If you never read Tintin, or even if you did but have forgotten most of his adventures, I’d like to convince you, if I may, that he is a badass motherfucker.
Let us first take a look at our hero:
There he is, traversing a waterfall while hanging upside down from a rope, with a dog on his back.
This is a 16 year old freelance reporter from Belgium. His best friend is a dog called Snowy, or Milou in the original French, and he spends most of his time busting drug smugglers, kidnappers, gangsters and other ne’er-do-wells. He has no family that we are ever told about.
In his 20-odd adventures he is shot, knocked unconscious, drugged, beaten up and nearly killed countless times. He is never taken down.
I only mention this because my girlfriend gave me the boxset of the animated series from the ’90’s on DVD for Christmas and I’ve been working my way through them. In the course of watching the series it struck me that not only is Tintin a totally gnarly dude, he is also completely insane.
I’m going to take as an example an incident from the first episode, Tintin in America (the first two books, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo were never adapted into the TV series). The incident in question saw Tintin being thrown into a river after being drugged and stuffed into the boot of a car. Snowy, who was similarly drugged, regains consciousness and drags Tintin ashore. Tintin then sneaks up on his kidnappers and holds them up by pretending he has a gun, causing them to drop theirs, which he picks up, fires two shots into the air, then laughs maniacally. He laughs maniacally. Is there any stronger proof of a person’s insanity than laughing manically after firing a gun? I think not.
Instance number 2: Tintin and Haddock travel to Peru in order to rescue Professor Calculus from kidnappers. The kidnappers are offshore in a boat with quarantine flags flying so the authorities will stay away. Tintin and Haddock row out to the boat and Tintin starts to get ready to swim out to it.
“What about the sharks?” Haddock asks, peering over the edge of the dinghy.
“Nuts to the sharks!” Tintin replies, as he strips off his blazer.
Insanity or badassery? Probably both.
Oh, Tintin, how I do love thee.
jamesdparnell 