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Calculus Affair: Problems with speech bubbles?

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Shivam302001
Member
#11 · Posted: 20 Sep 2018 20:21
I took a long, pretty long look at the said pages from the Tintin magazine and personally I think the following must have happened:

Herge or his artists may have drawn the speech bubbles directly into the panels and somehow the tails of the speech bubbles got switched both in frame 2 and 4 of that page in the magazine. As pointed above, there have been more such mistakes in the French version of both the magazine and the book (was there any problem?).

Anyway,if you look carefully, Tintin & the Captain are in the exact same posture in frame 2 as in frame 4 (albeit turned backwards) and let us suppose that in each case, the Captain was given the speech bubbles tail by mistake (a coincidence?!).

However since in frame 4, the mistake was quite obvious (as jock123 pointed out), the editors sprung into action. I am willing to take the probability that they did notice frame 2 too. Since there were not any solid basis to find out who could have made the statement in the speech bubble, unlike the former one, it was made to remain as it was.

So if we look at it like this, it is both an error and not an error. But since in the final book form, the Captain is given the role of the deducer and the declarer of their next destination to Nyon (which is still hard to take in for me), and does not cause a major paradox of any kind (except personality and posture wise, but that depends completely on the reader), so the Captain it is!
jock123
Moderator
#12 · Posted: 20 Sep 2018 20:33
It's now just arguing round in circles, really.

There isn't a strong enough case that there is any sort of error in the second panel; it's possible to say that to some people's taste that piece of dialogue might have been better delivered by Tintin, but that is all, and is comparable to when in a play or a film, one thinks that this or that line could be delivered by someone else.

There isn't actually anything in the dialogue which makes it better, or clearer or more accurate for it to be by Tintin, and everything in place to make it work as it stands, unlike frame 4, which is fundamentally wrong as given in the magazine, and (quite correctly) re-attributed in the book.
Shivam302001
Member
#13 · Posted: 20 Sep 2018 20:49
Yes, it ultimately all boils down to the readers's perspective, I guess.

However, what about the other speech bubble mistakes? They were surely more obvious than this one. It is a considerable number of speech bubble misplacements for a single album! There must be some reason behind it?
mct16
Member
#14 · Posted: 21 Sep 2018 00:05
Here's another little mix-up they made in the speech bubbles:

On page 40 of the book we have the scene when Tintin suddenly realises where Calculus was hidden in the kidnappers' car.

In the original magazine version, he says that it was under the front seat. The car is a Chrysler and photos I found on the internet indicate that the front seat was a full sofa-life seat.

Later, after the incident with the plane, they examine the car and find the hiding place under the rear seat, Haddock saying: "You were almost right, thundering typhoons! It is the rear seat that is hollow..."

The font used for Haddock's remark is rather crude, very different to the font used in the other speech bubbles, indicating that Herge and his assistants had to make a last-minute correction in order to keep the dialogue consistent.

In the book edition, Tintin says that it is the front seat from the start.
BlackIsland
Member
#15 · Posted: 10 Jan 2019 20:25
Regardless it's still my favorite.

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