Make no mistake: the Tintin albums are great art. We could argue until the cows come home about what type of art they represent (narrative? Visual? Sub-cinematic?), but their greatness brooks no querying. Their characters, from melancholic and explosive Captain Haddock to proud and fiery General Alcazar to the vain and affected opera diva Bianca Castafiore, rival any dreamt up by Flaubert or Dickens for sheer strength and depth of personality. Their recurrent themes and symbols — the downfall of noble houses, host-guest encounters gone drastically wrong, tombs and their secrets, water, forgery, the Sun (to name but a few) — are entirely classical, the same found in Aeschylus or Shakespeare or Faulkner. They are eminently political, depicting, first from a rightwing perspective, then, increasingly, a leftist one, a 20th century characterised, just like the present era, by conflict over Middle Eastern oil, the perpetually unsettled Balkans, galloping technological progress, profiteering multinationals and arms traders who have one foot in the president’s office. Best of all, they yield to a casual reader of seven the same amount of joy and wonder as they do to the most diligent adult scholar.

Tom McCarthy, o autor de C. (romance a ser resenhado por Vinicius Castro na Dicta&Contradicta 8, breve em uma livraria perto de você), elogia os quadrinhos politicamente incorretos de Hergé e enxovalha a versão cinematogáfica de Steven Spielberg e Peter Jackson.

Ah, sim, “O Desabamento”, um conto de minha autoria, foi publicado no jornal literário Rascunho, de Curitiba.