Snowy Soft Plush 8 Cm, Moulinsart 35139

This album marks a return to adventure. It begins to appear in the weekly Tintin, in September 1966, four years after the end of The Castafiore Emerald. Here we meet again Rastatopoulos, whom we thought drowned at the end of The Red Sea Sharks, and his friend Allan. A new figurine appears: the very rich Lazlo Carreras, the man who never laughs. Carreiras is a millionaire owner of airairplanes, oil companies and the Sani-Cola beverage. This character was inspired by Marcel Dassault. He is a paradoxical character: he is among the good guys, but under the effect of the truth serum he is portrayed as a being without scruples when it comes to having amassed his fortune. Towards the end of the story we discover Mik Ezdaditoff, a character inspired by Jacques Bergier, author of the book Le Matin des magiciens and animator of the magazine Planète. We see here Hergé's fascination with paranormal and extraterrestrial phenomena.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

In this adventure, Tintin goes to the center of Africa, to make a report. There, dangerous adventures await him, as his enemies are chasing him to kill him. On Tintin's return from his trip to Russia, described in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Hergé is commissioned to take Tintin to the Congo, then a Belgian colony. This album is an excellent document to see how Europeans of the time imagined Africa and Africans. The story was first published on June 5, 1930 in Le Petit Vingtième (see Hergé's biography). In 1946, Hergé completely redrew the album to change it to color and reduce its 110 original plates to the 62 pages that the albums would have from then on. In this new color version, he introduced numerous modifications, softening the colonialist overtones a bit. In spite of this, Tintin in the Congo fell out of favor from the 1950s onwards, and became quite difficult to find. It was the troubled time of decolonization, and the album was not particularly timely. But curiously it was in a Zaire magazine that the story first reappeared, ending the quarantine of Tintin in the Congo.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages