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Tintin & Friends: How old are they?

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Seven
Member
#121 · Posted: 25 Jan 2012 01:20
Wow I don't know why but I always thought Tintin would be 18-20 years old due to the fact that every now and then he drinks, The Broken Ear & Seven Crystal Balls come to mind. He also would be one very mature 15 year old.
rose_of_pollux
Member
#122 · Posted: 25 Jan 2012 01:44
Seven:
I always thought Tintin would be 18-20 years old due to the fact that every now and then he drinks,

That's true, but he tends to try to avoid it (like when he tells Lt. Delcourt in Crab that he never drinks). In Broken Ear, if I remember right, he was about to be executed, so that was probably him trying to ensure he would feel no pain when it happened.

Anyway, if Hergé says he's 17, that's what I'll go with, then.

The Captain is definitely middle-aged; I would lean towards late 40s because I don't see him going gray at all (and he doesn't seem like the type to dye his hair, either).

I'd put Bianca in her lower 40s--she's at the peak of her career, and if she were older, I couldn't see her traveling/performing as much. I'd put Thompson and Thomson around the same age, as well.

Calculus... is tricky. His deafness seems to suggest that he's older, but it could be that he lost his hearing in a freak accident when he was younger (Father Mulcahy in M*A*S*H comes to mind...). He seems to be around the same age as the Captain for me.
Balthazar
Moderator
#123 · Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:15
Seven:
Wow I don't know why but I always thought Tintin would be 18-20 years old due to the fact that every now and then he drinks, The Broken Ear & Seven Crystal Balls come to mind.

That's true, but I don't know what the law was in 1930s Belgium. Maybe there wasn't a legal age limit for alcohol consumption, and even if there was, maybe it wasn't strictly policed.
Seven:
He also would be one very mature 15 year old.

Indeed, but I think that unrealistic maturity was deliberately very much part of the appeal of Tintin, right from the start: the fantasy for child readers of being only 14 or 15 but having none of the restrictions of real youth (parental discipline, school or a lowly apprenticeship, lack of maturity, limits to your driving skills or finances, etc). From all accounts, Hergé disliked much of his childhood so was probably living out his own fantasy youth through Tintin - exaggerating the sort of freedom he did find in the Scouts - as well as providing that fantasy for his readers.
A much more realistic Belgian childhood can be seen in his Quick & Flupke strips.
rose_of_pollux:
like when he tells Lt. Delcourt in Crab that he never drinks

He actually tells him he never drinks spirits.
In the same book, Tintin accepts a beer from the Thom(p)sons, and is happily planning to survive on champagne when barricaded into the hold cabin on the Karaboudjan, telling Snowy something like "Well at least we won't go thirsty!"
So I think the book makes a distinction between Tintin's consumption of less-strong alcoholic drinks in a social or emergency context, and Haddock's uncontrolled addiction to the hard stuff.
Seven
Member
#124 · Posted: 26 Jan 2012 01:06
Balthazar
Balthazar:
That's true, but I don't know what the law was in 1930s Belgium. Maybe there wasn't a legal age limit for alcohol consumption, and even if there was, maybe it wasn't strictly policed.

That's an interesting point because in Belgium today the age limit to drink beer is 16 and other alcoholic beverages is 18, however many say in Belgium that you can get away with drinking despite being under 18 as long as you do not get drunk in public. In other words its like you said not "strictly policed". This may well have been the case in 1930s Belgium.
tintin1
Member
#125 · Posted: 26 Jan 2012 06:50
Tintin is 17 years old. Captain haddock must be around 50!!
kygoober16
Member
#126 · Posted: 19 Feb 2012 21:11
In a interview with Hergé he stated that TinTin is between the age of 15-17.
Star Child
Member
#127 · Posted: 5 Mar 2012 18:00
Tintin's early characters, Totor and Tintin-Lutin are supposed to be teenagers. Totor is probably 13, being a boy-scout, and Tintin-Lutin is possibly 15. Tintin, on the other hand, looks about 16 from the first half of the comics and 17 for the other half. It's funny, Herge does not let Tintin celebrate his birthday in any of his comics! Shame! Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that maybe Tintin's just shy of his 18th birthday!*

In the movie, Tintin is so cute but looks about 16!

But personally, I think that Tintin stays 17 throughout the series!

*Note: Tintin's birthday is on 10 January.
Emdy
Member
#128 · Posted: 24 Apr 2013 01:31
Tintin:17
Haddock:Mid-forties
Calculus:Late fifties
Thom(p)sons:A few years younger than Haddock
Chang:13 or 14
FormulaFourteen
Member
#129 · Posted: 30 May 2013 01:59
In Tintin and the Black Island Tintin goes into a Scottish pub alone, and orders what appears to be an alcoholic beverage (page 41 in my Little Brown edition of the 1966 text.)

The story originally being published around 1937-38, from what I can find, this pub ("Ye White Hart" in the 1938 edition, "Ye Dolphin" 1943, and "The Kiltoch Arms" 1966) would have fallen under the Children and Young Persons Act of 1933, which set the minimum drinking age at 18.

Unless I'm reading the laws wrong, it would seem that at the time of The Black Island, Tintin would have been at least 18 years old. Interestingly enough, this would also be before he meets Captain Haddock, which could reasonably place him in his 20's for the majority of the canon.
jock123
Moderator
#130 · Posted: 30 May 2013 10:30
FormulaFourteen:
it would seem that at the time of The Black Island, Tintin would have been at least 18 years old

It's an interesting point; however, in the same story he's also seen riding in a moving caravan attached to a car, which is illegal - so it isn't a given that he wouldn't just break the odd law, here and there.
Also remember that Hergé thought that the U.K. had colour television in the Thirties, so it could be that he thought that the drinking age in Scotland was lower than it was, beer being available to sixteen year olds in Belgium.

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