Pastiche Without Permission

Harry Edwood’s Tintin (and Snowy)

The Voice of the Lagoon by Harry Edwood, translated by Richard, and Tintin and the Mysterious Visitor

Pastiches have their own logic. They’re like modern franchise films, in a way. In that, like those films, they’re not made by the original author, and trade often — if they are not imaginative — in jokes fans will get, references they will have heard, and the transient thrills and pleasure of mere recognition.

I know what that is!

Readers may well say or think it to themselves as they progress.

Pastiches, therefore, can be lazy and they can be something almost worse than lazy, if near synonymous. They can be cosy. Cosiness can have its moments, its time and its place. But cosiness is not a virtue in itself. It ought to be resisted sometimes as, like its fellow poison nostalgia, cosiness weakens the defences, rots the brain visibly and obviously from the inside.

I have reviewed a lot of books on Tintin this year. Initially, this was because I was wondering, as I perused the covers of the albums by Hergé, how much of the originals I remembered, how much I had actually read. (I’d read fewer than I thought, by the way, and remembered even less.)

I knew immediately that I had to finish them all, and within the course of the year. But after getting through a few of the albums, and thinking a little harder about what they were and what they meant, I thought I’d have to look into the subject a little broader and a little deeper. I’d loved Tintin as a child and I enjoyed the world of the books very much. Enjoyed it implicitly. But it became obvious very early that other people loved it more than I did, more vividly than I did, and that they dreamed in clear lines and had hopeful jolts of imagination where they were on a white and red rocket to the moon themselves with fictional friends, and so on.

Any love like that is worthy of study. Just as any famous property will produce parody, it will also produce loving pastiche. Both, if you’re interested in the phenomenon itself, are worth watching. And so watch I did.

A lot of Tintin pastiche is bad, probably because it is produced by children. After all, Tintin is for children. Many men of, if we’re being charitable, middle age have produced works on the Tintin corpus. Some have investigated its themes, interrogated its apparent implications in philosophy. But fundamentally, these people are playing with their toys incorrectly. Tintin is for children, and the best commentators on Tintin, and the most valuable pastiches, come in childish forms.

And so, the thin, thin premise of The Mysterious Visitor — a voice on the end of the phone telling the captain that certain doom soon awaits him — is an interesting object here. What is this work, if not an excuse to reference the recurring characters of the series? To have those characters on the page give us their catchphrases, and to enjoy ourselves in the process?

That the drawing is, while acceptable, unadventurous — that’s hardly a negative in my book.

We thus have one flavour of pastiche. Another, which is more developed, more sophisticated, can be found in The Voice of the Lagoon, a book of which, I admit it, I’ve only been able to read the first issue.

Readers ought to know that the premise of this book is that Tintin and Captain Haddock (and indeed Snowy, Tintin’s dog) are off in Madagascar, preparing for a holiday of scuba diving inside a mysterious body of water. The captain has an ancient diving suit prepared for an expedition to the undersea world, while Tintin prefers more modern gear.

When they go diving, and after many pratfalls and episodes of slapstick, including one fearful flight from a barracuda, the two of them encounter a strange thing. It’s a fish. Nothing odd in that, per se. But this is an entirely different kind of fish. It’s a fish of pale gold. Of luminous colour. And it appears to be able to speak. As Tintin and the captain see this fish, it lets out a series of loud exclamations almost like excerpts from radio broadcasts. And just as this strange incident is being digested, the book ends. To be continued, we are promised. All being well.

This is a different product entirely, for although Captain Haddock does indeed refer with disgust to blistering barnacles, and he does disappear into the water shouting his many non-expletive phrases, the drawing is fluid and beautiful, and the story appears to have real drive and momentum. In other words, it feels truly in keeping with the original, and is not a pale resurrection, a tired retread of old ground.

This is the kind of work that authors’ estates dislike because they are so fine. Estates dislike pastiche drawing that is excellent because it functions in direct competition, they argue, with the original. I will leave these immense and tedious legal questions aside. We haven’t the time for them.

Instead, I’d like to commend the work of Harry Edwood, who, it seems, managed to produce a faithful and interesting rendition of the work of Hergé long after the creator’s death, even if he did so without an estate’s direct permission.