The previous 'Tintin' adventure, 'Destination Moon', ended with a serious cliffhanger, but then it had always been intended to be another of Hergé's two-parters. It was a more serious affair, with the occasional comedic interlude, that brought Prof. Calculus' genius to the fore and was notably cognisant of scientific and engineering detail. He's designed a rocket ship in Syldavia that he aims at the Moon. As that story wrapped, that rocket had achieved escape velocity two thousand miles above the surface of the Earth but, when its control room tries to contact it, nobody answers. Of course, you won't be surprised to find that they're all okay. There are six more books to go.

On board are our usual suspects. That means Tintin, of course, and Capt. Haddock. Prof. Calculus is along for the ride too and we can't have Tintin without Snowy. There's also Frank Wolff, Calculus's engineer assistant and a whole barrage of equipment. Thomson and Thompson aren't supposed to be on board but they are, because they slept on board, thinking that the launch was at 1:34pm not 1:34am. The idiots. Unfortunately, that means that there aren't enough supplies of oxygen, so we have our first crisis. Prof. Calculus couldn't build in that much leeway.

Of course, there are many more crises to come because, while this also attempts to get its science right, Hergé was not going to cut back on shenanigans in space and especially at a location like the Moon. Some are funny, like Capt. Haddock attempting to drink a glass of whisky at the point that they leave the atmosphere and Prof. Calculus accidentally turns off the artificial gravity, so it rises from his glass as a floating ball. Some are serious, like Haddock's drunken idea to go home, so he stops the nuclear motor and gets out of the ship, in his spacesuit at least, promptly turning into a satellite of the asteroid (called a dwarf planet here) Adonis, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.

However, hard Hergé tried to get his science right, I had a problem with a few details here. I'm not a space scientist and I don't even play one on TV but some of this sent up serious red flags. I can go along with the nuclear motor's acceleration providing artificial gravity, though there's no mention of rotation so I'm not sure how that would work. However, I'm pretty damn sure that stopping that nuclear motor by pulling a lever is not going to magically stop them dead in space. It's weird to see things that couldn't possibly happen prompt setpieces that are completely believable. Given how fast they must be going, I'm not buying into the automatic meteorite avoidance system either.

Ironically, given that prior paragraph, the eventual landing on the Moon looks eerily familiar. It's a vertical landing, the rocket turning round during the approach and landing on its base. In fact, it looks just like a SpaceX landing, merely without the gantry. The moment of honour naturally goes to Tintin, who doesn't do a bad job of it. He isn't as simply eloquent as Neil Armstrong would be a decade and a half later but he's not bad at all. "This is it!... I've walked a few steps!... For the first time in the history of mankind there is an EXPLORER ON THE MOON!"

Hergé is on top form in the moment too. That panel and another two pages earlier that each take up three quarters of a page are iconic. That first one especially resonates with me. It's a long shot with the Earth in the top left corner, neatly given a speech bubble to represent the radio signal on its way from the control room, as seen from the Moon with the rocket ship in the foreground, safe in the Hipparchus Crater by the Sea of Nectar. It's not a long way from the famous Earthrise photo taken from Apollo 8 in 1968; this was 1953. The second also plays with scale, comparing a tiny Tintin with the huge rocket. In context, these two images say what Armstrong said, just without words.

There are promptly a bunch of explorers on the Moon, because, while Michael Collins had to stay in orbit, everybody here takes a stroll in one of the many spacesuits available. Prof. Calculus may not have allowed enough air for extra people but he had suits prepared for everybody bringing a plus one. The oxygen shortage means that they have to cut the trip down from the fourteen days intended (or one lunar day) to just six. But hey, that's more than enough for Snowy to break a leg, Tintin to find an ice cave and nearly run out of oxygen and Thomson and Thompson to do a ballet routine in Moon gravity. Oh, and a twist to be put into play back in the ship.

I won't spoil what that is, but, as routine as it is in action stories that play this closely to good guys and bad guys, there's some nuance, too, in how Frank Wolff deals with it. In a world where everyone else has been assigned their role, either as a good guy or a bad guy, he's given the opportunity to choose and on more than one occasion. Not every choice he makes is a good one but he has a heck of a final one and he nails it. It's not entirely original, a certain Titus Oates having famously done the same thing in the Antarctic in 1912 on the Scott expedition, but it's still powerful here.

Surprisingly, that's the detail that caused controversy. When originally serialised in the dedicated 'Tintin' magazine, that final choice is, well, a lot more final. Given that Belgium is heavily Catholic, the church saw that as a problem and there were complaints. It seems like a stretch to me, given that intent surely has a huge amount to do with it. Making this choice for entirely selfish reasons is one thing; making it to save the lives of others sounds like something else indeed. But hey, I'm not a theologian and I don't play one of those on TV either.

I liked this one a lot, though with all the events happening on the way to the Moon and even more happening on the way back, we don't actually get a lot of time there. I guess we should be blaming Thomson and Thompson for that, but, outside the confines of the story, that was Hergé's decision. With last month's 'Destination Moon', this was the fourth of four stories in the 'Tintin' series to be told in two parts. Each time he took that approach, starting with 'Cigars of the Pharaoh' and 'The Blue Lotus', it allowed him plenty of room to breathe, using the first part for setup and the second for action. Each time that balance got better, but here I wished that he'd split this second part of a two-parter into two parts, too. It's over too quickly.

Next month, more Calculus in 'The Calculus Affair'. It's been interesting to see how the professor has grown as a character, just as Capt. Haddock did before him. When we first met him, he was an annoyance who occasionally proved useful but mostly provided comic relief. By this point, he's a genius who's made possible the first trip to the moon. Let's see what he gets up to next month! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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