Cigars of the Pharaoh

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by Hergé

Book 4 of The Adventures of Tintin

Review

★★☆☆☆

Cigars of the Pharaoh, by Hergé, is the fourth book in The Adventures of Tintin. It follows Tintin as he explores Egypt and India and uncovers an opium-smuggling ring.

Cigars of the Pharaoh is a transitional work in The Adventures of Tintin in many ways. Like early entries—Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo, and even Tintin in America—this book is essentially a travel comic. Tintin visits a new country and finds himself mixed up in some adventure. And like those early stories, Tintin still operates under the logic of cartoons, but it’s toned down. He doesn’t knock out a buffalo with a rubber tree slingshot like in Tintin in the Congo, but he does jump a 15-foot wall by bouncing on a fat man’s stomach and talk to elephants with a trumpet.

In other ways, Cigars of the Pharaoh is moving toward the more modern works in the series. It has a plot—the opium-smuggling ring—that runs through the whole book and continues into The Blue Lotus, making it the series’s first two-part story, like The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure, or Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.

The story meanders from adventure to adventure, and the dialogue is uninspired. Thomson and Thompson don’t have a big enough part, and the lack of Captain Haddock means Tintin doesn’t have anyone to play off of. The art is still great, though, and with far more variety of setting than Tintin in the Congo. There are some beautiful panels, especially the half-page one of Tintin escaping the Middle Eastern city while the army chases him. The mountain car chase at the end reminds me of both the mountains Hergé drew in Destination Moon, and also Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem, as the villain plunges to his apparent death.

This book is mostly interesting as a glimpse of what the series would become. On to The Blue Lotus next.