The Adventures of Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh

This 2006 hardcover reissue of Cigars of the Pharaoh is a must for the Tintin completist. It’s a black-and-white facsimile edition of the story as it appeared in the 1930s, before Herge revised, shortened, and redrew it to for the style of the later adventures. So it’s 129 pages compared to the standard 62, though the larger panels mean it isn’t really twice as long as the familiar version. But there are noticeable differences. The detectives Thompson and Thomson call themselves X33 and X33A, frequent nemesis Captain Allan is no longer involved, and when Tintin is forced to enlist, rather than happening in Abudin, it’s in Mecca in the middle of a Christian-Muslim dispute. The anachronistic glimpse of Destination Moon is now gone, replaced by the more logical Tintin in America, and most interestingly, Tintin encounters additional perils (two involving cobras) while on the trail of the fakir. When he revised Cigars in the 1950s, Herge left pretty much all of the story intact, but his layouts and storytelling were vastly improved. If you’ve read all the standard Tintin adventures, this is fascinating stuff. –David Horiuchi