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Win a Candyman Digital Code

Win a Candyman Digital Code

The successful Candyman remake is coming to streaming and home video this week. Our friends at Universal Home Entertainment have provided us with two digital codes which we’re offering to our readers.

In order to win, tell us the scariest memory from your Halloween experiences. Provide good, creative details and have your entry submitted no later than 11:59 p.m., Monday, November 8. The decision of the ComicMix judges will be final.

Universal City, California, October 26, 2021 – Dare to say his name. Oscar® winner Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) and director Nia DaCosta (Little Woods, Disney’s upcoming film The Marvels) expand on the infamous Candyman legacy with “a new horror classic” (FOX TV) that is “smart, stylish, and scary as hell” (Danielle Ryan, /FILM). Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 84%, Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s (MGM) CANDYMAN is back and yours to own on Digital November 2, 2021 and on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-rayTM and DVD November 16, 2021 from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. All versions come packed with over an hour of bonus features including a never-before-seen alternate ending, deleted and extended scenes as well as special featurettes taking viewers behind-the-scenes of the film and deeper into this complex and deeply resonant contemporary take on the bone-chilling urban legend.

For decades, the housing projects of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green were terrorized by a ghost story about a supernatural, hook-handed killer. In present day, a visual artist (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; HBO’s Watchmen,”Us, forthcoming Matrix Resurrections) begins to explore the macabre history of Candyman, not knowing it would unravel his sanity and unleash a terrifying wave of violence that puts him on a collision course with destiny.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II leads an incredible buzz-worthy cast in CANDYMAN, which also stars Teyonah Parris (If Beale Street Could Talk, Wandavision, forthcoming The Marvels), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Generation, Misfits) and Colman Domingo (HBO’s Euphoria, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Assassination Nation). A bold, expansive take on the tragic and terrifying urban legend, CANDYMAN is produced and co-written by Academy Award® winner Jordan Peele and directed by rising filmmaker Nia DaCosta, the first Black woman to helm a #1 film at the box office!

EXCLUSIVE BONUS FEATURES ON 4K UHD, BLU-RAYTM, DVD AND DIGITAL:

  • ALTERNATE ENDING
  • DELETED AND EXTENDED SCENES
  • SAY MY NAME: Filmmakers and cast discuss how the horror at the center of Candyman is both timely and timeless, which is a tragedy in and of itself.
  • BODY HORROR: We explore director Nia DaCosta’s influences in the subgenre of body horror, and what Anthony’s physical transformation means to the story.
  • THE FILMMAKER’S EYE: NIA DACOSTA: Take a closer look at director Nia DaCosta, and how her singular voice and perspective were perfect to tell this story.
  • PAINTING CHAOS: Filmmakers reveal how Anthony’s artwork evolves throughout the film and how they strived for authenticity in recreating Chicago’s vibrant art scene.
  • THE ART OF ROBERT AIKI AUBREY LOWE: Composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe reveals some of the unconventional methodology he used to create the unique and haunting soundscapes sounds of the film.
  • TERROR IN THE SHADOWS: A behind-the-scenes look at how the analogue shadow puppetry scenes were created and an unpacking of why this ancient artistic medium was the most conceptually relevant for depicting the legends’ cycle of violence.
  • CANDYMAN: THE IMPACT OF BLACK HORROR: A roundtable discussion moderated by Colman Domingo about the nuanced relationship Black Americans have with Candyman , the horror genre and the overall idea of monsters and victims.

CANDYMAN will be available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray™, DVD and Digital.

  • 4K Ultra HD delivers the ultimate movie watching experience. Featuring the combination of 4K resolution, the color brilliance of High Dynamic Range (HDR) and HDR10+, which delivers incredible brightness and contrast for each scene and immersive audio for a multidimensional sound experience. 
  • Blu-ray™ unleashes the power of your HDTV and is the best way to watch movies at home, featuring 6X the picture resolution of DVD, exclusive extras and theater-quality surround sound.
  • Digital lets fans watch movies anywhere on their favorite devices. Users can instantly buy or rent.
  • The Movies Anywhere Digital App simplifies and enhances the digital movie collection and viewing experience by allowing consumers to access their favorite digital movies in one place when purchased or redeemed through participating digital retailers. Consumers can also redeem digital copy codes found in eligible Blu-ray™ and DVD disc packages from participating studios and stream or download them through Movies Anywhere.  Movies Anywhere is available only in the United States.
Shang-Chi Steelbooks from Best Buy, Target

Shang-Chi Steelbooks from Best Buy, Target

Best Buy

Marvel Studios’ Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings stars Simu Liu as Shang-Chi, who must face the past he thought he left behind and confront his father, leader of the dangerous Ten Rings organization. The film also stars Awkwafina as Shang-Chi’s friend Katy, Meng’er Zhang, Fala Chen, and Florian Munteanu, with Michelle Yeoh as Ying Nan and Tony Leung as Xu Wenwu.

Beginning November 12, “one of Marvel’s best origin stories” (Sean Mulvihill, Fanboy Nation), Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings will be available to all Disney+ subscribers. The film also arrives on all digital stores such as Apple TV , Prime Video and Vudu with exclusive bonus features.

Target

In addition to the traditional disc releases , the studio announces Steelbook exclusives coming from Best Buy and Target.

Fangs by Sarah Andersen

I did not intend this to turn into Sarah Andersen Week here at Antick Musings, but why not? She’s funny, and the two books I read nearly back-to-back are funny in very similar ways, which could potentially be interesting.

Fangs  is a small unjacketed hardcover, stylish and blood-red. I believe it was Andersen’s fourth solo book , following three collections of her “Sarah’s Scribbles” strip (and the graphic novel Cheshire Crossing, with novelist Andy Weir). There is a goth-y young woman on the cover, as you can see. Readers will generally assume she is a vampire, and assume that this is her story.

That’s correct: she’s Elsie. On the first page, she’s in a bar for monsters, meeting a new young man (Jimmy). They quickly start a relationship, and we quickly learn this is not a book that will tell us a story – like Sarah’s Scribbles, these are funny comics about a situation, and this situation is “what if a 300-year-old vampire goth girl fell in love with a vaguely hipster werewolf?”

So Fangs is a lot like a collection of a gag-a-day strip (not all that surprising, since Sarah’s Scribbles has run as a daily strip off and on, and this project originally appeared on Tapas in a similar format) – every page is a separate strip about Elsie & Jimmy, with some kind of vampire or werewolf-themed joke.

Humor is always subjective, but I thought Fangs was clever and funny – as funny as Sarah’s Scribbles, and a bit more clever, as Andersen clearly was having a lot of fun assembling these jokes from the intersection of relationship-humor and horror-humor. There’s also an underlying sweetness to it: you get the sense that these two people haven’t really connected with anyone else in a long time, and having each other, in all of their quirky oddities (supernatural and personal) to be with is a wonderful thing.

This is a short book , but who knows? Maybe Andersen will come back and give us more comics about Elsie and Jimmy. There’s no reason this couldn’t keep going for a long time, or come back for somewhat longer stories. (What would a vacation look like for them? Do either of them have families the other one gets to meet?) And, even if she never does, this is a fun, sweet package as it is.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Girl in Dior by Annie Goetzinger

Sometimes you read a book because it’s there and you’ve heard of it. Maybe you don’t remember exactly what you heard about it, or why, or in what context, but it’s been in your head and you’re pretty sure it was for positive reasons. The world is full of books: you need to stretch sometimes and that’s an easy way to do it.

That’s more or less how I came to Girl in Dior , a graphic novel by Annie Goetzinger originally published in France in 2013 and translated into English for this 2015 NBM publication by Joe Johnson. It’s available in Hoopla – is there a reason why every Internet-era business needs to have a stupid and infantilizing name? – an app my library system uses to provide various digital things (TV shows, movies, comics, audiobooks, even ‘real’ books) – and I started reading it after realizing How to Read Nancy was far too dense to dive into on a Saturday afternoon. (And don’t get me started on its aggressively hostile introduction, by some academic who was at pains to be clear he hated comics, modernity, 90% of all artists ever, the concept of sequential art, and anything else the reader might possibly love or respect.)

Girl in Dior, I learned after reading it, is a fictionalized account of the first ten years of Christian Dior’s high-fashion house, founded in 1947 in Paris. It centers on a young woman, Clara Nohant, who is the primary piece of fiction: she is a minor reporter for the launch, later becomes a model for Dior, and ends by marrying a rich client. (Thus encompassing most of the potential dream-jobs for the book’s audience.) I think she’s just there as an audience-insert character, and to have a gamine, Audrey Hepburn-esque face to provide a through-line, but it does make me wonder why the book couldn’t or didn’t focus on Dior himself (surely the more interesting figure) or, considering the audience is primarily women who care about dresses, instead digging into one or more of the large group of women who worked for and with Dior to do all of this – one of his major designers, or models, or seamstresses, or several of the above.

Instead, Girl in Dior is lighter , more of a travelogue – Clara thinks Dior’s work is wonderful, but she’s not deeply invested. Her story is light, her crises few and easily solved, her endings entirely happy. The book has a lot of detail and color: Goetzinger is particularly good at both drawing the dresses to be very particular and using color to make them pop off the page, in a comics version of the sensation they caused on runways in the late ’40s.

I think I wanted more about the real people and less of “look at this gorgeous dress,” which is on me. Girl in Dior is very much a “look at this gorgeous dress” book, and my sense is that it’s deeply researched and carefully assembled to show specific, distinct gorgeous dresses from those first few Dior collections. There’s extensive backmatter to detail chronology, the sources (year and season) of the dresses shown in the book, quick biographical sketches of the historical people who appear (from Dior to Lauren Bacall), lists of potential careers in fashion and types of fabric and accessories, and, finally, a bibliography. This book was clearly very heavily researched, and I have no doubt that everything in it (except Clara) is as close to true as it’s possible to be seventy years later.

And it is gorgeous, full of sumptuous expensive formalwear for rich, thin, young, connected women  [1] ready to be elegant and sophisticated (and maybe just a bit useless) after the war years. I always want more context and cultural criticism; I always want more why and less “remember this thing?” Again, that’s entirely on me: Girl in Dior is a lovely evocation of a time and place – I haven’t even gotten into Goetzinger’s faces, which are magnificent, deeply specific, and much less pretty-pretty than the dresses she draws. If any of that sounds appealing, check it out.

[1] Pick at least two.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Portugal by Pedrosa

I don’t know if Cyril Pedrosa – who mostly goes by just his last name on his comics, in the European manner – really just does one big book every few years. That’s been my experience of his career: Three Shadows over a decade ago, Equinoxes  a few years back, and now Portugal (from 2017).

And it seems to be the life of his main character here , a Portuguese-French cartoonist named Simon Muchat: Simon had a reasonably successful career making “books,” as his agent and girlfriend call them, but is in a slump as Portugal opens. He’s teaching art in schools, doing some advertising freelance work, but feels completely unmotivated. About anything at all.

And that leads to the obligatory question of how much of Pedrosa is in Simon. The question is obligatory; the answer, though, is unknowable to any of us on this side of the paper. Pedrosa’s grandfather immigrated from Portugal to France in the 1930s and stayed; so did Simon’s. Portugal is largely the story of that family history – or, rather, how a chance trip to Portugal started Simon to re-engage with life, and led him to start trying to track back that family history. The focus is on Simon, and Pedrosa never drops into flashback to tell the stories of earlier generations: we see everyone and everything through Simon’s eyes in the present day.

Portugal is loosely organized into three large sections, after a short prologue with Simon in the mid-70s, a young boy on his only previous trip to Portugal. Each of the three is named after a man in the family: first  “According to Simon” himself, then his father, then his grandfather. But that’s not “according to” as in that’s who is telling us the story, it’s more of a sense of how far back in time Simon has gotten at that point.

That all makes it sound very deliberate: it’s not. Simon is aimless when Portugal begins, and only slowly gathers any aim as the book goes on. He’s still drifting until very deep into the book, still just going along with whatever happens, and only shows some interest in family stories and the details of life in Portugal. So this is the story of a reawakening, in a way: one connected to history and heritage in a very personal way.

Pedrosa tells this story at a distance, though small talk and background voices, with gorgeous watercolor panels that lend a slow, deliberate rhythm to this fairly long book. It took Simon a long time to climb out of his ennui; we’ll see it happen slowly, and learn with him. This is a lovely book, with a quiet personal story told quietly and well – it may not be for all readers but those who can engage with it will find a lot to love.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

DC FanDome Media Roundup

DC FanDome Media Roundup

Throughout the day, DC FanDome has been whetting appetites and tickling fancies for all ages. Below are some of the film and television announcements and teasers.

Perhaps the biggest release to date has been the first look at next July’s Black Adam film. Star Dwayne Johnson hosted the behind-the-scenes look at the eagerly-anticipated feature. Johnson was first attached to the project way back in 2007 and has been its champion through numerous changes of studio personnel.

In addition to Johnson, the film will feature Aldis Hodge as Hawkman; Noah Centineo as Atom Smasher; Quintessa Swindell as Cyclone, and Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate.

Over at the CW, Grant Gustin will finally sport comics-accurate yellow boots in the eighth, and possibly final, season.

HBO Max unveiled the news that both Titans and Doom Partrol have been renewed for fourth seasons. The third season of Titans is almost complete and the DP is about halfway through its run. And coming January 13, the ten-part Peacemaker series, spinning out of The Suicide Squad will make its debut.

Young Justice: Phantoms, the fourth season of the animated series, dropped episodes one and two today. New episodes will follow every Thursday beginning this week. The series is produced by Warner Bros. Animation. Greg Weisman, Brandon Vietti and Sam Register serve as executive producers

Among the first direct-to-HBO Max films , Blue Beetle, had some key art unveiled.

Pennyworth, the Epix series looking at a possible background to Batman’s faithful butler, has been renewed for a third season and will move to HBO Max, consolidating their DC offerings.

The Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman released its first look at Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer.

Catwoman receives her first animated feature Catwoman: Hunted with Elizabeth Gillies voicing Selena Kyle/Catwoman. The additional voice cast includes Jonathan Banks as Black Mask, Steve Blum as Solomon Grundy, Keith David as Tobias Whale, Lauren Cohan as Julia Pennyworth, Zehra Fazal as Talia al Ghul and Nosferata, Jonathan Frakes as King Faraday and Boss Moxie, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Barbara Minerva/Cheetah, Kelly Hu as Cheshire, Andrew Kishino as Mr. Yakuza and Domino 6, Eric Lopez as Domino 1, Jacqueline Obradors as La Dama, and Ron Yuan as Doctor Tzin.

The adventure follows her attempt to steal a priceless jewel. The heist puts her squarely in the crosshairs of both a powerful consortium of villains and the ever-resourceful Interpol as well as Batwoman (Brooklyn 99’s Stephanie Beatriz). Shinsuke Terasawa directs from a script by former DC assistant editor Greg Weisman.

The film arrives February 8 followed in 2022 by Constantine: House of Mystery! , Teen Titans Go!, DC Superhero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse, Green Lantern: Beware my Power, and Battle of the Supersons, the studio’s first CG-animated film. Fans can also get Batman: The Long Halloween – Deluxe Edition.

Finally, after years of delays, the first teaser for The Flash was unveiled, hinting at Michael Keaton’s Batman, one of many caped crusaders to appear in the film which is based on the controversial Flashpoint miniseries. In a striking bit of convergence, this film introduces the DCEU’s version of the multiverse several months after Marvel’s third Spider-Man feature does the same thing.

I Moved to Los Angeles to Work in Animation by Natalie Nourigat

The ecosystem of graphic novels is still proliferating – it might not have quite as many niches as pure-prose books do, but it’s getting there. We may see a day where any kind of book that exists in prose also exists in graphic form.

I Moved to Los Angeles to Work in Animation  is a great example: I don’t think a book like this would have existed twenty years ago, and definitely not thirty. The title explains it perfectly: Natalie Nourigat [1] was a freelance artist and cartoonist in Portland (Oregon), and wanted a more stable career that used her art skills. So she researched the animation world, set her sights on a story artist job, eventually got one in LA, and created this book a few years later to describe the whole deal – job , move, career, LA, industry.

Books like that have been around in prose for a hundred years or more – some are personal, like Nourigat’s, and some are more general (How You Can Get a Job in Insurance in Hartford!). Nourigat is writing about an art career and speaking to other artists, though, so the graphic form works very well: she can convey not just the facts , but how she feels about LA and the animation industry through the body language and expressions of her avatar in the book, and her audience can see her examples of what storyboards look like and how they differ from comics.

This is a fairly dense book: it’s just under a hundred pages, but Nourigat uses a heavily captioned style to get in a lot of details and explanations. She has an upbeat, positive tone throughout, though she does also talk honestly about the downsides of LA life (heat, car culture, expense, a spread-out landscape that makes it more difficult to connect with people). The book mixes her personal story with more general information, though it’s almost all based in her personal experience – she did interview a group of other artists, though, and includes their thoughts, each as a separate three-page section, at the end.

Moved to LA is broken up into many shorter chapters on different aspects of her story and life in LA: perks, the moving itself, the job hunt, pros and cons of LA life, tips on getting a job, general questions – and she has running titles on her pages (I don’t think I’ve ever seen in this in a graphic novel before) to show which section you’re in, so it’s useful to leaf through and find specific advice.

I, personally, can’t draw. I’m also one of the Olds, deeply into a second non-art career, and firmly stuck on the other side of the country. So I can take no advice from this book myself – but I did enjoy Nourigat’s look at what her journey was like, and what it could be like for others who want to do something similar. It’s exciting to see that kind of energy and enthusiasm, especially when it’s aimed at making good stories and art.

So I recommend this primarily to people who might want to work in animation and/or move to LA. And maybe secondarily to people in other art-related fields, as a reality check about how their industries and locations work and compare.

[1] She does not present any credentials for her expertise other than the obvious “I got a job doing this, and I have kept that job and love it” one. She does talk about the differences between movie and TV animation (and that she’s on the movie side), but never says what studios she does or has worked for. But I see from her website that she’s not just an individual-contributor storyboard artist, but currently Head of Story on an upcoming movie and her whole career to date has been at Walt Disney Features Animation – which is kind of a big deal, and a major “take this person seriously” credential.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

REVIEW: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

For about a thousand years , people have been writing, in effect, King Arthur fanfic, merging characters, rewriting events, introducing characters, reimagining them in different times and places. As far as historians can tell, there really was an Arthur and as his story was told, it got embellished. And embellished.

As a result, it’s hard to say if writer/director David Lowery did a better or worse job with his vision of the classic tales than anyone else. What I do know is that after teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his version comes up way short in my expectations.

The film, out on disc and streaming now from Lionsgate Home Entertainment, takes the 14th century epic poem, written by anonymous, and undercuts its themes and message in favor of new themes and messages, none of which I found interesting. The visually compelling film really isn’t very good on storytelling or characterization, other than the title character, which is a shame.

Gawain was Arthur’s nephew, youngest of the knights at the Round Table, his mother is, to most storytellers, Arthur’s half-sister Morgause. To serve as a knight suggests he was already proven a brave, noble knight, a faithful upholder of the code of Chivalry. Therefore, his willingness to take up the Green Knight’s challenge makes perfect sense.

Instead, here, Lowery depicts Gawain (Dev Patel) as a callow youth, a wastrel who drinks and beds his beloved Essel (Alicia Vikander), and shows no aspect of heroism. This, therefore, is a coming of age story, a hero’s journey in the making of man.

The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), likely an aspect of the pagan Green Man, representing nature (think Swamp Thing), arrives to challenge Arthur (Sean Harris) to the beheading game, a popular trope in the fiction of the day. After Gawain lops off his head, the Knight scoops up the piece, and invites him to his Green Chapel in a year and a day so he may return the favor.

The poem is vague as to what occurs on the ride from Camelot to the Chapel, but it’s certainly more than the six days’ ride Lowery suggests. He uses this interlude to heap misery on Gawain, effectively stripping everything away from him so he can be remade and ready for the confrontation. Along the way he sees giants and is accompanied by a fox, new to the tale.

The bulk of the poem is devoted to the three days he spends with Lord (Joel Edgerton) and Lady Bertilak (Vikander) at a castle in the days before his appointment. Here, Bertilak offers him a deal that he will hunt each day and given to Gawain whatever he finds. In exchange. Gawain must give the same to his host.

And over the course of the three days, Lady Bertilak tries to seduce Gawain in more provocative ways, involving less clothing, and each time his chivalry holds out, so he accepts kisses, which he chastely bestows on Bertilak.

The film version warps the timing and growing size of the stakes as there are more kisses and larger game each day. On the final day , in addition to the kisses is the gift of the green girdle for protection, which he does not give to his host.

And despite the gift, he flinches the first time the Green Knight swings his axe. The second blow merely cuts his neck and then the game is revealed. Bertilak is the Knight. He and his lady were working for Morgan Le Fay (Sarita Choudhury), who wanted to undermine the Round Table by showing how even the noblest knight can falter. He returns home in shame, but is forgiven by all, and they adopt green wraps of their own as a reminder of their faith.

Not so in the film where Le Fay is his mother and she gives him the girdle only for him to lose it before the lady returns it to him. Then there’s a weird fever dream that suggests he will gain the throne but everything will fall.

The message here is muddied, the making of a man a flawed process.

Lowery clearly loves his subject matter and gives us a plausible looking England with a heady mix of magic. If only the writing and characterization so interesting.

Thankfully, the film, in a 4D Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and Digital HD combo pack lets the visuals shine. The 2160p transfer in 1.85:1 is stunning, nicely capturing the colors and shadows. In some cases, the 2160 is only marginally better than the 1080p but here it is markedly improved. Not that the Blu-ray is bad, just the 4K is better.

In both cases, the Dolby Atmos audio track is a lovely complement to the discs.

The film’s special features are so-so which is a shame considering the rich source material that could have been mined. Among the features are Boldest of Blood & Wildest of Heart: Making The Green Knight (35:23); Practitioners of Magic: Visual Effects (14:39); Illuminating Technique: Title Design (17:53), which is interesting given the chapter breaks we get; and the Theatrical Trailer (2:28).

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 7 by Herge

This is the end. Well, sort of: there’s an unfinished last book called Tintin and Alph-Art, which is available in what I think is the form Herge left it (rather than completed by other hands). But this is definitely the last Tintin stories actually completed and published.

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 7  collects books that cover almost two decades: The Castafiore Emerald (serialized 1961-62), Flight 714 to Sydney (66-67) and Tintin and the Picaros (75-76). Herge was clearly not devoting as much time to writing and drawing new albums in his fifties and sixties as he was as a younger man, but I suspect he was doing just as much “Tintin stuff,” only related to running a business empire: approving toy designs , meeting with movie people, arranging sublicenses, and all of the other things that are definitely work but don’t deliver any new material from a creative person.

Anyway, the three books are quite separate here, as you might guess from that sixteen-year span. So I guess I should treat them separately.

The Castafiore Emerald stands out as different from the rest of the series: it’s entirely set at Marlinspike, Captain Haddock’s ancestral pile, and it’s a mystery/farce rather than the series’ more usual adventure plot. I found the humor was not quite as juvenile as Herge sometimes gets – it’s still most based on how horrible Bianca Castafiore is and how much Haddock can’t stand her (and, secondarily, on how much of a blustery klutz he is), but that’s the story here, rather than random interjections. The story sees Haddock injure his foot, so he’s stuck in a wheelchair, right as Castafiore invites herself (and the inevitable accompanying media frenzy) to Marlinspike, leading first to worries about theft and then what seems to be an actual theft. It’s also got some good don’t-judge-people material, suitable for its young audience, though that thread is mostly background.

Flight 714 to Sydney is a more typical adventure story: Tintin and Haddock and Calculus are off to some international aviation symposium in Australia, get sidetracked by an eccentric rich guy, and then a villain strikes. There’s a lot of running around with guns after that, mostly serious, and a weird fantastic element that struck me as outside the usual style of the series and that largely serves to set up a deus ex machina ending in a book that didn’t need one. That one element aside, though, the adventure stuff is strong, and the comic relief mostly well-integrated into the actual story.

And then the last finished Tintin book, the one I could have read as a child of the appropriate age if Tintin was a thing in the USA in the mid-70s (it wasn’t), is Tintin and the Picaros, something of a greatest-hits compilation of the series. The fictional Latin American country of San Theodoros from The Broken Ear provides a venue and a big chunk of cast, one secondary villain returns from The Calculus Affair, and of course there’s the usual suspects of Tintin, Haddock, Castafiore, and the Thom(p)son twins. It has an odd anti-violence message from Tintin as part of his revolutionary plot, and that plot is fairly thin and mostly on rails.

I still think these omnibuses are a rotten way to present the Tintin books: they’re too physically small to read easily and the books are long and dense enough that they’d work better as individual albums. I expect the next big repackaging of Tintin will be back to the album format; every series gets packaged into omnibuses for a while and then broken back out again. If you have the inclination to read this series, I’d either wait for that switch or look for actual albums. (If you’re reading in a language other than English, the latter should be easier.)

As for me, I’m happy I read the series: it was a big hole in my comics cultural literacy. I didn’t love the Tintin books, but I didn’t expect to: they were made for European boys starting several decades before I was born, and I didn’t read them until I was middle-aged. But I can appreciate what they do well – I don’t think I’ve even mentioned Herge’s lovely line in any of these posts (maybe because of the horrible small size of these omnibuses , which does not display his art well at all) – and indulge the things they do to keep that young audience happy and engaged. I still don’t think I’d agree with the Tintin maximalists, but this is pretty good stuff. (See my posts on the earlier books for more.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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