mct16:
many publishers tend to introduce the books out-of-sequence regardless of whether it can be read in that way or not
This is re-hashing what has been much discussed before, but I think we just have to see it as a necessary evil. To be honest, if the first two books published by Methuen had been
Soviets and
Congo, I doubt that we'd be having this conversation today, because there is little chance that the books would have survived, and there wouldn't be a Tintinologist.org.
I'm not certain that a publisher would go out of their way to have a sequence of books that
must be read in a particular order published in any other way, but with
Tintin it really isn't an issue to me: Hergé introduce anachronisms by having books redrawn and reworked, so there isn't a through line, significant character development, or story-arc even in the original French. Hergé suppressed
Soviets, so for most of the time
Congo was as artificial a start for French readers as
Crab was for the English-speaking reader;
Cigars may pre-date
Lotus, but is more modern in style because it was re-drawn, etc. Why get exercised about it?
mct16:
the translators have been criticized for taking "Cigars" out of chronology by having Tintin state that he and Rastapopoulos have met before (i.e. in the two previous books)
Which they had - what's the problem? The books weren't coming out in the original order anyway.
Again, it is always possible to criticize, but to what end? They got the books out for us to read, with only a trivial compromise;
Lotus was not expected to be issued, and thus
Cigars was rendered as a stand-alone - and successfully so, to my eye.
mct16:
references to Marlinspike (which he and Snowy are not due to move into for some time).
But that is as much as a problem to me as the sheik who is updated to hold one of the
Moon books. Put it another way, it doesn't seem any more or less confusing than a boy who starts his adventures in 1929 Russia, and ends up living at more or less the same age to the 1970's - willing suspension of disbelief works for me!