The Morning of the Magicians

“Flight 714” is the penultimate “real” Tintin adventure. Aficionados claim that it's somewhat different from the Tintin comics of Hergé's golden age. The villains are clownish and pathetic rather than really evil, one of the “good” guys turns out to be something of a crook himself, and the story contains paranormal elements not usually found in Tintin adventures.

Maybe, maybe not…personally, I think it was mostly business as usual. All the usual gags are there: Captain Haddock's insults are as incomprehensible as they are colorful, Calculus is distracted and badly in need of a hearing aid, Snowy (Tintin's little dog) is hyper-intelligent and saves the day more than once, and the crooks are old acquaintances from earlier albums. Perhaps Tintin, the ever-young and priggish boy scout, is a bit harder than usual. In “Flight 714”, he is using both guns and machine guns to fight the bad guys!

What makes “Flight 714” interesting is, surprise, precisely the paranormal angle mentioned above. One of the characters, called Mik Kanrokitoff in the English version and Mik Ezdamtoff in the Franco-Belgian original, is based on Jacques Bergier, the famous French ufologist and co-author of “The Morning of the Magicians”! Apparently, Hergé had approached Bergier and asked the ufologist if he wanted to be portrayed in a Tintin comic. Bergier accepted with the words “Nobody remembers last year's Nobel Prize winners, everyone will remember Mik Ezdamtoff”.

The plot has incorporated elements of the “ancient astronaut theory”, made famous shortly afterwards by Erich von Däniken. There are also references to UFO contactees and abductees. The story ends inconclusively, since Tintin and his friends have been hypnotically induced to forget Kanrokitoff and the aliens. Calculus finds an object apparently not made of any metal found on Earth (again like many contactees), but his claims are laughed at by the general public (also a realistic scenario).

All in all, an interesting little piece of cultural studies, originally published in 1966-68.