I ventured a little further afield today, as the temperature had dropped a bit today, down to a more comfortable Santa Monica cool. I walked five or ten minutes to the beach during lunch and found a breezy, shaded area to read my book and eat my lunch, marveling at the relative emptiness of the sidewalks and bike paths on a Wednesday afternoon.

Up next in order is the third adventure, Tintin in America. This book is one of the first I remember, likely one of the first we bought, and though it’s not my favorite story, its twists and turns are indelibly written in my mind: Tintin being imprisoned in a taxi with steel shutters, Tintin falling off a cliff and landing on an outstretched branch, Snowy emerging from train wreckage of a particular shape, or both of them nearly getting turned into processed meat in the Grynde factory. As in the first two books, Hergé creates a constant stream of situations from which Tintin must escape — perfectly placed trapdoors on the streets of Chicago, good guys who are always bad guys in disguise, and so on — but other things are improved: Tintin can see something and Hergé no longer adds the dashed lines to tell us so. Snowy still talks, but no longer narrates his every move. Many of these improvements likely date from the 1945 redrawn version; the original black and white edition is available, but I haven’t seen it.

The book features moments of beautiful artistry, such as the panels where Tintin rides over the plains, or sits in front of his fire, with a beautiful, subtle light. Some other notes:

• When the gangster Smiles trips over the buried tomahawk, the scene is a close precursor to the discovery of the buried rowboat in Red Rackham’s Treasure
• The scene in which Tintin falls off the cliff and lands on a branch, followed by Snowy, stuck in my head: how great would that be, were I ever to fall off a cliff, to have a miraculous landing like that? I’m not sure why I was thinking about falling off a cliff…
• Reading it now, I’m struck by the ethnic language stereotypes, which of course I don’t think I probably noticed before: Italian and Mexican characters speaking in phonetically exaggerated ways.
• The sheriff who discovers that Tintin isn’t actually the bank robber, but was just given the bank robber’s tell-tale boots, is a sort of proto-Haddock: he vows to help but insists on taking one more drink “for strength,” until he’s too drunk stand up, as his weakness gets the better of his good intentions.
• I don’t remember the multiple Sherlock Holmes references, but there they are.
• The strongman’s manager does the exact same enraged jump as the film director does when Tintin rescues the starlet he he thinks is a real damsel in distress in The Cigars of the Pharaoh.

The tickertape parade on the last page is one of those great large-scale panels that Hergé often ended his books with, a piece we used to pore over, enjoying all of the details. Speaking of details, I seem to be pointing out a lot here, but that’s where the magic of Tintin is, so there you go. I was happy to have enjoyed the book on a sunny afternoon on the beach with a fresh lemonade from Hot Dog on a Stick.