The Crab with the Golden Claws
Encyclopedia
The Crab with the Golden Claws is the ninth of The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist , who wrote under the pen name of Hergé...

, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé
Hergé
Georges Prosper Remi , better known by the pen name Hergé, was a Belgian comics writer and artist. His best known and most substantial work is the 23 completed comic books in The Adventures of Tintin series, which he wrote and illustrated from 1929 until his death in 1983, although he was also...

, featuring young reporter Tintin
Tintin (character)
Tintin is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the series of classic Belgian comic books written and illustrated by Hergé. Tintin is the protagonist of the series, a reporter and adventurer who travels around the world with his dog Snowy....

 as a hero. It is also the first to feature Tintin's longtime friend, Captain Haddock
Captain Haddock
Captain Archibald Haddock is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the series of classic Belgian comic books written and illustrated by Hergé...

.

Synopsis

Tintin is informed by the Thompsons
Thomson and Thompson
Thomson and Thompson are fictional characters in The Adventures of Tintin, the series of classic Belgian comic books written and illustrated by Hergé. Thomson and Thompson are detectives of Scotland Yard, and are as incompetent as they are necessary comic relief...

 of a case involving the ramblings of a drunken man, later killed, found with a scrap of paper from what appears to be a tin of crab
Crab
True crabs are decapod crustaceans of the infraorder Brachyura, which typically have a very short projecting "tail" , or where the reduced abdomen is entirely hidden under the thorax...

-meat with the word Karaboudjan scrawled on it. His subsequent investigation and the kidnapping of a Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese man interested in talking to him leads Tintin to a ship called Karaboudjan, where he is abducted by a syndicate of criminals who have been hiding opium
Opium
Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...

 in the crab
Crab
True crabs are decapod crustaceans of the infraorder Brachyura, which typically have a very short projecting "tail" , or where the reduced abdomen is entirely hidden under the thorax...

 tins. Tintin escapes from his locked room after Snowy chews through his bonds and Tintin knocks out a man sent to bring him food. He leaves him bound and gagged in the room. Tintin encounters Captain Haddock
Captain Haddock
Captain Archibald Haddock is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the series of classic Belgian comic books written and illustrated by Hergé...

, an alcoholic
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...

 who is manipulated by his first mate
Chief Mate
A Chief Mate or Chief Officer, usually also synonymous with the First Mate or First Officer , is a licensed member and head of the deck department of a merchant ship...

, Allan, and is unaware of his crew's criminal activities. Tintin hides in the locker under the bed and defeats Jumbo, the sailor left in the cabin, as Tintin is thought by Allen to have climbed out of the porthole. The Mate finds Jumbo tied to a chair and gagged. Escaping the ship in a lifeboat in an attempt to reach Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

, they are attacked by a seaplane. They hijack the plane and tie up the pilots, but a storm and Haddock's drunken behaviour causes them to crash-land in the Sahara.

After trekking across the desert, Tintin and Haddock reach a Moroccan
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

 port, but the Captain is kidnapped by members of his old crew. Tintin tracks them down and saves the Captain, but they both become intoxicated by the fumes from wine barrels breached in a shootout with the villains. Upon sobering up, Tintin discovers the necklace with the Crab with the Golden Claws on the now-subdued owner of the wine cellar, Omar Ben Salaad, and realizes that he is the leader of the drug cartel. After capturing Allan, the gang is put behind bars.

Background

The Belgian comic book creator Georges Remi – who would become better known under his pen name of Hergé – first came up with the character of Tintin, a young boy reporter, whilst working at the right wing Belgian newspaper Le XXe Siècle
Le XXe Siècle
Le XXe Siècle was a Belgian newspaper that was published from 1895 and 1940. Its supplement Le Petit Vingtième is known as the first publication to feature The Adventures of Tintin....

 (The 20th Century). Pioneering this new character in the story Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is the first title in the comic book series The Adventures of Tintin, written and drawn by Belgian cartoonist Hergé...

, this comic, which involved Tintin battling the socialist authorities in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

, was serialised in Le XXe Siècles supplement for children, Le Petit Vingtième
Le Petit Vingtième
Le Petit Vingtième was the weekly youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle from 1928 to 1940. The comics series The Adventures of Tintin first appeared in its pages.-History:...

 (The Little Twentieth), from 10 January 1929 until 11 May 1930. Proving a success, Hergé went on to pen a string of new Adventures of Tintin, sending his character to real locations such as the Belgian Congo, the United States, Egypt, India, China and the United Kingdom, and also to fictional countries of his own devising, such as the Latin American republic of San Theodoros
San Theodoros
San Theodoros is a fictional Central American country in The Adventures of Tintin. It is a satirical version of a Latin American banana republic country under the yoke of military government.-History:...

 and the East European kingdom of Syldavia
Syldavia
Syldavia is a fictional Balkan kingdom featured in The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé. The name was derived from TranSYLvania and MolDAVIA.-Overview:...

.

As he produced these works, his political approach to the world began to change; the earliest books reflected the socially conservative
Social conservatism
Social Conservatism is primarily a political, and usually morally influenced, ideology that focuses on the preservation of what are seen as traditional values. Social conservatism is a form of authoritarianism often associated with the position that the federal government should have a greater role...

, fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

 and imperialistic
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...

 attitudes of those for whom he worked. As he got older, he became more critical of the political far right, with the eighth Tintin adventure, King Ottokar's Sceptre
King Ottokar's Sceptre
King Ottokar's Sceptre is the eighth of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring the young reporter Tintin. It was first serialized as a black-and-white comic strip in Le Petit Vingtième on 4 August...

 (1939), involving Tintin battling the forces of fictional fascist state Borduria
Borduria
Borduria is a fictional country in the comic strip series The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé. It is located in the Balkans and has a rivalry with the fictional neighbouring country of Syldavia. Borduria is depicted in King Ottokar's Sceptre and The Calculus Affair, and is referred to in Tintin and...

, whose leader, named Müsstler, was a combination of Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

 and Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....

. He continued this anti-German sentiment in his subsequent work, Land of Black Gold
Land of Black Gold
Land of Black Gold is the fifteenth of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero....

, in which the main antagonist, Dr Müller, is a German intent on sabotaging the oil supply in the British Mandate of Palestine.

Then, in November 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium as World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 broke out across Europe, and although Hergé initially considered fleeing into a self-imposed exile, he ultimately decided to stay in his occupied homeland. To ensure their own dominance, the Nazi authorities closed down Le XXe Siècle, leaving Hergé unemployed and his story Land of Black Gold unfinished. In search of employment, he was given a job as an illustrator by Raymond de Becker
Raymond de Becker
Raymond De Becker was a Belgian journalist and writer who was born in Brussels. He edited the Belgian papers Independence and Avant-Garde...

, an executive of the popular newspaper Le Soir
Le Soir
Le Soir is a Berliner Format Belgian newspaper. Le Soir was founded in 1887 by Emile Rossel. It is the most popular Francophone newspaper in Belgium, and considered a newspaper of record.-Editorial stance:...

 (The Evening), which was allowed to continue publication under German management. On 17 October 1940 he was made editor of the paper's children's supplement, Le Soir Jeunesse, in which he set about producing new Tintin adventures, The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941) and then The Shooting Star
The Shooting Star
The Shooting Star is the tenth of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip books that were written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero....

 (1942). In this new, more repressive political climate, Hergé could no longer explore political themes in his Adventures of Tintin lest he be arrested by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...

. As Tintinologist Harry Thompson
Harry Thompson
Harry William Thompson was an English radio and television producer, comedy writer, novelist and biographer....

 noted, Tintin's role as a reporter came to an end, to be replaced by his new role as an explorer, something which was not a politically sensitive topic.

Publication

The Crab with the Golden Claws was first published in serial comic strip form in 1941.

The story was written after Hergé had been forced to abandon his previous story, Land of Black Gold
Land of Black Gold
Land of Black Gold is the fifteenth of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero....

, also set in the desert, when Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 took over Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

. After the invasion, publication of Le Petit Vingtième
Le Petit Vingtième
Le Petit Vingtième was the weekly youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle from 1928 to 1940. The comics series The Adventures of Tintin first appeared in its pages.-History:...

, the children's newspaper supplement that had published his previous Tintin adventures, was stopped and Hergé had to look for another means of publication. In addition, Land of Black Gold featured controversial political matter, depicting the conflicts between Jews, Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...

s and the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 troops in the British Mandate of Palestine. Hergé was asked by the newspaper Le Soir
Le Soir
Le Soir is a Berliner Format Belgian newspaper. Le Soir was founded in 1887 by Emile Rossel. It is the most popular Francophone newspaper in Belgium, and considered a newspaper of record.-Editorial stance:...

 to create a weekly supplement, similar to that of Le Petit Vingtième, called Le Soir Jeunesse, and he began work on a new story about the less controversial subject of drug smuggling.

The Crab With the Golden Claws appeared for the first time on October 17, 1940, and every week Hergé published two full pages. But the supplement disappeared again after September 3, 1941, due to paper shortage during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, when only 98 pages had appeared. The interruption continued until September 23 1941, when Hergé and Tintin got a daily strip in Le Soir. It continued for 24 days until the story was finished on October 18. This meant a major change in the method of working of Hergé, with a daily instead of a weekly publication, and a consequent rethinking of the layout of the comic and the rhythm of the storytelling. This version was republished as an album in 1941.

The strip was completely redrawn in colour for publication as an album in 1943.

In the 1960s, the book was published in America with a number of changes. In the original, the sailor Tintin leaves bound and gagged in Captain Haddock's cabin, and the man who beats Haddock in the cellar, are black Africans. These were changed in the 1960s to a white sailor and an Arab due to objections by American publishers of having blacks and whites mixing together. However, Haddock still refers to the man who beat him as a "Negro" in the English version. Also at the request of the Americans, scenes of Haddock drinking directly from the bottles of whisky on the lifeboat and the plane were taken out.

In an interview, Hergé sarcastically stated that these moves were "justified" because "Everyone knows that Americans never drink whisky(!)" and "that there are no blacks in America(!)".

Stop motion animated film, 1947



The Crab with the Golden Claws was adapted into a stop motion
Stop motion
Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...

-animated
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

 feature film
Feature film
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...

 of the same name in 1947
1947 in film
The year 1947 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*May 22 - Great Expectations is premiered in New York.*November 24 : The United States House of Representatives of the 80th Congress voted 346 to 17 to approve citations for contempt of Congress against the "Hollywood Ten".*November 25...

, produced by Wilfried Bouchery for Films Claude Misonne. It was the first ever film adaptation of Tintin and reproduces the story of the original comic almost exactly. It was first shown at the ABC Cinema
ABC Cinema
The ABC Cinema is a historic building on Whiteladies Road in Clifton, Bristol, England.It was built in 1920–1921 as a cinema, called the Whiteladies Picture House by James Henry LaTrobe and Thomas Henry Weston and opened by the Duchess of Beaufort...

 on January 11, 1947 for a group of invited guests. It was screened publicly only once, on December 21 of that year, before Bouchery declared bankruptcy and fled to Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

. All of the equipment was seized and a copy of the film is currently stored at Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

's Cinémathèque Royale..

Motion capture film, 2011

A motion capture
Motion capture
Motion capture, motion tracking, or mocap are terms used to describe the process of recording movement and translating that movement on to a digital model. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, and medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robotics...

 film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 titled The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn directed by Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...

 and produced by Peter Jackson
Peter Jackson
Sir Peter Robert Jackson, KNZM is a New Zealand film director, producer, actor, and screenwriter, known for his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy , adapted from the novel by J. R. R...

 is slated for a US release on December 21, 2011. The film was released in Europe at the end of October 2011.

A video-game tie-in to the movie has been announced at E3, June 6 with an unknown game release date.

Belvision animation, 1957

In 1957, the animation company Belvision produced a string of colour adaptations based upon Hergé's original comics, adapting eight of the Adventures into a series of daily five-minute episodes. The Crab with the Golden Claws was the fifth such story to be adapted, being directed by Ray Goossens and written by Michel Greg, himself a well known comic book writer and illustrator who in later years would become editor-in-chief of the Journal De Tintin.

Ellipse/Nelvana animation, 1991

In 1991, a second animated series based upon The Adventures of Tintin was produced, this time as a collaboration between the French studio Ellipse
Ellipse
In geometry, an ellipse is a plane curve that results from the intersection of a cone by a plane in a way that produces a closed curve. Circles are special cases of ellipses, obtained when the cutting plane is orthogonal to the cone's axis...

 and the Canadian animation company Nelvana
Nelvana
Nelvana Limited is a Canadian entertainment company founded in 1971 known for its work in children's animation. It was named by founders Michael Hirsh, Patrick Loubert and Clive A. Smith after a Canadian comic book superheroine created by Adrian Dingle in the 1940s...

. Adapting 21 of the stories into a series of episodes, each 42 minutes long, The Crab with the Golden Claws was the seventh story to be produced into the series, with the story spanning two episodes. Directed by Stéphane Bernasconi, the series has been praised for being "generally faithful", with compositions having been actually directly taken from the panels in the original comic book.

In popular culture

In The Simpsons
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...

 episode In the Name of the Grandfather
In the Name of the Grandfather
"In the Name of the Grandfather" is the fourteenth episode of the twentieth season of The Simpsons. It first aired on Sky1 in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 2009 and aired on the Fox network in the United States on March 22, 2009. It was the first...

 Lisa Simpson
Lisa Simpson
Lisa Marie Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons. She is the middle child of the Simpson family. Voiced by Yeardley Smith, Lisa first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987. Cartoonist Matt Groening...

 mentions Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 is on the forefront of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

's "tech-boom". Bart Simpson
Bart Simpson
Bartholomew JoJo "Bart" Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons and part of the Simpson family. He is voiced by actress Nancy Cartwright and first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987...

 mockingly adds: "In your face, Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

!", whereupon Marge threatens Bart with the words: "Bart! If you hate Belgium so much, maybe I should take your Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist , who wrote under the pen name of Hergé...

s away!" This scares Bart, who clutches a copy of the album "The Crab with the Golden Claws", promising he'll be good.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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