Tintin Forums

Yes, getting eaten by crocodiles is not a nice way to go, even for a villain who tried to condemn Tintin to the same fate.

Another definite dark moment is when Tintin blows up the rhinoceros in the original Tintin in the Congo. Cruelty is not supposed to be part of Tintin's nature.

Using the United States as the rival expedition in the original Shooting Star was not Hergé’s brightest moment either, because they get up to some really dark stuff. Okay, so Hergé was forced to work under Nazi censorship at the time. But couldn't he have used a fictitious country to begin with instead of changing it to one later on?

Unintentionally giving the villain in The Shooting Star a Jewish name was unfortunate as well. But I never thought of that villain or his name as Jewish; I just saw him as your typical ugly cartoon villain.

The Cigars of the Pharaoh certainly has its frightening moments, which gives it a darker tone than the first three books. It delves into mystery and touches on the supernatural. That evil fakir is one scarey villain in Tintin. The poison of madness is disturbing, especially when it turns Wang Jnr into a head-chopping madman.

And I am not impressed with the police who forced the gypsies to camp at a rubbish dump in The Castafiore Emerald There's no excuse for forcing people to live like that!

The word "dark" can be understood in a wide variety of ways. A quick google took me to the Free Dictionary, which provided the following:

6. Characterized by gloom; dismal: took a dark view of the consequences.
7. Sullen or threatening: a dark scowl.
11. Exhibiting or stemming from evil characteristics or forces; sinister: "churned up dark undercurrents of ethnic and religious hostility" (Peter Maas).
12. Being or characterized by morbid or grimly satiric humor.

I suspect that the posts above are mostly thinking in terms of 6 and 11.

For myself, I find that the mood of large chunks of The Blue Lotus is dark (sense 7 - i.e. threatening) in comparison with most of the other Tintin books.

It's just made me think of the last part of "Explorers on the Moon" - the journey back to Earth when they have to try and return before running out of oxygen.

With everyone struggling to stay alive and two men dying in the process, you get plenty of dark moments in several pages.

Yes, the final moments of the oxygen crisis in Explorers on the Moon are extremely dark and sad, especially when Wolff sacrifices himself.

And there is the panel where the villain, who has been eavesdropping on the rocket's transmissions, admits defeat and screams at them all to perish up there, go to hell, etc etc. Presumably he stops eavesdropping after that. It comes right after Tintin's pitiful transmission that they may not make it and he starts crying, 'adieu', which makes things even darker.

I think the darkest moments, at least the moments that I like the least, are the ones in The Black Island where Tintin is being mean to Snowy. Tintin is constantly doing things like taking away his bone, spanking him, grabbing his ear or threatening him. ("Woe betide you if it's just another bone!")

Even when Snowy saves Tintin by luring the goat into chasing him, Tintin scolds him. It seemed like poor Snowy couldn't do anything right!

Hi,
I rate The Broken Ear as particularly dark.
I find the two villains - Ramon and Alonzo very evil with no morals whatsoever. The way they finished Tortilla off on the ship was quite confronting.
Herge tries to cover the specifics of the killing but we are still privy to some key visuals which highlight the vicious attack.

From memory, I think this story showcased the most murders in the adventures.
Diaz's accidental suicide although humorous, was still quite confronting - definitely dark humour!!


Rod

rodney
I reckon the deaths of Ramon and Alonzo are even darker than Tortilla's because Herge includes a panel where demons drag them off to Hell.

There are some really sad scenes in Cigars of the Pharaohs when Snowy thinks Tintin has been executed.

First, when he's running through the streets crying.

Then he's lying on the grave of Ali-Bhai, crying: "I'll never see him again! There's nothing left for me now but to die on his grave!"

Cigars of the Pharaohs
Not to mention the chamber filled with the mummified explorers. The blank stares in their eyes always gave me the creeps. After all, these are supposed to be corpses, men murdered by the drug smugglers.

I agree - I found that horrific as a child - even today, it seems a particularly sadistic touch by the drug smugglers, with ghoulish attention to detail. One of the victims is too short for his sarcophagus, and one is too tall, meaning that the villains have had to cut a gap in the top of it for his head! Also the neat little name placards, which are even dated on the book's cover, though not within!

This might seem a strange one, but I was disturbed by the possible fate of Rastapopoulos and his henchmen in Flight 714. Krollspell, as a villain turned good, is found wandering with amnesia, but we never find out what happens to his boss, along with Allen, Spalding and the crewmembers of the Carreidas 160. At that age, I firmly believed in UFOs, along with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, so I imagined that the villains had been whisked off into space by the aliens, never to be seen or heard from again!