Harry Hayfield:
therefore as Tintin and Haddock are the same height in the picture (allowing for perspective) there can only be less than three inches difference in height between them (Haddock the taller)
Hmm… think that tha’s a stretch. You’d have to assume that the camels are identical in height, to make anything of that; additionally having to adjust for perspective as you put, surely means it just wouldn’t possible to arrive at a figure with that degree of accuracy.
It
might make sense to say that, were you to be shown Haddock standing next to the camel on a level surface, and then Tintin standing on the level ground next to the camel at the same distance from said camel, that, given a figure of seven feet as an average height, Tintin might be approaching x inched shorter or taller than Haddock; but the data simply doesn’t allow for two camels of unknown height, and an unknown distance apart, on ground that isn’t flat, to be used in such a fashion, to such exacting tolerance.
But the biggest problem comes from the fact that there are many pictures of Haddock and Tintin together without the diversion of a camel, which shows the Captain to be a good bit taller than Tintin – I’d say greater than three inches at a guess – even in
Crab itself: look at them as they walk through the Souk.
However, for those wishing to try to do the mathematics, here’s a crumb of information which relates Tintin directly to a measurable object in the real world.
When Tintin holds up the book about weapons in
The Calculus Affair, look at the word “Research†in the title.
Using a ruler on a real-world copy of the same book, I see that it is almost exactly fifty millimetres wide from the bottom outer-left corner of the leg of the “R†to the bottom outer-right hand corner of the letter “hâ€â€¦
See what you can do with that, folks!