The Red Sea Sharks (The Adventures of Tintin)

I wan to clarify this review by saying I loved reading these books when I was a kid, so I bought a bunch for my niece and nephew. Upon receiving the books I noticed something was off. I had an older copy of The Red Sea Sharks around, so I compared the two and was shocked to see the dialogue lettering was completely different in the new version. The newer digitally typeset lettering detracts from the experience of the book compared to the older hand lettering. Among other things, large areas of white space are left unfilled, which disconnects the flow of the eye. I returned all the books I ordered because of this unnecessary change. These books were so great as they were. Why on earth would you change them? Blistering Barnacles! Visigoths! Poltroons!

Tintin is one of the most famous comic book characters in the world. Unfortunately he is not as well known in the U.S. Hopefully I can help change that. The Tintin albums were created by the Belgian comics writer and artist Georges Prosper Remi under the pen name Hergé. His first Tintin album "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets" appeared in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième on January 10, 1929 and his last completed album was "Tintin and the Picaros" in 1975/1976. The Tintin albums are primarily for children but they are written so that adults also greatly enjoy them.

Tintin is a Belgian investigative journalist who gets drawn into all kinds of dangerous and eventful adventures around the world. Already in the very first album "Tintin in the Soviets" he is aided by his talking dog, a fox terrier called Snowy. In Swedish and in French Snowy is called Milou. In "The Crab with the Golden Claws" he meets the grumpy but hilarious Captain Haddock. A lot of the best comic situations arise from Captain Haddock's bad temper in combination with his bad luck and above all his creative use of words. As a sailor Captain Haddock is expected to swear a lot but all swear words have been replaced by expressions like "billions of blue blistering barnacles", "you Mameluke", "Macrocepahlic Baboon", "odd-toed ungulate", "and troglodyte "," Pithecantrophus", but never real swear words. Another source of many comic situations is the genial but hearing-impaired Professor Cuthbert Calculus (Kalkyl in Swedish, Tournesol in French). Other prominent supporting characters are the incompetent twin detectives Thomson and Thompson (Dupond and Dupont), and the constantly joking and laughing but irritating insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg.

In this album from 1958 Tintin and Captain Haddock unexpectedly meets an old friend of Tintin, the former dictator from South America, General Alcazar. It turns out that General Alcazar is trying to purchase weapons from a shady arms dealer who is also illegally selling arms to two fighting parties in the Middle East. The son of the emir Ben Khalish Ezab (one of the fighting parties) the rambunctious Abdullah is staying with Captain Haddock (and Tintin) and is playing all kinds of tricks on everyone. To get away from this Arab Dennis the Menace and all his pranks they go see the emir himself and end up getting deeply involved in an incredible adventure. They also stumble upon an organization that is selling African slaves (slavery still existed in the Middle East and Africa in 1958). A lot of old crooks and friends from other books show up here, including Captain Allan, Rastapopolous, and the lovely but highly irritating Prima Donna and opera singer Bianca Castafiore.

This album is fast paced, action packed and very exciting and quiet interesting. It is difficult to put the book down even for an adult. The humor is superb and there are laugh out loud moments on almost every page.

It is my experience that American kids will love the Tintin albums once they have been acquainted with them (an album is a hardback comic book with the pictures in series). My kids love them and their friends love them as well. As a child, I read all of the Tintin books in Swedish, and as an adult living in the U.S., I am reading them again to my children, but this time in English. This book is intensely exciting and full of action and therefore it is one of my favorites, and one of my children's favorite. I highly recommend this Tintin album to young and old.

This is Herge in the 1950s, his art having reached a fully mature style. There's just something so open and exciting about this book -- the exotic locale, the breathless adventure and palpable danger, the complex political scenario. First-rate stuff, marred, alas, by a patronizing portrayal of black Muslims being sold into slavery. It's racist, but at any rate considerably less so than "Tintin in the Congo."

Despite their age, many Tintin books are still great reading to this day. But a few are pretty hard to read in 2020, and this is one of them. The Africans are drawn as caricatures, virtually identical. They’re childlike, passive, eager to please, and speak in a ridiculous pidgin. It’s great that Tintin, Haddock, and friends are mad about the slave trading, but they still treat its victims as dumb cargo. At one point Tintin actually shoots a firehose at them!

Our 6-year old has been loving Tintin adventures, and I bought this one thinking its place in the chronology made it much less likely to suffer from the problems of some of the earlier comics. I wish I’d read it before giving it to him! Instead, while reading it together we kept having to stop to talk about the racist context for this or that scene.

One curious thing about this book is that it is one of the few Tintin books whose original title (in the French edition) is in English: "Coke in Stock", a reference to the modern slave trade, I believe; but for some strange reason the title was changed for the English-language edition., to "Red Sea Sharks"...I wonder why?

My two grandson's, ages 7 & 9, simply adore Tin Tin. It's rewarding to know that they have books they can read over and over and never tire of them. This was the last book they needed to finish their collection, and they were extremely pleased that "Santa" brought it this year.

This may not be the very best of Tintin books, but is among his most enjoyable. The plot deals with Tintin stumbling by accident into an organization dedicated to sell african slaves. The action starts in Tintin's native Belgium, but it soon moves to (fictional countries) in the Middle East. One of the peculiar features of this book is that almost all the villains of Tintin's previous books appear in cameo roles here (such as Dawson, Tintin's long forgotten nemesis in The Blue Lotus). Rastapopoulos also appear (though you know that only in the final pages), as well as Alcazar, Allan, Abdallah, his father the emir of Khemed, Doctor Muller of The Black Island, etc. Sharks also shows the first appearance of Estonian pilot Szut (also called Skut or Pst in some editions), who would later appear in a major role in Flight 714. Some of the portrayals of the african slaves could be considered racist today, but I hope most readers will understand this was written in a very different time (the book is almost 50 years old).

I think this is my favorite Tintin adventure; has the best combination of humor and drama. For novices to this Series, parents may not find the content appropriate to young children (though my seven year old son loves it dearly; particularly the visual comedy); I do a LOT of explaining. The content was written from the point of view of the European Colonists of that era and so there is a certain racism and patronizing tone expressed towards the non-Western peoples depicted, that one has to take into account and yet it is still an amazing graphic novel.

"The Red Sea Sharks" was first done by Herge in 1958, and is the nineteenth Tintin comic, set around Jordan and the Red Sea. There's a few old characters, and a few old gags too. "Land of Black Gold", is a little better, I think.

love, love, love the tintin books. those are really nice, big enough to read, but flexible to take anywhere, in a back pack, or in the car. highly recommend!