Adventures Far Away
Tintin and the Muppets away from home
Cigars of the Pharaoh by Hergé and Muppet Napoleon by Emily McGovern
Tintin, the ace boy reporter (and of course Snowy, his dog), are off on a world cruise. They’ll amble around Africa. They may end up in the east. It’s all very leisurely.
Just what we need, boy, says Tintin.
This will be boring as anything, thinks Snowy.
And then they meet a madman on the ship’s deck. Sophocles Sarcophagus is clad in a tailcoat and ill-fitting top hat and is, as his name might suggest, an absent-minded explorer and archaeologist. Initially, Tintin and Snowy thought the explorer was chasing after a priceless map, an artefact that might take him to an undiscovered tomb of the Egyptian kings. But in fact, he is not. The fool is chasing a cruise brochure that’s blown overboard.
That said, the explorer does have a fine offer he’s prepared to make Tintin.
Come with me, my boy, and we can hunt the tomb together. We’ll be put ashore at Port Said, and then it’s a quick trek inland to start the exploration. It’ll be grand.
Tintin quite naturally says yes. But no sooner has he given assent, Tintin’s in trouble: someone has tipped off the authorities that, far from being boy wonder, boy reporter, boy genius, he’s actually a drug-smuggling gun-runner. A dangerous criminal whose capture is an urgent priority.
Tintin finds himself seized and thrown into the brig. Mere feet from the port.
If only, Tintin thinks, there was a way out and off the boat.
One escape later, Tintin and Snowy are ashore, and they begin — with Sarcophagus — to search for the tomb of the departed Egyptian king. They pass dune and pyramid. They go inland on camel-back. And finally, they pace their way towards a patch of desert sand as featureless as all the rest.
How do you know where we are? Tintin asks the explorer.
I don’t know, he replies, but the directions on this map are quite precise. They pause. The archaeologist is sure they’ve found something; and as he digs feverishly, Tintin and Snowy look around. Snowy uncovers something — and most odd indeed, it’s a cigar. A cigar whose band has a strange yin-yang type of symbol on it — a symbol that is replicated, of all the bizarre coincidences, on the outer works of the tomb that Sarcophagus has just uncovered.
The old boy jumps up and down in glee. He’s found the burial place, after all! Many other explorers and archaeologists before him had set out to find it; but all of them were unsuccessful, he says. Every one of them disappeared in the attempt.
But Sarcophagus isn’t deterred. He’s jubilant. He has bettered all his predecessors — or so he thinks. Snowy and Tintin sniff around a little and return to where the explorer was, a moment or so ago. But what’s this? He’s gone.
Gone. Vanished into thin air.
Our two heroes look about. They can’t understand it. Where is the explorer? They look all over the hard, cuboidal stone that is the tomb. Finally, they return to the yin-yang type sign, a glyph etched into the side of the monument. That’s where Sarcophagus was last seen. Tintin pushes against it — and then, it opens, like the cave den in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves; although neither Tintin nor Snowy has first to utter ‘open sesame.’
What they find is grotesque: preserved almost like Egyptian mummies are all the earlier archaeologists and explorers who tried to discover the tomb. They all have cards attached to their sarcophagi, stating both name and occupation. And, Tintin and Snowy realise, there are sarcophagi prepared for them, too. The small canine-sized one bears a card that reads: SNOWY: Dog.
This would perturb anyone.
What Tintin and Snowy only realise later — after kidnappings, and wrongful incarcerations a mental institution, after conscriptions and an apparent execution and plane crashes, car crashes, and all manner of crashes — is that they are at the centre, the very eye, of a great conspiracy: a conspiracy so vast and so various it almost defies logic.
This is, in my judgement, the first mature book in the Tintin series. It is a little prettier, more detailed, than the others that arrived before (although the modern reader might have difficulty discerning the early serials from the glossy colour publications they’re likely to find these days).
It is more politically sophisticated than the earlier books. Yes, Tintin and Snowy are still ranged against the gangsters and the ne’er-do-wells. But they are looking at real illicit markets for real things — in this case, heroin — and actually giving some thought to supply (if not demand).
The satire is just as broad as it was in earlier books, but it is better aimed. Rather than going after Congolese and American Indians, there is a whole panoply of characters here. Some are villains; some, like the two policemen Thompson and Tomson (who are introduced in this book), are well-intentioned but foolish.
All the while, as Tintin tries to uncover the grand designs of this web of criminality, the truth is kept just out of sight for the reader, in a way that’s truly satisfying.
I enjoyed this one a good deal. I also enjoyed a comic by Emily McGovern about the script for a possible Muppets film — but one with a historical rather than a literary source. Just as someone once said that it was redemption of a sort for Orson Welles, at his fattest and least employable, to become a close personal friend of Kermit the Frog, so too, one might say, the island of St. Helena, and Napoleon’s inevitable life sentence of exile, might be made more bearable, more thematically appropriate, by the inclusion of all the Muppets singing songs, getting into shenanigans, and doing Muppety things.