Tintin Forums

I'd seen this little lost scene somewhere before, and thought I'd brought it up here, but in coming across it again in the B&W collected newspaper strips for The Seven Crystal Balls and looking for reference to it, I seem to have been mistaken. Here's an incident that shows a very unexpected side to Tintin's character.

Between what became frames 14 and 15 on p. 40 of the book (from daily strips Nº126 and Nº128 of the newspaper version) Hergé originally had another strip (Nº127), in which Captain Haddock steps in a man-trap, or as Tintin tells us, a wolf-trap, which snaps shut on his ankle.
In his commentary to the collected strips, Philippe Goddin notes the similarity between this and the scene where Tintin steps into a similar device in The Black Island (frame 3 of p. 15 in that book), and points out that, as the grey wolf hasn't been found in Belgium since the 19ht century, Bergamotte must have been worried about prowlers.
However, the true oddity of the sequence is that Tintin, on finding and releasing the Captain, rather than being in any way sympathetic towards the Captain - which, as a fellow victim of such a trap in the past you might have thought he would have been - is shown in fits of highly uncharacteristic laughter at his friend's plight. It is quite disconcerting and inexplicable in the circumstances, unless he is suffering some form of nervous shock?
Whether this fit of the giggles, the absence of wolves or the feeling of repetition of something from The Black Island was the true reason for the excision, the books is probably improved by the removal.

I wonder whether "piege a loup" (wolf trap) was just the French term for a steel-jaw trap of that type? The trap doesn't have those horrible jagged teeth that would be on a wolf trap, so my guess is it's really a man trap designed to catch trespassers. Just a guess, but perhaps "piege a loup" was a euphemism for a man trap, since trapping men might have been illegal?

It might have been laid by the police, rather than Bergamotte, as another line of defence against crystal ball throwers.

Tintin's laughing fit is very out of character, which makes me think it was a prelude to Tintin seeing the bloodied hand imprint in the tree; he tilts his head back to laugh and "what's that?". I agree that the book, and the overall flow, was improved by ditching it, but it does explain how the Captain lost his monocle between pages 40 and 41 of the final book!

That could easily be, although Google Translate offers "piège à homme" too for mantrap.


Hmm... it looks to me that it does, as does the one in the B&W version of The Black Island, which would be very painful.
In the modernised version of Black Island the arched trap of the original has been replaced by a gin trap, a longer, squarer toothed-trap, used for snaring animals rather than (intentionally) trapping people, so that sorts out the vocab on that one - although it misses the fact that all toothed traps were outlawed in the U.K. in 1958, so Müller is definitely a bad man...!
It also adds another breach of U.K. law to the story, as Tintin travels in a moving caravan attached by a towbar as a passenger, which is definitely a no-no!

I must admit, I couldn't find my copy of The Seven Crystal Balls newspaper strips yesterday, so I was referring to a very pixelated version scanned from Le Soir. However, I've located my book now and it does look like there are teeth. Small teeth, but still, Ouch!

It was not unusual, in that period of his development, for Tintin to smile at his friends' misfortune. For example, in the final panel of "Ottokar", the Thom(p)sons step out of the plane and fall into the water. When it was first published in B&W in the 1930s, Tintin was shown smiling at this incident; but when redrawn in colour in the current version, he is shown as more concerned and sorry for what has happened.

I think that in the scene in "Crystal Balls", Tintin is also smiling at the irony that Haddock has raised: the fact that it is he who has been caught in the trap rather than the previous night's intruder.

There's more to Tintin here than "smiling" here though, he's racked with laughter at another's pain and misfortune - an uncharactersitic response in any scene, but as it is also a deleted scene, exactly fitting for the topic's premise, I'd say.
Quite obviously the irony of the situation is the overt purpose of the "gag" - however the reaction is disproportionate to the action involved.
Falling in the water is a slap-stick trope, verging on cliché; having your ankle caught in a man-made trap, designed to break the legs of animals, and a painful experience even to a human is not prime slap-stick material, and neither is it deftly handled here.
Hergé appears to have thought this too, hence the excision.