Just like clockwork, and within fifteen minutes of the day and time our judge had predicted a month ago, our trial ended today, and I finished reading the last of the 24 Tintin books Hergé wrote.
We’d been deliberating for half a day prior to today, and I figured we’d be done, so I took myself out to lunch at Library Ale House for fish tacos and a beer, which I’d been looking forward to all month. I don’t know if I’d ever really read the first version of Tintin and Alph-Art, which I got back in the mid-’90s, I think, as it’s a little hard to decipher, and the layout wasn’t the easiest to follow. The book is a collection of preliminary pages and sketches for the story, which Hergé had not finished at the time of his death. The early pages are better defined than the later ones, and by the end, just a few strokes – circles, dots, and lines – represent each character. In the original edition, a separate booklet with English translations is included, but in the new edition, which I hadn’t read before, both text and image are on the same page, making it much easier to understand.
The story was an entertaining one, as far as it went: Tintin in the world of modern art, with forgery, spying, and a fake religious guru thrown in. Castafiore, Jolyon Wagg, the Thompsons, Rastapopoulos, and other familiar faces are back. The sketches are pretty rough, but having read all of the other books in succession, it was pretty easy to imagine what the book would have looked like. For any Tintin fan, the book is a real treasure trove of doodles, tests, sketches, abandoned thoughts, and insights into the process of creation that Hergé went through, and having immersed myself in all of the finished products over the last month, it was a real pleasure to see something that showed his process.
It was also a real pleasure to finally be finished with the trial, and pretty surreal to spend the next twenty minutes after we finished re-hashing all of the moments and questions and thoughts we couldn’t talk about, with the lawyers and the prevailing party outside the courthouse. Very weird, but satisfying – lots of my burning questions were answered, and we got some insight into the things the attorneys were thinking, things that they couldn’t really mention or address in the courtroom setting. It was an interesting experience, and I’m glad I did it, though I wish it hadn’t meant I’d miss 17 days of work. The hours were nice, the commute was nice, hour and a half lunches on the beach and all, but it’ll be good to get back to work…for a day, and then I’m off to New York tomorrow night.
