This is the tenth volume in 'The Adventures of Tintin' to be serialised in Belgium, once again in 'Le Soir', which was controlled by the occupying Nazis between October 1941 and May 1942. However, it was the first of them to be published in the now traditional sixty-two-page colour album format, a pioneering moment for the series. This one appears to mimic a Jules Verne novel from 1908 called 'The Chase of the Golden Meteor', though Hergé later claimed that he hadn't read it.

I remember the cover art well from my youth, because it features a glorious use of space, with the majority of it taken up with an incredibly simplistic background, comprised of a faded blue sky, an equally faded green sea and a vivid mushroom in explosive red, on similarly shaded brown rocks.  Without much there, it speaks volumes, with Tintin and Snowy visibly shocked at how massive the mushroom is. We can't not be eager to dive in to find out why and then we'll learn that there are other questions being asked that make the image even more powerful than we thought it was.

First, of course, we have to get moving and this one gets moving quickly. A shooting star in the sky prompts Tintin to notice something in the Great bear that he reports to a local observatory. They know already but hang up on him unexpectedly, so he goes to visit and mystery ensues. The bottom line is that a fireball is on an inexorable collision course with the Earth and it'll destroy everything the very next morning, at 0812 and 30 seconds. By this point, it's already heating up. Panic-stricken rats emerge from the sewers. Tyres burst in the heat. Tar melts in the road. It's like summer every year here in Phoenix!

Of course, the world doesn't end, because the meteor misses us by 48,000 kilometres. Someone's calculations were notably wrong. However, the real story begins, as a spectroscopic photograph of the meteor shows that it contains an unknown metal. Decimus Phostle, observatory director, modestly names it phostlite after himself. And, as part of this meteor, presumably containing the phostlite so teasing the international community, fell into the Arctic Ocean, an expedition is soon mounted to go there and retrieve a sample. And, of course, it's not the only one with that goal, so dangerous games are immediately set into motion.

There are a number of threads to how this all goes down and, while they feel rather tradititional for the 'Tintin' series, they weren't at the time because they involve Captain Haddock, who'd only just joined the cast one book earlier, in 'The Crab with the Golden Claws'. He was a long way from being fully formed in that book but he plays much better here. He's still the billed as the president of the Society of Sober Sailors (S.S.S.), while hitting the whisky at every possibly opportunity, but he contributes to the story in a substantial manner and firmly warrants his inclusion as captain of the 'Aurora', the polar research ship the expedition uses to reach the meteorite.

There's a character called Philippulus, who we first meet as a prophet proclaiming the end of the world, but he turns out to be an escaped mental patient who causes some trouble. Fortunately, it falls to Snowy to save the day, by peeing on the fuse of the dynamite set to blow up the 'Aurora'. A more serious villain is behind the 'Peary', the other ship competing to reach the meteorite first, and it's telling that he's American. The Nazis didn't like the Americans, who joined the war effort while this book was being initially serialised, and, while Hergé had no problem with Americans, he didn't like American business, which seems rather prescient to our eyes eighty-plus-years on. We saw that in 'Tintin in America' and we see it here too.

While 'The Shooting Star' doesn't mention the war, it's telling that everyone on board the 'Aurora' as part of the expedition, i.e. the good guys, are from countries occupied by the Nazis, except for Captain Haddock, who's British. Prof. Phostle is presumably Belgian, as, of course, is Tintin. Señor Porfirio Bolero y Calamares of the University of Salamanca is Spanish. Eric Björgenskjöld, scholar and author, is Swedish. Prof. Paul Cantonneau of the University of Paris is French. Senhor Pedro Joãs Dos Santos of the University of Coimbra is Portuguese. And, naturally, there's a German, in Herr Doktor Otto Schulze of the University of Munich. That's a lot of accented characters in play!

The bad guys, on the other hand, are absolutely not from countries occupied by the Nazis. They're Americans and perhaps Brits, with their ship named after an American explorer, even though the anti-American sentiment was toned down by Hergé by changing the enemy nation in subsequent editions, including the one I'm reading, from the United States to a fictional country somewhere in South America called São Rico. The leading villain is a banker named Bohlwinkel, which, together with his long nose, has prompted accusations of anti-semitism. Given that Bohlwinkel was named Blumenstein in the serial, I can see why, but that seems anomalous.

Of course, there's plenty of intrigue on the journey, all of which is designed to give the 'Peary' an edge over the 'Aurora', but both ships eventually make it to the meteorite, which is pretty damn large—No wonder its impact caused earthquakes!—and we can finally learn what phostlite does. So to the mushroom, which pops up like magic in no time flat, then explodes, and spawns a whole lot more. Tintin throws away an apple core, which contains a maggot, and finds a fully grown tree in the morning with a giant butterfly. Now he starts worrying about the spider that was secreted inside his ration box. That's been loose on the island all night too!

I liked 'The Shooting Star', which moves along nicely enough, but it doesn't feel like a particularly substantial instalment of 'Tintin'. I'm sure a lot of that had to do with Belgium being occupied by the Nazis, who controlled the paper Hergé was writing for, thus limiting his opportunities. Surely, given what he put into 'King Ottakar's Sceptre' before the Nazis invaded, he would have written a very different book indeed had that been possible without him being shot by his oppressors. Two further books, 'The Secret of the Unicorn' and 'Red Rackham's Treasure', were written under this occupation, but 'The Seven Crystal Balls', wasn't finished until after the war was over, for reasons I'll cover when I get there, becoming the first to reach book form after the Nazis' defeat.

I'm eager to see how these next couple of books play out, given that context. I have no memory of 'The Secret of the Unicorn', but I seem to remember 'Red Rackham's Treasure' being a standout of the series, a good old fashioned pirate treasure yarn set in the Caribbean. Let's find out over the next couple of months. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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