iirc I first read Tintins when I was like 7-8. Anyway, I have some European heritage and when I was like 9-10 we went to visit some distant relatives in Europe. While there, the relatives said: hey, do you want to go see a painting of your grandfather? Turns out that my grandfather once worked for a painter, and that person did a painting of my grandfather.
I was pretty naive, esp. for someone who grew up in troubled developing nations, but in my defense I was only like 9-10. So when I wondered what that painting of my grandfather looked like, I immediately thought of this panel in Tintin. I fully expected to see a painting of my grandfather dressed in a greatcoat and feathered hat, posing in front of, idk, some kinda landscape since he wasn’t a sailor.
So we go to the art museum where it’s displayed and walk down the hallways to the painting. There I see some poorly-painted piece of shit where a couple of brushstrokes are supposed to be the arms, another couple ones the head, and you can’t make out a face bc the person is supposed to be bending down doing some field work. I was just a kid but I was the dorky kind who spent plenty of time with the World Book Encyclopedia, so I had some familiarity with abstract art and Impressionism and I could tell that this painting showed no genius.
I asked: This is supposed to be my grandfather? They said: Well… either him, or the other guy who worked there.
I swore then, and I maintain this oath, that if I ever gain access to a time machine I will go back to that day when some aristocratic fop lounged around doing piss-poor paintings of my grandfather (or his coworker) breaking his back in the yard, without even taking the time to indicate who was being painted. I will take a baseball bat and rain wooden destruction on that painting. Then I will communicate my thoughts directly to that painter. Furthermore - and this is very important - while doing so I will call him a Jackanape, a Logarithm, and a Bashi-Bazouk.
Oh man, I just checked back on this post, and saw how much you’d added since it first went down.
Nice! :D
If you remember reading the books as a kid, treat yourself and pick them up again. Your adult brain picks up on subtle humor and themes. Same with Asterix series.
Great advice, I ended up getting most of the Tintin and the early Asterix books as a young teenager, and would re-read them frequenty.
Always fun to imagine a popular character’s earlier relatives as looking similar, or just plain identical. As in-- what would today’s Haddock be like in a completely different era?
I do think this kind of thing can be taken too far, however. Or are the Van Houten parents actually supposed to be siblings? D:
