… the ten thousand things I have to do before the year ends will just have to wait.
I’ll be at National Book Store’s The Adventures of Tintin premiere!
Tag: herge
Tintin times three
(Sorry for the delayed post — had no electricity for over 24 hours due to that last storm!)
This weekend was my first free weekend in a long, long while, and it was spent vegging out, bargain book hunting, and watching more episodes of The Big Bang Theory (as well as Bounty Hunter and I Hate Valentine’s Day). I wasn’t in the mood for heavy-duty reading, but I did manage to squeeze in the three Tintin comics I bought (20% off!) during Free Comic Book Day: The Seven Crystal Balls, Land of Black Gold, and Tintin and the Picaros.
Bookish Stamps
A couple of weeks ago, I went on an Old Manila Heritage Tour sponsored by the Pilipinas Stamp Collectors’ Club, a tour that covered the Metropolitan Theatre, the Arroceros Forest Park, Liwasang Bonifacio, and the Manila Post Office. It was not as organized as I would have liked, but then again it was a free tour, so I shouldn’t be complaining.
At the end of the tour, there was a stamp collecting seminar and by then my book club friends had decided they’d had enough geekiness for one day. I was tired, too, but I couldn’t resist staying. I’ve never had any formal instruction in collecting stamps and I’ve got two albums bursting full of them, some from my childhood collection and some accumulated after two years of BookMooching.
A little more Tintin
I had just posted an entry about Herge’s The Adventures of Tintin a month ago when the copy of Flight 714 (#120 for 2009) I mooched arrived and I couldn’t resist reading it straightaway. I also recently acquired The Pocket Essential Tintin (#121 for 2009) at a Goodwill sale in Tiendesitas, and decided to read it right after Flight 714.
In The Adventures of Tintin: Flight 714, Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus are en route to Australia to attend an international astronautical congress. At a stopover in Jakarta they run into their friend Skut (from Red Sea Sharks) who is now a pilot for the multimillionaire Laszlo Carreidas. Carreidas invites the party on his private plane, and the next thing they know, they’re adrift at sea in a rowboat with no recollection of what happened.
For the Love of Tintin
One of my fondest memories of our grade school library is the hunt for Tintin comics. When I was in grade school, our library had the whole set, but everyone wanted to read them, so while they were marked “for room use only,” (maybe because copies kept disappearing) they were still not very easy to find, as most girls (well, including me and my friends when we found them) stashed them in secret hiding places around the library, often behind what we supposed were the books nobody ever read.
In case you’re not familiar with the series, The Adventures of Tintin is a comic strip series created by the Belgian artist Hergé, a.k.a. Georges Remi (G.R. backwards is R.G., which sounds like Hergé), dating back as early as 1929, originally in French. It is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, translated in over 50 languages, with 200 million books sold worldwide. It features the reporter Tintin, who has a knack for stumbling upon mystery — and more trouble than his white fox terrier, Snowy, would care to get entangled in.
I loved the series when I was younger, and I still love it today, and so when I started earning my own money to build my book collection, Tintin comics were high on the priority list. I’ve been acquiring pieces slowly, because they’re not exactly cheap. Today they’re around P400 ($8) at Fully Booked and National Book Store, and P450 ($9) at Powerbooks so as much as I’d love the complete set, I’m just happy I’m past the halfway point. Tintin comics were never cheap, but at the rate they were selling a decade ago, I want to kick myself for starting this late.