This great image is from the Garen Ewing, a writer and illustrator who is currently doing an A-Z of comic characters. Clearly a big Tintin fan, Garen is writing and drawing a strip cartoon very much in the vein of Herge’s Tintin. The Rainbow Orchid, inspired by authors such as Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Edgar P. Jacobs and, of course, Hergé, has appeared in print but you can read the entire story (so far) online. I’m about to do that so there goes my work for the rest of the day.

On his blog, he has a good post on the current plan that all children’s books in the UK should be age banded, i.e. labeled with their target age range. This plan is worrying many children authors because so many books appeal across ages. The authors fear that labeling a book like Winnie-the-Pooh as 3 – 6 years or Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy as 10 – 12 years will put off children (and adults) outside of those ranges. As someone who came late to reading due to dyslexia and still regularly reads “children” books I think the authors fears are justified. All readers should be allowed to discover for themselves what is suitable and enjoyable to them without social pressure or fear of stigmatization.

For more on this, see Age Banding and look what image Garen illustrated the story with.

To be filed under groundless speculation.

The Daily Record (a Scottish newspaper) believes that Scotland will feature big in the Tintin movies because The Black Island, which is set in Scotland, could be one of the films. There is no evidence that the Black Island is going to be one of the films, but it could be.
New Dr Who chief’s Tintin film in line for Scots setting

In other news:

• Cyclists and Tour-de-France leader Alejandro Valverde is a Tintin fan
• Scientists have discovered ice on the moon, just as Herge predicted
• A series of films at the Indian International Centre about Tibet will include the animated version of Tintin in Tibet.
• Peter Jackson is producing a new version of the classic film, Dambusters, with a script by Steven Fry.

Photo by Axel Bührmann under a Creative Commons license. Source: Fanmode.net

Australian DVD produced Umbrella Entertainment have released the two 1960′s Tintin Movies on DVD. They are Tintin & the Blue Oranges and Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece. Both are $24.99 (Australian dollars presumably) and are in French with English Subtitles. According to Windscorpion Madness “… Blue oranges … was very pleasantly entertain[ing]. The actors got the characters right, Snowy included. Good performance by that dog!”

Steven Moffat, the award winning scriptwriter of Coupling and Dr Who walked away from writing the second Tintin movie.

According to the Daily Mail (so pretty suspect), Moffat was originally contracted to write the first two Tintin films for a cool £1 million. He had completed the first script and handed it over to Spielberg, director of the first film, and was due to start work on the second. However the writer’s strike happened in the US and this prevented Steven Moffat from working. During this time he was offered the Dr Who job at the BBC which he took without a moments hesitation. Not many people would walk away from £500,000 or say no to Steven Spielberg but for a lifelong Dr Who fan it was easy to do.

Moffat departure is bad news for Tintin (though great for Dr Who) because Steven has a track record of great writing and being faithful to the source material. He understands what it is like to be a fan and how the essence of the original work can be remixed in a contemporary setting without ruining it. We don’t know who is going to get or has got the job of scriptwriter for the second film but they have a tough job ahead of them.

That Steven Moffat was only given the contract for the first two films suggest that the three films are not going be tightly linked into one continuous story. More likely, each film will standalone which makes some of the casting decisions curious. The original casting list suggested the three films would be The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. These would form a natural story arc, focusing around Captain Haddock. However Eric Stoltz has been cast as Doctor Krollspell (apparently) who only appears in Flight 714. Krollspell is closely linked to Tintin’s nemesis Rastapopoulos but Rastapopoulos doesn’t appear in Goldren Claws, Unicorn or Red Rackham.

All of this suggests that the Tintin movies are going to draw characters and incidents from multiple books rather than closely follow a single book. This is worrying as we may be left with a mess rather than a cohesive story.

Source: £500,000 Mr Spielberg? Sorry, I’ve got a date with the Beeb, says the new Dr Who writer