was sort of like Hunter S Thompson, only without the copious drug intake...

Strange, that. You don't tend to get superstar reporters/foreign correspondants any more. Unless they're spoof ones like Dennis Pennis...

But Tintin is very much a man of his time, and I should think within his own world he's very hot property indeed.

Yeah...I guess you must be very famous indeed if nearly everywhere you go someone is spying on you or plotting some sort of foul play. :/

When the police come to Marlinspike after Haddock rings them early in the story, one scene has always puzzled me.
The white haired policeman does not know who either Tintin or Calculus is.
After the moon books, wouldn't it be fair to say the characters are household names what being the first people to walk on the moon?

They are indeed a celebrity of some sort as all the commotion on page 13 shows this with TV crews and people interested in the events. Their are also interantional headlines in the media but you can argue this element makes it funny considering the Thom(p)son's promise to be discreet with the matter earlier!

I can see Herge created a moment of surprise and intrigue for the reader, we cut to Tintin trying to track the intruders which is a nice touch.

I was always just a tad puzzled about this scene and your thoughts would be good to hear!

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The Tidy Tintinologist Team

I've often wondered if the trip to the moon was really well publicised. There are no scenes of the astronauts being interviewed or of reporters being present at the launch or return of the rocket. It's almost as if security at the Centre was so tight that not even temporary visitors were allowed and therefore news coverage, even for an important event like that, was low-key.

It could be that this country policeman did not pay much attention to the news. He may have heard of the moon trip but not registered the names, unlike the Bordurian official who greets Tintin and Haddock at the airport, referring to them as the first men on the moon.

I've often wondered if Tintin is more notorious than famous and that this notoriety is sometimes overestimated: some gangsters assume that he knows a lot more than he does and their attempts to get rid of him only serve to lead him to uncovering their activities.

In the "Congo", for example, he is under constant threat from a man sent to prevent him from discovering Al Capone's diamond trafficking, even though this is only mentioned towards the end. For much of the story, Tintin is too busy hunting or dealing with the locals' other problems to worry about diamonds.

This again happens in "Black Island" when, during the cliff top incident, Tintin asks what the gangster want with him and the bearded gang leader answers that he, Tintin, already knows. The same exchange is pretty much made between Tintin and Alan in "Crab" when he's tied up in the ship's hold.

It's funny how his enemies seem to think that he knows all about them long before he does.

Apologies for this meandering post!

In the early titles he was an active reporter (or more active anyway). In fact the very early titles were presented as essentially being a visual travelogue - almost as if Tintin filed his report back to the magazine in pictorial style. This is why he is greeted by a crowd upon his return to Brussels in Soviets - the crowd is the readership itself. In America he is obviously quite famous as a result of these exploits too - the gangsters are ready for him when he arrives. He gets parades in that and in Cigars too.

I find this recognition drops off over the course of time and I'd suggest that it's largely because of the switch from open-ended stories where Tintin was effectively reporting to his readership to more closed affairs with that link more and more at a distance.

I know that this is outside the "world" of tintin but I guess what I am trying to say is that as Tintin's world became less in contact with our own then his own profile seemed to drop.

There are some high profile things that he did - most notably walking on the moon - but if there's one aspect of the moon landings Herge got wrong perhaps it is that it would be so very public around the world. At that period of the Cold War - before there was even a man in space - he could be forgiven for imagining that such an accomplishment would be a lot more secretive and hush hush rather than a multimillion dollar pee-ing contest with huge propaganda value. I find it pretty easy to believe that a country policeman would not know their faces - but note that important physicists are very interested in it and they are also on television at the end.

Perhaps there's a little cynicism from Herge in that the rest of the world - personified mildly by the policeman but more acutely in the form of Jolyon Wagg - don't quite recognise the importance of the accomplishments!

Another thing is that as 21st century readers in the age of information we tend to forget the way that information was disseminated - a lot more slowly, without the ability to see good pictures or just look up information exactly when required. Non-sensationalist newspapers carried a lot less pictures and they were grainy; a lot of people got their news from radio; TV was still developing (see Calculus' invention!) Anyway, perhaps in our age of celebrity and ease of access to information we forget that it wasn't quite the same.