Tintin Forums

In the book Tintin in Tibet, I have noticed a difference between two frames of the plane Chang takes.

There is a page depicting the plane on the ground, with a propeller badly damaged in front, while at the end of the book, while Chang is explaining about the trauma, there is a picture of the plane flying, without the Propeller.

This is kinda weird, any ideas?

Herge probably just made a mistake. He was human, after all.

I'm sure Hergé was indeed human and made mistakes, but on this occasion there is actually no error. In that picture from Chang's story, the plane is flying, so the propellors are whizzing round. Therefore, to be true to the way spinning propellors appear in real life, the propellor blades aren't fully drawn.

If you look carefully at that picture, Sedna, you'll see that Hergé has drawn little rotating whizz marks to represent the blurred propellor blades of each engine, as he generally does when drawing planes in flight.

Hope that helps!

I agree entirely with Balthazar - the blades of the propellor are turning too fast to be seen, so Hergé has done what is quite common in comics, and put in a series of marks to indicate a blur. It's not entirely realistic, but is sort of artist's short-hand for speed.
If he had drawn a set of propellor blades, it would have seemed that the engine had stopped, and that would have been something different, don't you think?
It happens too when he wants to show a car in motion - he makes the wheels on the car look blurry - otherwise it wouldn't look any different to one which was standing still.