Customer Reviews

The Shooting Star (The Adventures of Tintin)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

After a string of stories loosely based on mystery/crime plots, 'The Shooting Star' initiates the formula that would become fairly standard in the Tintin books to come: the science-fiction adventure, a kind of modernist Jules Verne. A huge meteorite flying past earth splinters a large fragment which lands near the North Pole. Containing a new metal called phostlite, named after the astronomer who detected it, Tintin and Snowy join an expedition of world-class scientists to lay claim to the rock, in a ship captained by one Haddock, now unlikely President of the Society for Sober Sailors (despite smuggling crates of whiskey for the journey). Their quest, however, is pre-empted by another expedition, financed by crooked Sao Rico banker, cigar-chomping (anti-Semitic caricature?), Bohlwinkel.

The first dozen pages of 'Star' are unequalled in literature for sustaining a nightmare mood of unaccountable suspense and anxiety (appropriate given the Occupation context [1941] in which the story was written). The meteor is introduced as both a speedily growing incandescence in the night sky, and by a melting heat afflicting the usually drizzly Brussels, the tar on the roads melting, armies of rats fleeing the gutter, car-tyres popping and mad prophets pronouncing millenarian judgements. The spangled blackness of the sky is offset by the dreamlike twilight blue that illuminates the streets. When Tintin rushes to the observatory, he finds the spanking, steely modern technology run by an eccentric gaggle of Dickensian relics, all black frock-coated dodderers, running around in the vicious circles of their own self-absorption, headed by the appropriately-named, anvil-headed Phostle. When he encourages Tintin to look into the giant, cannon-priapic telescope for himself, he sees a colossal spider heading towards the planet.

No work could keep up that sweat-making momentum, and Herge wisely lets the narrative dip, mixing comedy (including Haddock's pathetic attempts to sneak a nagan, Snowy's incessant raids on the kitchen, and the sight of the world's finest minds keeling over in green-faced sea-sickness) with race-against-the-clock suspense as our heroes strive to reach the meteor, despite various chilling sabotage attempts by their rivals. The meteor itself is a creation worthy of Swift, soon erasing memories of 'The Black Island'. The affirmative faith in science that propels the action is undermined by the instabilities of the sinking meteor, with its magnified lifeforms (including flies and spiders) and exploding toadstools (among the book's many great visual effects, the best is possibly the shrinking in successive frames of our hero as the mushroom enlarges). The massive apples that knock Tintin on the head may be an ironic allusion to the great Enlightenment hero Newton, who could be said to usher in modern science, and the famous fruit in the Garden of Eden (like Adam, or Columbus, Tintin explores virgin land), a warning against the dangers of pursusing too much knowledge (earlier predicted by the decline into madness of the scientist Philippus); nature will always fight back, in ever more aggressive and distorted forms.

I agree with the other reviewers before me that this episode of Tintin, is, well a little bizarre. For example, in the first few pages we learn that the world is coming to an end due to a predicted meteor that will crash into earth. One of the series strangest and most satirical character, Philippulus the Prophet makes an all too brief appearance with his words of doom for all the sinners of this world. Well, by morning of the next day, the world has not ended. Life goes on. The real adventure begins when Tintin, Capt. Haddock and a group of international scientists go on a quest to beat out their competition and to be the first ones to find a piece of the fragmented meteor that fell into the arctic oceans. It's basically an old fashioned space race but in cartoon. Personally, I liked this episode. I think it's charmingly weird--like reading a dream because it's full of imaginative stuff: armageddon, Tintin parachuting onto a boiling hot rock, spiders that grow into the size of cars, exploding pokadoted mushrooms from outer space.... Like I said, The Shooting Star could very be the name of a painting by Salvador Dali. Still, in general, this episode is quite worthy because you do have some pretty funny and exciting moments--which is, of course, the essence of Tintin.

"The Shooting Star" is one of my favorite Tintin adventures. It's got action, humour, and a colorful final sequence.

Walking home one night, Tintin sees a large star in the sky, a star that hadn't been there before. The astronomers have spotted it too, and predict it will colide with and end the Earth! The meteor causes an earthquake on impact, but fortunately that's all. According to some of their readings, the astronomers believe the meteorite is made of a mysterious new metal, and decide to make a trip by boat (led by Captain Haddock) to the Arctic Ocean to investigate. An oil company from Sao Rico has also decided to visit the meteor, to take the new metal for themselves. It becomes a race filled with sabotage and seasickness. Will Tintin and the astronomers be able to beat them to it?

It's a very easy going, straightforward story, and I think that's why I like it so much. It's got a few elements of sci-fi to it (like the effects of the meteor on the Earth) and a dream sequence, which were a nice touch too. It's good to see Captain Haddock, it always is, but from the way the story starts, it is a bit unexpected. A nice surpise though.

Definitely worth reading for fans of Tintin.

No, not the best, but definately the most interesting. This book was written in war time, in occupied belgium, and is a key point in deciding whether or not Herge was a fascist. I wrote a short essay on this, and if anyone would like to read it, email me at Wills_b@yahoo.com.

This is definately a must for any tintin fan though.

Set in the 1930's, another great Tintin adventure begins in Brussels
Tintin notices that there is an extra star in the Great Bear constellation, that keeps growing bigger. He heads to the Space Observatory where he makes acquaintance with Professor Phostle and also encounters a madman who calls himself Philippulus the prophet. Phostle's prediction of the destruction of the world being imminent turns out to be off the mark, but Tintin joins important expedition to Greenland, to find the new mineral on the asteroid that has crashed into the ocean there, headed by Phostle and under the auspices of the European Foundation for Scientific Research.
A rival expedition financed by Sao Rico businessman Bohlwinkel does all it can to sabotage Tintin and friends, as the good ship Aurora heads out north.
A surreal dreamlike Tintin album with, as usual, lots of exciting colourful detail. Exciting and a lot of fun.
The episode of the anti-semitic stereotype of the international banker Bohlwinkel, Herge insisted was a genuine error with no malicious intent.

The beginning is really bizarre. The world seems to be falling apart. Everything is messed up. It turns out a meteor is about to fall into the earth. But when a piece of it falls into the ocean, there is a scientific race to claim the island first...

Really neat, the "race" setting provides us with much amusement, and lots of suspense. Once on the island, even more bizarre and strange things begin happening...

Read the rest for yourself, its so worth-while...

The Shooting Star - L'etoile mysterieuse, or The Mysterious Star, in the original French version - is the tenth story in the Adventures of Tintin series. It is also the second featuring the colourful Captain Haddock, always a welcome and comic addition to the otherwise tense (but still wonderful) tales.

In this adventure, a mysterious shooting star and an unexplained heat wave are rumoured to signal the end of the world -- that is, until eccentric Professor Decimus Phostle proves otherwise. Phostle (perhaps a predecessor of Professor Calculus?) determines that these oddities are in fact caused by the emergence of a new element, which he names phostlite after himself. The adventure itself revolves around the professor's - and Tintin's, of course - quest for a lump of the material itself. Of course, the perfunctory bad guys are determined to get there first.

Comedy is lent, as always, by the aforementioned Captain Haddock, who moonlights in this book as the unlikely president of the Society of Sober Sailors (or S.S.S.) and by Tintin's plucky dog Snowy. The Shooting Star is followed by an adventure in two parts, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure.

In this adventure (written 1941) the world comes close to annihilation when earth almost collides with a star (or a meteorite). A piece of the star (or the meteorite) brakes off, and it falls into the Ocean. Professor Phostle discovers a new metal in the meteorite/star using spectroscopy, which is named phostlite. Tintin and Captain Haddock sets out on an expedition together with a team of international (European) scientists to find the piece that broke off as well as the new metal.

From the drawings and the description of the approaching object it is clear that it must be a star (being a large hot fusion object in space, and the use of spectroscopy, etc.) On the other hand solid pieces cannot break off from stars, and it is described as a meteorite at one point. It is clear that Herge did not know the difference between a star and a meteorite. There are also other passages that show poor understanding of science (previous reviewer points out another example). Therefore, this adventure cannot be viewed as good science fiction (just compare with other contemporary science fiction literature).

However, as with most Tintin books, the story is fast paced, spell binding, exciting and full of humor. The story is heavy with mystery and tension but it also has light hearted moments. It is an entertaining story, and once you start reading it you can't put it down.

I should say that there is some controversy surrounding this adventure. The international members of the team picked for the expedition are from Nazi Germany, axis occupied nations, or neutral nations. Also the original villains were Americans (this was later changed to Sao Rico). It might also have contained an anti-Semitic caricature, but this is not noticeable unless you expect it before hand. However, it should be noted that Herge denied that the character in question (Bohlwinkle) was intended to be Jewish. Belgium (where Herge lived) was occupied by Germany at the time, and the newspaper he worked for was the only independent media that was allowed to operate under the Nazi occupation. This might have influenced how he wrote the story.

Despite its flaws, I really enjoyed this story and I have read it and re-read it dozens of times, but it is not among the better Tintin adventures.

While Tintin has provoked some controversy, in particular over Hergé's naive depiction of overseas areas like Africa and Russia, The Shooting Star seems to be the episode among those published during the Nazi occupation of Belgium that has produced the most discussion and revision. Basically, the story is about a scientific discovery (a meteorite has fallen into the ocean), with scientific teams dispatched by the US and also by Axis-occupied nations to claim it for their own; Hergé and Tintin are part of the latter team. Naturally, the story shows how Hergé and Tintin played fair in this competition, as opposed to enemy teams which were run by underhanded organisers with Jewish names that flew the US flag (although later editions replaced the US flag with that of the fictitious country Sao Rico.)

Again, the story starts out with Tintin out for a stroll that quickly brings him into involvement in a serious adventure: a comet is nearing the earth, so Tintin befriends some academics that are studying it; the comet won't collide with the earth, but part of it will fall into the ocean, so an expedition sets forth to retrieve samples for scientific study. Tintin has another encounter with eccentric professors, he hires a boat - perfect excuse to bring Captain Haddock into the picture - and off they go; the rest of the book's adventures are water-based.

Haddock enters the picture by page 15, eventually getting into a few booze-related incidents but not acting as clumsy as he does in later episodes. The rest of the story is full of exciting incidents, but nothing too radical.

One of Herge's most controversial books (not considering here "Land of the Soviets" and "Tintin in Congo", whose anticommunism and colonialism are so crude and over the top they are hard to take seriously), this is actually a very entertaing adventure yarn. Herge wrote it during the German occupation of Belgium on World War II, and the plot deals with a European team of scientists rushing to the North Pole to recover a meterorite in competition with an American team. What is controversial is that all members of the European team belong to the axis or countries aligned or associated with it (Spain, Sweden). And the backer of the american expedition is an unmistakably jewish financier (called Blumenstein in the first editions, and Bohlwinkel in later ones) who tries to sabotage the European expedition in a number of ways. The book is very entertaining, but such details left something of a bad taste.