Cigars of the Pharaoh by Hergé.
Les Cigares du Pharaon (1955)
translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner.
Methuen Children’s Books, 1975 (1971).
The fourth Tintin book Cigars of the Pharaoh has a bumpy backstory. Serialised in weekly instalments from December 1932 through to February 1934, it first appeared in black and white. A new edition then appeared in 1955, completely redrawn and with added colour and significant revisions.
But it seems the plot remained essentially the same. Intrepid reporter Tintin, together with his dog Snowy (Milou in French), are on a cruise in the Mediterranean, about to dock at Port Said. But trouble is not far away: he first encounters Sophocles Sarcophagus, an eccentric Egyptologist, then sinister film tycoon Rastapopoulos, followed quickly by detectives Thomson and Thompson.
How does the tomb of the Pharaoh Kih-Oskh link to a brand of cigar with a strange device, an Indian fakir with an Arab colonel, and an American cinema magnate with a pair of incompetent English sleuths?
Should we worry about the convoluted plot? No, not really because it’s primarily a game of cops-and-robbers – captures and escapes, misunderstandings impossible coincidences, obscure clues and derring-do. Visually it’s a treat, with different scenarios given distinctive colour schemes and a mini cliffhanger often presented just before the turn of the page.
Yes, it’s of its time: dreadful racial and cultural stereotypes abound – of rascally Arabs, a Svengali-type fakir, simple-minded black Africans – and their depictions, even in this 1970s version, are uncomfortable to look at. Yes, they reflected European fear of the Other as popularly expressed then in film, fiction, comics and posters; but it’s to be hoped that subsequent editions have addressed these concerns.
Like the artwork the English translation has also been revised, the 70s edition I’m reading clearly at variance with more recent reissues. I preferred the irony of the first words Tintin spoke in my edition (“This is the life, Snowy. A really quiet holiday for a change…”) to the more prosaic notice of their itinerary now evident: “Tomorrow, Snowy, we arrive at our next stop, Port Said in Egypt.” Even the map that follows in the next panel differs significantly.
But the story is king. Cigars of the Pharaoh is tightly plotted, taking us from Egypt to Arabia and on to India as Tintin unwittingly stumbles on a gun-running and drug-smuggling operation, learns to communicate with elephants, travels by train, boat, plane and car, has his first ever adventure with Thomson and Thompson, and interacts with a dotty academic much like Professor Calculus is in later stories. And with the excitement we also have humour: pratfalls galore – naturally – but also the occasional silly pun in this translation (such as an Indian destination called Sethru Jamjah) and of course a pharaoh called … Kih-Oskh.
And finally, when all’s said and done, the irony of Tintin being told he’s earned a good holiday: “Maybe a nice quiet cruise, now that we’ve seen the last of that evil gang.” Tintin is not so sure, and nor are we!
1/20 Books of Summer. Cigars of the Pharaoh also qualifies for the palm icon, No 5 of Mayri’s Picture Prompt Book Bingo and the ninth icon I’ve managed to match for 2024.
Calmgrove 
Just love those illustrations.
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The quality of the illustrations in the revised and colourised editions – when Hergé employed a dedicated team to undertake research to ensure details were up-to-date – is stunning, in some ways of documentary standard. And the strips tell the story so well, the details never distracting from the action.
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I remember this one scaring me as a kid, though not as much as The Seven Crystal Balls. There’s a surprising amount of supernaturalism in Tintin despite the general veneer of scientific modernity. I’d forgotten about the pun names though—Sethru Jamjah and Kih-Oskh made me snort.
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I haven’t read the title you’ve mentioned, Elle, but certainly here the sense of jeopardy is strong! In retrospect the series reminds me of the Indiana Jones films, so it’s unsurprising that Spielberg was the one to direct the recent-ish English-language Tintin movie.
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You’re so right, they are like Indiana Jones! Minus the sex symbol status (or at least I hope so…)
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There was a lot of media noise surrounding a thought experiment – that Tintin was a girl – a few years back, wasn’t there, and other claims that he was asexual (but then so were pretty much all of Hergé’s comic characters). Perhaps it’s best to see him as gender neutral and so an appealing protagonist for both girls and boys?
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I think Tintin works as a gender-neutral character in a lot of ways, although obviously he has to be read as at least theoretically male by everyone he encounters, in order to get as far as he does both geographically and in metaphorical career terms.
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Yes, as a character he’s definitely of his time, whether the 1930s for the original series or the incarnation from the fifties (which continued till the 1980s).
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I wonder why it was felt necessary to change the opening? The original seemed perfectly fine to me !
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The map in the panel of the edition I read, which shows only Tintin’s cruise around the Med, was changed in more recent editions to include his travels further afield, from India to Singapore and on to Shanghai, perhaps in a bid to link it up with the China-set story that followed. Clearly this necessitated some text adaptation: https://www.tintin.com/en/albums/cigars-of-the-pharaoh
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If there is good reason to change then I’m OK with that.
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Glad I cleared that one up.
🙂
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Lovely–I’m always always so pleased to see a review of Tintin. Rereading as an adult, the uncomfortable bits do stand out (and indeed rankle), more in some stories than the others but I still feel as you point out too, the sheer entertainment of the adventures themselves is never lost. And of course, there is the art which I do love too.
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I just felt in the mood for a bit of light reading,. Mallika, and this fitted the bill perfectly! As for the uncomfortable bits reflecting past prejudices and reiterating misconceptions, it’s good that new editions address the things that are seriously offensive such as demeaning racial stereotypes.
But I feel it’s always important that in whitewashing the offences the publishers don’t instead offer an overly rosy and historically inaccurate view of what these classics represent. It’s tricky isn’t it?
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I’m with you on the whitewashing–I think one should know what things were like and even as a child one wouldn’t necessarily think that was how things are supposed to be just because one reads it in a books–after all, we’re taught history at school too.
It is a hard think to attempt but I think if they stick with removing or toning down outrightly offensive content, it should be enough. But there are also pointless changes like with Fatty in the Five Findouters–the newer editions have any reference to ‘fat’ edited out but I didn’t ever get the sense that it was used to ‘fat shame’ as we’d understand it today
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It’s all about historical context, isn’t it, certainly in terms of assessing a classic work’s worth, but if history and its associated critical thinking isn’t seen as important in a child’s education then they get a very skewed picture of the world, I think.
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Always brings a smile to see Tintin and Snowy, thanks!
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Yay, my good deed for the day! 😊
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Oh I love Tin Tin! Despite everything. I used to watch it before school and read the books. I tried to get my kids into it, but they weren’t too interested.
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I suppose Hergé’s creation is a nostalgia kick for us oldies… What Tintin needs is for his adventures to be made into a video game! Oh wait – there was one apparently, based on the Spielberg film, which I see got very mixed reviews – ho hum.
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It’s the drawings which are the thing, isn’t it? Though the translation has to work too – I’ll need to dig out the Tintins I have and see which editions they are (old, I hope…)
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Absolutely it’s the artwork, Karen – very individual compared to other comics at the time and, I think, quite appealing – but I don’t think I read them for the literary quality, and certainly not via the English translations!
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I enjoyed the Tintin books so much as a young teenager, I haven’t been able to revisit them as an adult, knowing that the issues you highlighted would probably work against my level of enjoyment now. But still, it was lovely, for a moment, to remember that time when I so loved these adventures.
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The Tintin stories always remind me of those action-packed cinema and tv shorts that I used to see as a kid on Saturday mornings, Brona, involving as they did Tarzan, cowboys or explorers, themselves indebted to serials in Boy’s Own magazines and, before that, penny dreadfuls.
And of course the Indiana Jones films deliberately followed the same formulas. If it helps, I tend to think of those classic stories as of their time in terms of those regrettable issues and try to enjoy them as thrillers, albeit with a guilty pleasure.
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Yes, I apply that thinking too and can sometimes acknowledge it as a sign of the progress we’ve made since that time, but it’s still jarring and I’m finding lately that it does impact on my ability to enjoy the other elements of the book.
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Yes, and the same with me. I don’t think we’re being over-sensitive here: it’s being desensitised that would start to worry me, but I don’t think I’d ever fall into a frame of mind that passed it off as okay.
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