The Calculus Affair

As a kid, travelling with my parents in Europe, I was exposed to the brilliance of Tintin books. Across the board, they are entertaining, comical, suspenseful, and somewhat educational. "The Calculus Affair" has long stood as one of my top five of the Tintin series. It features the absentminded professor, the blustery captain, the intrepid Tintin and his dog Snowy, and the British inspectors Thomson and Thompson. It's the quintessential Tintin story, full of miscues, clues, adventure, and comedy. I picked up a new copy the other day (now that I'm reaching forty years old), and sped through the story, reliving all the joy of my childhood. This is still fun stuff. Worth every penny. May a whole new generation discover the genius of the Tintin books, as I did back in the seventies.

This book is one of the great masterpieces of the cartoonists art. I've read it many times since I was 14 (I'm now 29) but the sheer athleticism and virtuosity of both the draughtmanship and the narrative remained undiminished. It really is an astonishing display and is perhaps only second to 'Flight 714' and 'The Castafoire Emerald' in Herge's ouevre. Buy it and read it.

This adventure is well written and well illustrated, as all the Tintin books are, but is unique in how it is completly non-stop. Tintin and the Captain follow Calculus, the absent minded professor, as he travels, only to discover Calculus has been kiddnapped! An exciting story.

Definately up there with the top Tintins. Expert amount of suspense and great characters. 9.5 out of 10.

"The Calculus Affair" may not be immediately entertaining, as in Explorers on the Moon or the Shooting Star, but it slowly develops the plot, with just enough suspense to put the reader at the edge of his seat at the last panel. And it starts with a boom, too. The mysterious phenomenon of breaking glass and china, including the Captain's whisky glass, is only fully explained on page 51, and the later pages expose many other plot details which contributed to the overall controlled confusion in the beginning and middle of the book. In some adventures, an answer is readily available to the various people and clues which meet up with Tintin and his friends, but in this book you feel just like a character, not knowing what will happen next. For Tintin and the Captain's dash through Switzerland, every little detail--the Hotel Cornavin, Professor Topolino's villa in Nyon, even the positioning of signposts and billboards--was mapped out by Hergé, with his usual extreme attention to detail. And for Tintin and Haddock's unexpected visit to Szohod, Hergé based most of the city on bits and pieces from the USSR--after all, it began in TINTIN magazine in 1954, the height of the Cold War. The Bordurians' habit of constantly reproducing their laughable leader Kurvi-Tasch's whiskers, even in their alphabet, was another Soviet touch, and their phrase "By the whiskers of Kurvi-Tasch" was probably taken from chants used at 1930s Stalinistic rallies. Overall, the book was an expert work, one of Hergé's finest, and certainly a complicated and precision instrument, even when compared to his much-hyped works preceding it, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.