the adventures of tintin: the crab with the golden claws

Tintin: The Crab With the Golden Claws (Review)

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Darren

In the lead-up to the release of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, I’m going to be taking a look at Hergé’s celebrated comic book character, from his humble beginnings through to the incomplete post-modern finale. I hope you enjoy the ride.

The Crab With the Golden Claws is the first of three Tintin stories that were used as the basis of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (the other two being, obviously, The Secret of the Unicorn and its sequel, Red Rackham’s Treasure). The Crab With the Golden Claws was originally written during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, when Hergé feared that his then on-going storyline The Land of Black Gold would have proved too politically charged for the country’s new governing force. So the adventure was essentially written as filler, a bit of light entertainment to take the minds of his headers as far away from the political reality as possible. And it certainly succeeds as one of the lighter and brisker adventures in the series, with one major addition to the franchise’s mythos in the form of Captain Archibald Haddock.