Ice on the Moon

September 16th, 2009 · No Comments

Day 17: Explorers on the Moon

While it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of seeing the first man to walk on the moon, decades before Apollo 11, Destination Moon strikes me as being interesting for a few other reasons. It’s the most artistically daring of the books so far, with a much more varied landscape of layouts than any other book. Every page seems to bring a quarter-page panel, a full-page mural, or several short but very wide panoramas of the lunar surface. HergĂ© really played around with the conventions of layout as they had existed in the previous sixteen books to this point, and gives the reader lots of highly detailed scenes to explore.

Additionally, we meet the real tragic hero of the Tintin canon in this book, the engineer Frank Wolff. He’s a skilled scientist and treasured colleague of Professor Calculus, but his erratic behavior in the first book foreshadows a troubling revelation in the second: he’s being blackmailed and has helped steal valuable plans and smuggle an enemy agent aboard the rocket. Not only does he end up shooting the enemy, Jorgen, in self-defense, but then, stricken with guilt over the way he has endangered the mission, and aware of the fact that with the addition of the smuggled spy, the crew now don’t have enough oxygen, he takes his own life by leaving the rocket and sending himself off into space. Captain Haddock, always the emotional barometer of the series, has a wonderful reaction, defending the memory of the late Wolff from those who still thought he was a traitor – which, of course, Haddock himself thought just moments before learning of Wolff’s sacrifice. It’s a pretty powerful moment, and one that has stuck with me ever since my first reading of the book.

I was back at work today, due to the State of California furlough day, the third Wednesday of every month, and will be back on the jury tomorrow (but back at work on Friday). I think we may be nearing the end, though who really knows. One can hope.

Tags: Books · Los Angeles · Nostalgia