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Calculus Affair: Where does the pipe go?

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Ranko
Member
#1 · Posted: 18 Dec 2008 12:43
Hi all,

This may have been spotted before. Apologies. A quick search didn't reveal anything. (Or I may not have been looking hard enough!)

Anyway, on page 42 Fr7 Haddock is reading the newspaper he bought just prior to their flight to Klow. Notice he is smoking a pipe. In the next frame it is gone.

Has anyone else spotted this?
tuhatkauno
Member
#2 · Posted: 18 Dec 2008 13:30
Now that you said. On pg. 60 Archie says: "At last! Now I can have a quiet smoke ..." Something always came up on pg. 28, 40, 42 and finally 62. But the disappearence of Captain's pipe is a mystery.
Ranko
Member
#3 · Posted: 18 Dec 2008 15:09
tuhatkauno:
But the disappearence of Captain's pipe is a mystery.

Indeed. At the very least in the next frame I would have expected the pipe to fly out of his mouth... he shows enough surprise for his cap to come flying off!
cigars of the beeper
Member
#4 · Posted: 18 Dec 2008 16:44
I think that the idea is that he got so shocked by the article he was reading that the pipe flew out of his mouth. Not something that usually happens in real life, but such things happen often in comics.
Ranko
Member
#5 · Posted: 18 Dec 2008 17:01
cigars of the beeper:
I think that the idea is that he got so shocked by the article he was reading that the pipe flew out of his mouth. Not something that usually happens in real life, but such things happen often in comics.

I agree, cigars. But in this instance knowing how precise Hergé was in his drawings, I'm a little surprised that we didn't see evidence of it flying out. Maybe I'm being too picky?
Interestingly, in my Egmont 3-in-1 edition it looks as though an attempt has been made to ink over the pipe to make it look like Haddock's beard. This could just be peculiar to my copy as there are a few frames where in shrinking the artwork to fit some of the colour has 'bled' into the surrounding areas.
cigars of the beeper
Member
#6 · Posted: 19 Dec 2008 01:17
Perhaps the idea is that the newspaper is obscuring the pipe.
Triskeliae
Member
#7 · Posted: 20 Dec 2008 00:34
Could be....
jock123
Moderator
#8 · Posted: 27 Sep 2022 14:17
Ranko:
Interestingly, in my Egmont 3-in-1 edition it looks as though an attempt has been made to ink over the pipe to make it look like Haddock's beard.

I realize that some time has passed since this thread was current, but I was browsing through my copy of Calculus Affair (an Egmont hardback), and happened to notice that the Captain's pipe in this frame is actually missing its colour - it's a sort of a white blob. As I had a Casterman copy in French to hand, I looked at that as well, and lo and behold, it too has the pipe without colour!
I wonder therefore if there was an attempt to repair the art when it was reduced for the 3-in-1, if it was noticed that the colour had been lost at some unspecified time in the past, leading to the noticeable "inking in"?
There's a third possibility, and, to borrow a phrase from Hergé's Belgian compatriot René Magritte, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"...
It's not said that the Captain is going to smoke a pipe, and he doesn't have a pipe before he goes for the papers, and has been remarked, it certainly isn't there when he gets startled. Could it be that the colourist mistook a mark or marks on the page to be a pipe, and filled it in brown? The side of the Captain's beard could be misread as a spiral of smoke.
Could what I have now described as the white blob, and Ranko saw as an attempt to ink it in, be the remains of remedial work to try and clarify that the Captain *isn't* smoking a pipe? It wasn't unknown at all, in the days when printing was more mechanical, and artwork was physical rather than digital, for repairs and revisions to be done by affixing patches of paper to the page with glue, which then in turn perished over time, and the patch would drop off again and get lost.
Harrock n roll
Moderator
#9 · Posted: 30 Sep 2022 10:03
Hello, another johnny-come-lately on this thread... :-)

jock123:
Could it be that the colourist mistook a mark or marks on the page to be a pipe, and filled it in brown?

I must say, I don't buy it! Perhaps it's just because through years of reading the book I can't see it any other way. It does seem an entirely appropriate time for the Captain to be smoking his pipe. He's in quiet contemplation mode, meditating on the newspaper. And his stance seems to suggest it. The colouring aside, just by the shape, his posture and the way he has it in his mouth, it looks similar to elsewhere in the book. I have no explanation as to what happened to the pipe afterwards though!

As tuhatkauno seemed to suggest above (a mere 14 years ago), whenever the Captain is relaxing or in his comfort zone it's the cue for a major mishap. Something has to happen to make him spill or spit his drink out, burn his hand or drop his pipe. Like in many of the other books, quite often he doesn't even get his drink because something happens like the building explodes. The Captain's life is one continuous mishap but it always has more impact when disaster strikes as he's about to relax.

Later in the book, after they crash through the Bordurian border in the tank, he celebrates with a smoke and BOOM! The Captain says here it was "the first since we set off" – perhaps he was referring to this particular one at Geneva airport. And just two pages later, they're home so he can relax again but Calculus has to burn his face off with microfilm just as he's lighting it.

So, I would class this as another minor example of the 'Haddock comfort zone impending disaster syndrome'. He's reading the paper and has the pipe which means something about to happen.
mct16
Member
#10 · Posted: 30 Sep 2022 19:57
There are other instances such as when, at the very beginning, he is smoking his pipe while walking in the Marlinspike estate when it is ruined by the storm and Snowy wrecks his hat.

Also, when he crosses the road to buy some tobacco, he is hit by Arturo Benedetto Giovanni Giuseppe Pietro Arcangelo Alfredo Cartoffoli in his sports car.

I wonder if Herge simply happened to refer to smoking in these scenes by chance or if it was an intentional running joke, similar to the sticky plaster, but more spread out.

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