A Visual Guide to How I Categorise the Eras of Tintin
- Foundations (1929 -- 1932)
These are the first three Tintin albums. Tintin as a character and universe haven't really found their footing, and the influence of Le Vingtieme Siecle looms large, with didactic political themes overshadowing all three albums. Nonetheless, the birth of our hero, and Tintin in America is not bad.
- The Solo Adventures (1932 -- 1940)
The next five. By Cigars of the Pharaoh, Herge has made leaps and bounds with plot and characters - not to mention art - and builds on this significantly with The Blue Lotus, heavily indebted to his friend, Chinese sculptor Zhang Chongren. The jump in quality from Tintin in America to The Blue Lotus is the largest in a three album run of the entire series, and the ensuing volumes see the full development of Tintin as a character. This period features the introduction of the Thomson twins, initially foes who become firm friends by King Ottokar's Sceptre. This stretch of adventures sees the introduction of two important fictional countries - San Theodoros (captured by General Alcazar), and Syldavia.
- Transition (1940 -- 1943)
These three adventures are defined by the introduction of Captain Archibald Haddock, first as a miserable incompetent drunk in The Crab With the Golden Claws, then a heroic captain in The Shooting Star, and finally the sole progenitor of the plotline that begins in The Secret of the Unicorn. A huge gap in the Tintin universe is filled with the addition of Haddock, but a few minor ones remain. Herge continues his experimenting with the mad scientist trope with Professor Phostle in The Shooting Star, and will ultimately devise a solution in the second half of the Unicorn set.
- The Golden Age (1943 -- 1960)
With the introduction of Professor Cuthbert Calculus in Red Rackham's Treasure, and the relocation of Tintin and friends' home base in Haddock's ancestral home Marlinspike Hall, all the ingredients of the classic Tintin stories are in place. By now, Herge cannot help but churn out fantastic plots, leading to a set of nine near-perfect adventures. These include the twin moon volumes, widely considered the best two-album miniseries, as well as The Calculus Affair and Tintin in Tibet, widely considered the two top candidates for best Tintin comic. Herge is at the height of his powers, balancing an expanding universe, new and recurring characters, good and evil, politics and science, the paranormal and mysticism with ease, heavily aided by Studio Tintin founded in 1950.
-Tintin in Tibet (1960)-
I place Tintin in Tibet in the Golden Age, but I use a dashed green rectangle around it to indicate that it contains many of the features characteristic of the next era:
- Late Style (1960 -1986)
Late style has its proto-origins in Tintin in Tibet, but really gets underway with The Castafiore Emerald. These five volumes are characterised by an almost postmodern lack of grand narratives about good and evil, in sharp contrast to the rest of the series, and a blase play on Herge's personal interests as he began to tire of being defined as an artist by Tintin. The Castafiore Emerald is famously the album where Herge attempted "to tell a story where nothing happened, without resorting to anything exotic". Even the Romani people/Gypsies lead an unusually autonomous existence: they may be the first set of characters hostile to Tintin yet not defined by this hostility. The departure from regularity continues with Flight 714 to Sydney, in which aliens feature, Rastapopoulos is made a complete fool, and the entire plot is erased from existence in the end. Tintin and the Picaros is on the surface a more classic Tintin adventure, but it is notable for an almost nihilistic, head-on approach to depicting Tintin's interventions in geopolitics, as opposed to the righteous infallibility displayed in The Broken Ear. Alph-Art, though unfinished, seemed clearly to be heading in this same direction, with its unusual lack of focus on Tintin as a the centre of the story as well as its satire of the avante-garde art world.