TAC - 12 - Prisoners of the Sun

Prisoners of the Sun

There's a Tintin musical adaptation of this two-part story, Le Temple du Soleil. I discovered it during a high school resurgence of my Tintin obsession, and despite the fact that it was not available in English (let alone easily accessible), I bought a copy off Amazon.fr and had my very own copy to listen to hundreds of times. I don't really know French, but I've gotten to a point that I can fake-sing along with most of the songs (I expect I'm actually singing gibberish syllables that merely sound like what the words really are). It's not, y'know, Sondheim or anything, but it's terrifically cute and catchy. Good stuff.

Anyway, I didn't really need the help of my musical obsession to convince me that Prisoners is a good Tintin book; it's just about on par with Crystal Balls, even though it is in a completely different vein in terms of mood and action (there IS action). Like the Unicorn and Moon two-parters, the first half is the relatively low-key set-up and the second half is the adventure-- and Prisoners has a lot of adventure packed into its 62 pages. It almost calls back to Tintin's earliest books, but fortunately, Captain Haddock is the extra ingredient that keeps the relentless action scenes from getting monotonous. The train! The avalanche! The rainforest! The waterfall! So much, and so much fun.

Zorrino is precious, if not very well developed. I always enjoyed Huascar's character, who, although only appearing briefly, left an impact with his change of heart once he witnessed Tintin saving Zorrino (helping the heroes out as opposed to...well, trying to murder them...hah). Hergé's handling of the native Peruvians and the Incas is a general improvement over, say, what we saw of the Native Americans in America, but it's still not perfect, and at times a bit uncomfortable. The apparent Incan magic, though? Unlike the surreal exploding mushrooms of Shooting Star (or those aliens in Flight 714...grr, I'll get there eventually...), I can buy the High Priest burning up wax images of the explorers to release them from their comas. I don't know. The way it's described, it sounds like drugs and hypnosis are used, and that's feasible enough for me. Maybe

So, yes, overall, there are a couple of flaws I can see as I read through it, but I've always enjoyed this one a great deal, along with its predecessor. Also, a little nostalgic fun-fact, it's thanks to this album that, as a child, I was obsessed with playing make believe stories where I travelled behind a waterfall and found a world on the other side.

...I drew Tintin using a condor as a helicopter (landing, anyway) because damn if this isn't a memorable, if somewhat insane, image.


_{I wish I could do 4.25 stars, because that's probably more accurate, but oh well!}

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The Adventures of Tintin is © HERGE/MOULINSART S.A. estate; I will not be personally profiting from ANY of this art