Tintin in Morocco | The Crab with the Golden Claws (The Adventures of Tintin)

Moroccan Karaboudjan | The Crab with the Golden Claws (The Adventures of Tintin) | Herge

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	• The Crab with the Golden Claws (The Adventures of Tintin) Herge Little, Brown Young Readers, 1974 - 62 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Crab with Golden Claws

Brand new clean copy...very happy with the product and on-time delivery

Tintin in Morocco

A series of clues, including a mysterious tin of crab, and the possessions of a drowned sailor leads Tintin to a Ship called Karaboudjan.
He has stumbled on gang led by the villainous First Mate of the ship, Allan, and soon makes first acquaintance with Captain Haddock, presented here a pathetic and wretched drunk, very different from the robust and redoubtable Captain Haddock we come to know in the subsequent volumes.
Escaping from the clutches of Allan and his gang, Tintin and the Captain take a life boat which is fired on by a plane with Moroccan markings.
They manage to get hold of the plane, but due to one of the Captain's drunken outbursts the plane crashes into the Sahara.
After Tintin and the Captain are rescued by the French foreign legion in Morocco, they eventually reach the port-city of Bagghar, where Tintin comes across the gang of drug-runners led by wealthy Bagghar merchant, Omar Ben Salaad.
This book was an important stage in Tintin's development, and while not quite as inticate as some of the others is an entertaining and memorable addition to one's Tintin collection.

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Moroccan Karaboudjan

"The Crab With The Golden Claws" is probably one of the first Tintin comics I ever read as a kid, and is probably one of my favorites too.

Tintin is walking along, and Snowy gets his nose caught in a tin of crab meat, looking for bones. It turns out the tin has had a long and chequered history. A man who had drowned on the docks had a piece of its label in his pocket, with the word "Karaboudjan" on it in pencil. Tintin and the Thompson detectives investigate, leading them to Morocco, the Sahara, and into a certain Captain Haddock...

Though the artwork isn't as detailed as some of Herge's other comics, there's some rather iconic images in this one. I love the first frame of page 9, with Tintin putting on his trenchcoat. Captain Haddock is a really interesting character, one of my favorites, and it's great that he becomes a regular character from this comic on.

It's the ninth Tintin adventure, but it'd be great as an introduction to the series, as it's a straightforward story full of fun and adventure. The Canadian animated adaption of the comics used this as it's first episode, actually...

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Tintin book best known for introducing Captain Haddock

Not one of the best Tintin books, but still fairly entertaining, The Crab with the Golden Claws is best known for introducing Captain Haddock. While Haddock love for whisky is a running joke in all of Tintin books, here his character is quite different from future books, as he appears as a hopeless, pathetic drunk. This book is one the "apolitical" books Herge felt convenient to write during World War II. The plot itself is a bit lightweight, dealing with Tintin's fight against some drug smugglers, both in his native Belgium and in Northern Africa. There is not a hint of a world war going on here, as there was in the future Land of Black Gold.

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Introducing Captain Haddock

Herge, The Crab with the Golden Claws (Methuen, 1941)

And finally, we meet Captain Haddock! (Yes, I'm reading them in order-- for the first time ever.) Of course, he's not the Haddock we come to know and love this early on, but at least he's here. Tintin, Snowy, and the detectives stumble upon an opium-smuggling ring that takes them to Africa aboard the Karaboudjan, Captain Haddock's ship. Haddock is a drunken sot when we meet him, having been supplied with all the liquor he could possibly want by mutinous drug-smuggling crew members, but still shows signs of the bravery and rashness we'd come to associate with him in later volumes of the series. Still not Herge's strongest work, but it's getting better. ***

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The Crab with the Golden Claws is best known for introducing Tintin's best friend and one of the series' most memorable characters: Captain "Blistering Barnacles" Haddock. As Tintin is investigating a mysterious can of crab and a drowned sailor, he meets Haddock, a "miserable wretch" who's being kept in ample alcohol so his insidious first mate, Allan, can run a drug operation. Crab had to be lengthened to fit the standard 62-page format; fortunately, Herge achieved this by, among other additions, creating four marvelous full-page spreads. --David Horiuchi

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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