Tintin Forums

jock 123
Black Bob wasn't a Watkins creation
I stand corrected - sorry and thanks!

jock 123
My fudging of the attribution was simply because I couldn't recall if he was the creator or not - I wince when I see Alfred Bestall attributed as the creator of Rupert for example, so I erred on the side of caution!
I know what you mean, though in this case I'm pretty sure that Watkins did create as well as draw Desperate Dan. In the very earliest strips Dan is a stumpy little tough guy (not so unlike Hergé's earliest version of Tintin) - a long way from the well-meaning, domestic, pie-loving character Watkins quite quickly developed him into.

jock 123
...he did have the distinction of being an artist who got to sign his strips, and The Sunday Post was still cycling his original stories on Oor Wullie and The Broons well into the seventies...

A nice perk for Dudley, but the fact that artists had to obtain special permission to sign their own work as a highly unusual privillege shows just how feudal the situation in British comics (and at that publisher in particular) was. And, with the publisher owning the copyright on all his hard work (as well as the original pieces of artwork), they didn't have to pay any royalties or repeat fees (I'd guess) to Watkins' estate when they endlessly republished his work after his death. They certainly held his work in the highest esteem - not only had Watkins been largely responsible for making their comics succesful when he was alive; they could continue to use his work to boost their company's reputation and profits after he was dead, with the very appealing bonus of no longer having to pay properly for it.

Hergé managed to die famous, at a reasonably good age after a relaxed semi-retirement (having stopped overworking after Tintin in Tibet), with his estate inheriting the valuable rights to his work. None of this can be said of Dudley D Watkins, sadly. (He died too young at his drawing board, in the middle of producing a strip - one of the gruelling number of pages he produced for DC Thompson every week.)

A while back, I heard some marketing person from DC Thompson on the radio promoting their latest desperate publicity-seeking "makeover" of Desperate Dan (which is terrible by the way). The presenter asked him who had originally created Desperate Dan, and the DC Thompson spokesman said he had no idea. And he said he had no idea in a jokey, offhand way that made it clear that no one would be expected to know such an archaic, irrelevant fact (even though Watkins' creations and rerprinted work were still paying for a large part of his salary).

To be fair, DC Thompson's books of reprinted Watkins work, such as a recent collection of 1950's vintage Oor Wullie and Broons strips I've got, do pay a little bit more respect and acknowledgement to Watkins than that. But you see my general point, I'm sure.

Have I gone just a little bit off-topic?

Balthazar
I'm pretty sure that Watkins did create as well as draw Desperate Dan
He drew Wullie and The Broons from characters created by RD Low of DC Thompsons, so it is possible that they may be Low's as well, but I only mention that for information, not to disagree with you as I just don't know. Ron Low, RD Low's son is said to be the model for Wullie, and his pal "Soupy" Souter the model for "Soapy" Souter in the strip (subtle change of name, isn't it?).

To steer the creaking thread back on track, I would say that Watkins' work has some of the same problems as Hergé; he was himself Mancunian, and lived in Nottinghamshire, yet drew Scottish strips for a Dundee company about families which live in or near Glasgow (in the fictional Auchentogle).
The east-coast writers in Dundee often mixed up dialect and local references; for example the youngest Broon child is called "The Bairn", an east-coast dialect word, when she should have been called "The Wean" (The Wee One) in Glasgow.
He appear to have used local reference material, as trams and buses sometimes have Dundee destination boards, not west-coast ones.
He did move to Broughty Ferry (just outside Dundee), so he may have also included things he saw there. To add to the confusion, Cactusville, the mythical Wild west home of Desperate Dan, looks more or less like Auchentogle, save for the addition of the odd horse-trough, tie-bar and cactus...!
So it is really not possible to say where Auchentogle is, with any more certainty than Moulinsart/ Marlinspike.

Balthazar
I think a slightly tweaked, re-Belgianized English translation would be a great idea for our more Europe-friendly 21st century
I think it would certainly be useful to explain the reasons behind why certain changes were made to the English editions and what effects they had, perhaps within the books themselves as a foreword. I suppose the kids of today could at least learn something about the original cultural and historical contexts as well as the slightly Victorian attitudes that still prevailed within English-language publishing back in the 50s. And of course, it would keep both the "Franco-Belgian-purists" and the "Marlinspikers" happy!

Incidentally, here's a related thread from last year
Tintin: official postal address.

Wondering if someone can help as I go through my semi-annual Tintin jaunt.

I've read this thread with interest. As a kid I had a vague sense that something was wrong in that you never saw Tintin cross the channel to get home to Marlinspike, as he had in the Black Island, and yet the names of nearby locations and people somehow suggested it was in England (and of course the address of the Bird Brothers). Now of course I know about the changes for the English market which makes sense. Having said that, knowing about Herge's meticulousness it seems odd that he was happy to live with such inconsistencies, on top of those other ones which were made because of the different English publication order.

Anyway, a question I have is that I was under the impression Haddock was English, and always English. There might not be mention of it explicitly anywhere, but I remember reading that Herge's wife suggested the name as the Haddock was the name of a sad old english fish. So the question is, if Haddock is English, why did his ancestor own property in Belgium?

Or if he isn't English, as some previous posters have suggested - from what I can make out the English editions also changed the nationality of the Unicorn, suggesting that he had continental ancestry in the orginals - why did Herge give him an English name?

Or did Herge not give him an English name?

I am with all those who said a re-continentalised version of Tintin is in order.. I like things to make sense!

Hi Sondonista. This has been much discussed on the forums, notably (but not exclusively!) in this thread.

As you'll see if you trawl through all the posts, different people (posters and biographers) disagree on whether Hergé specifically intended Haddock to be British, with various theories as to how, if so, this would fit with his French naval Belgian-property-owning ancestor. It's a long and I think ultimately inconclusive thread, but I hope you enjoy it even if you don't find a definitive answer!

Welcome to the forums, by the way (slightly belatedly!)

It's not an impossible situation. Almost all of my ancestors on my father's side were from Switzerland and even owned property there, but I'm English, my grandfather having been a Swiss who moved and settled abroad.

Thanks Balthazar, interesting reading indeed.
It is all tied in with the Moulinsart/Marlinspike debate isn't it. Given the literature about Herge and his eye for detail etc I just find it frustrating that there is not just ambiguity but that some of it doesn't make sense; the changes in translation demonstrate how some of the ambiguity arose, but not all. Of course there's his sense of humour to contend with, and maybe he enjoyed the anachronisms.

As mct16 said, not impossible of course. My own ancestry is pretty muddled as well and a lot comes from the region in question... maybe there's a chateau out there with my name on it!

Another question - in the Seven Crystal Balls English translation Calculus is looking for a Saxon burial ground. Does anyone have what he is looking for in the original?

He's looking for a Merovingian tomb. The Merovingian dynasty was active from the mid-5th century to the mid-8th century AD, ruling over a large part of what are now France and Belgium. This period matches the early settlement of the Saxons in Britain.

Thanks mct16, makes sense! Maybe Haddock had a more distant ancestor... Pepin "The Barnacle" Haddock....