A few years back Egmont brought out three volumes of Tintin-themed story, game and activity books, roughly equivalent to a British annual, which, for those unfamiliar with the concept is a book aimed at the Christmas market, usually towards children, and roughly dedicated to a single topic, such as a comic weekly or character, a pop group, or television series.
The
Tintin annual, for want of a better word, was actually brought out mid-year, and was undated, so the idea was that they would have a longer shelf-life.
Now in fact they have been re-born, in a manner of speaking, as Last Gasp brings them to an American audience, albeit in a new format.
The Tintin & Snowy Big Activity Book is a new compendium edition, bringing together elements from all three of the original books in a soft-back collection.
The cover and the text story within are themed towards the
Unicorn/
Rackham books, which is not surprising, although the puzzles, games and activities are drawn from many places, so it covers a lot, and is nicely illustrated with images from many of the books.
The content is definitely aimed at the "fun" end of the spectrum, be it a lesson on how to draw Tintin or a jeep in the clear-line style, to making a pretend shrunken heads or signalling with flags.
There's also a nice two-page walk through of how the comics were created, from notes and ideas, through sketches and roughs, to pages at the printers - to me as a child this would have been worth the price of admission alone.
With this and the
Young Reader titles which have "Making of..." sections, it's moved on a long way from my own childhood, when my sources of information were a Methuen poster I read over and over again about Hergé working on
Picaros, and a single entry in a very expensive dictionary of comic artists, both of which I used to sneak looks at in a bookshop during family visits to Aberdeen!
The young Tininologists are being well-served before graduating to
The Complete Companion!
Personally,
having complained about it before, I could have done without the section on how to dowse, presented as if it actually has science behind it, but that's a minor quibble.
It's also a pity that the other text versions of stories have been missed out, but you can't have everything, and at 96 pages you get a lot of good stuff.
I think that Guy Harvey and Simon Beecroft did a nice job on the originals, and this is a good way to catch up on the series if you didn't get it first time around.
The ISBN is 978-0-86719-761-7, should you wish to get a copy for yourself.
Or a child that you know...
Or if you wish to pretend that you are ordering it for a child that you know... ;-)
