The Adventures Of Tintin (Comics)

The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin [lez‿avɑ̃tyʁ də tɛ̃tɛ̃]) is a series of 24 bande dessinée albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth in 1907, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies, and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre and film.

The series first appeared in French on 10 January 1929, in Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth), a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century). The success of the series led to serialised strips published in Belgium's leading newspaper Le Soir (The Evening) and spun into a successful Tintin magazine. In 1950, Hergé created Studios Hergé, which produced the canonical versions of 11 Tintin albums.

The series is set during a largely realistic 20th century. Its hero is Tintin, a courageous young Belgian reporter and adventurer aided by his faithful dog Snowy (Milou in the original French edition). Other allies include the brash and cynical Captain Haddock, the intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (French: Professeur Tournesol), incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (French: Dupont et Dupond), and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore.

The series has been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ligne claire ("clear line") style. Its well-researched plots straddle the action-adventure and mystery genres and draw upon themes of politics, history and technology, offset by moments of slapstick comedy.



Issue # 22
During a refueling stop in Kemajoran Airport, Jakarta en route to an international space exploration conference in Sydney, Australia (as guests of honour for being the first men on the moon), Tintin, his dog Snowy, and their friends Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus chance upon their old acquaintance Skut (introduced in The Red Sea Sharks). Skut is now the personal pilot for aircraft industrialist and eccentric millionaire Laszlo Carreidas, who is also attending the congress. Tintin and his friends join Carreidas on his prototype private jet, the Carreidas 160, crewed by Skut, co-pilot Hans Boehm, navigator Paolo Colombani, and steward Gino. Carreidas' secretary Spalding, Boehm, and Colombani hijack the plane and bring it to the (fictional) deserted volcanic island of Pulau-pulau Bompa, situated in the Celebes Sea, where the aircraft makes a rough landing on a makeshift runway. While disembarking from the plane, Snowy bolts from Tintin's arms and runs off into the jungle under gunfire. The mastermind of the plot then reveals himself as Rastapopoulos, intent on seizing Carreidas' fortune. Captain Haddock's corrupt ex-shipmate, Allan, is present as Rastapopoulos's henchman, and Sondonesian nationalists have been hired as mercenaries.

Tintin, Haddock, Calculus, Skut and Gino are bound and held in a Japanese World War II-era bunker, while Rastapopoulos takes Carreidas to another bunker where his accomplice, Dr. Krollspell, injects him with a truth serum to reveal Carreidas's Swiss bank account number. Under the serum's influence, Carreidas becomes eager to confide his life of greed, perfidy, and theft, revealing every detail thereof except the account number. Furious, Rastapopoulos strikes at Krollspell, who is still holding the truth serum syringe, and is accidentally injected, whereupon he too boasts of past crimes until he and Carreidas quarrel over which of them is the most evil. In the process, Rastapopoulos reveals that nearly all of the men he recruited, including Spalding, the aircraft pilots, the Sondonesians and Krollspell, are marked to be eliminated after he gets the account number.

Snowy helps Tintin and his friends escape, and they find the bunker where Carreidas is held prisoner. Tintin and Haddock bind and gag Rastapopoulos, Krollspell and Carreidas, and escort them to lower ground, intending to use Rastapopoulos as a hostage. The serum's effect wears off, and Rastapopoulos escapes; Krollspell, eager to stay alive, continues to accompany Tintin and Haddock. After a run-in with Allan and the Sondonesians, Tintin, led by a telepathic voice, guides the other protagonists to a cave, where they discover a temple hidden inside the island's volcano, guarded by an ancient statue resembling a modern astronaut. Inside the structure, Tintin and his friends reunite with Calculus and meet the scientist Mik Kanrokitoff, whose guiding voice they have followed via a telepathic transmitter obtained from an extraterrestrial race that was formerly worshipped on the island as gods and are now working with Kanrokitoff to communicate with Earth's scientists. Calculus gets angry and he gets into a fight with Laszlo Carreidas. An earthquake and explosion set off by Rastapopoulos and his men triggers a volcanic eruption; Tintin and his party reach relative safety in the volcano's crater. Rastapopoulos and his henchmen flee the eruption outside the volcano and launch a rubber dinghy from Carreidas' plane.

Kanrokitoff puts Tintin and his compatriots under hypnosis and summons a flying saucer piloted by the extraterrestrials, which they board to escape the eruption. Kanrokitoff spots the rubber dinghy and exchanges Tintin and his companions (except Krollspell, who is returned to his clinic) for Allan, Spalding, Rastapopoulos, and the treacherous pilots, who are whisked away in the saucer to an unknown fate. Tintin, Haddock, Calculus, Skut, Gino and Carreidas awaken from hypnosis and cannot remember what happened to them; Calculus retains a crafted rod of alloyed cobalt, iron, and nickel, which he had found in the caves. The cobalt is of a state that does not occur on Earth, and is the only evidence of an encounter with its makers. Only Snowy, who cannot speak, remembers the hijacking and alien abduction. After being rescued by a scouting plane and interviewed about what they can recall of their ordeal, Tintin, his companions, and Carreidas catch the titular Qantas flight to Sydney