Tintin Forums

Hello Tintin-Fans,
I'm just rereading my father's Tintin collection and I'm asking myself if the storyline differs from the publishing dates?
I couldn't find anything on the web and I hope that you could answer my question.
Thank you!

Hi Anenome, welcome to the forum!
Firstly, I should mention there are a number of threads where this has been mentioned (if you do a search you'll turn up a few).

I assume you are meaning the English language books (although this applies to many other language editons too.) If you look at this list of publishing dates of the Belgian and English editions you can see that they are very different. In order to get Tintin established in the UK they started with what they considered the more 'substantial' books; The Crab With The Golden Claws and King Ottokar's Sceptre in 1958, followed by the Unicorn / Rackham and the Moon stories in 1959. By the 70s most of them had been released, although in no particular order.

Unfortunately it led to many inconsistencies in the chronology of the stories. For example; mentions of Marlinspike in Cigars Of The Pharaoh and the mention of Haddock having met Castafiore before he actually had. It was really a case of putting out what the publisher thought was the best books first and leaving the more 'controversial' ones later; Tintin In America in 1978, The Blue Lotus in 1983 and Congo in 2005.
It rankles quite a few Tintinologists today, but it doesn't bother me!

Then you have better nerves than I have. I've always found it frustrating that when foreign language series like "Spirou et Fantasio" or "Lucky Luke" were published in English, they were stories that came later in the original series rather than the beginning.

It can be annoying when you are introduced to characters and you have no idea how they came about or how they developed. For example, a company once published a single Spirou story called "Z as in Zorglub" which included a strange creature called the Marsupilami, but no indication as to what it was or where it came from. More to the points would have been "There is a Sorcerer in Champignac" or "Spirou and the Heirs" in which the Marsupilami was introduced and marked the beginning of the most popular Spirou era.

I think that it is really all right that the published them in the "wrong" order. I just wish that they hadn't "amended" the dialog and changed certain conversations to fit the new chronology.

Hmm... Can't see how you could have done one without the other...

It has been said before, but it's worth repeating that the books were a gamble for Methuen: the series hadn't taken off when introduced in the Eagle with Ottokar, and the Casterman English editions had sunk without trace. It wasn't by any means certain that they wouldn't fail again, but LL-C and MT did everything they could to ensure that the books were given as good a chance as possible.
Thus they started with the strongest books (as had the earlier attempt, mark you), made them as appealing as they could to their target (British) audience, and collaborated and consulted Hergé as much as possible.

He appreciated what they had done, and a relationship was built, unique in all the translations of his work.

Every Methuen book up to and including Picaros was approved by Hergé, so they must have had a seal of approval.
Considering that the two translators were paid a pittance for their work, it was truly a labour of love.

As there wasn't any guarantee that the series would stay the course, and Congo and Lotus were seen at the time as unusable anyway, it made perfect sense to adapt the text if necessary to smooth the flow of the series.

Also worth bearing in mind that some changes exist even in the French books which caused anachronisms (the prime example being the sheik holding a copy of Destination Moon), and aren't just to do with translation.

I don't know, I think that the changes were unnecessary still.

Fair enough, I admire your optimism, but think it's misplaced. :-)

Hergé himself doesn't seem to have been too much of a purist when it came to the chronology.

As Jock points out, in his 1950s redraw of Cigars of the Pharaoh, he has the Sheik holding up Destination Moon - something of a plug for the newest Tintin adventure at the time, I think - regardless of the fact that Cigars of the Pharaoh is clearly set in the early 1930s, even in its redrawn version.

It's not just the cars and biplanes etc. that fix Cigars of the Pharaoh in this period; its sequel The Blue Lotus, fixes the date of this two-book adventure far more precisely than most Tintin stories. Given this, the appearance of Destination Moon in a 1930s Sheik's tent isn't just out of order for the books; it's impossibly futuristic, portraying not just a V2-inspired moon rocket but a very accurate Jeep (invented in the 1940s).

And then there's Hergé and De Moor's 1960s redraw of The Black Island, which updates everything to the 1960s, but leaves the story feeling very much like the pre-war Tintin book it is, with no reference to Haddock, and with the Thom[p]sons still trying to arrest Tintin (as they do so often in the early books).

I share Cigars' and mct's feeling of wanting everything to make sense chronologically, and I think there may now be a case for undoing all the now unnecessary chronology fixes and fudges of the original English translations, (as well as undoing the references to Marlinspike being in Marlinshire, England). But maybe we shouldn't let these things bother us too much, since they don't seem to have bothered Hergé himself.

Hmmm... I see the potential for a Star Trek-y, Back to the Future-y, wibbly-wobbly-time-wimey*, time-traveling, inter-dimensional story, in which Tintin and Co. have to go back and stop Werner von Braun, Rastapopoulos and the Bordurians from getting V-weapons and Wilys Jeeps in a parallel world of the thirties, changing the course of history...


*see the Doctor Who episode "Blink" for details...

Thanks for that information, Balthazar. I have always wondered what era that book was redrawn in (there was obviously something screwy going on, with Tintin leaving on board a high-tech jet at the end).