Tintin and Alph-Art (1986)
Tintin and Alph-Art Review
Tintin and Alph-Art is the 24th and final volume of The Adventures of Tintin comics series by Belgian cartoonist Herge. It was published in 1986 and it is a flawed, but interesting end to the series.
The story revolves around Brussels’ modern art scene where Tintin discovers that a local art dealer has been murdered. Investigating further, he encounters a conspiracy of art forgery, masterminded by a religious teacher named Endaddine Akass. This was the final Tintin book that was posthumously published after Herge’s death. He didn’t manage to finish it, but he left enough of the manuscripts and drawings, so that others could salvage it.
The resulting comic is surprisingly polished and final for a book that wasn’t actually finished. The ending was pretty interesting and the villain was quite a lot of fun and dangerous too. The comic has very high stakes throughout while the emphasis on art as a medium was refreshing thematically speaking.
My main issue with this story is that it lacked in terms of momentum in the first half as only the final ten pages or so were exciting. The rest was quite dull and uneventful. There is also the problem of Tintin and Haddock being once again rather sidelined and far from competent here. The illustrations were also not as artistic or as detailed as Herge himself would have drawn them. It’s a rough comic that has its moments of brilliance, but was otherwise not a great way to end the series, though the action toward the end was at least memorable.
