The Arumbaya Fetish (The Broken Ear)

The Broken Ear (French: L’Oreille cassée, originally published in English as Tintin and the Broken Ear) is the sixth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from December 1935 to February 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who pursue the thieves of a South American fetish identifiable by its broken ear. In doing so, he ends up in the fictional nation of San Theodoros, where he becomes embroiled in a war and discovers the Arumbaya tribe deep in the forest.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The video:

This is Tintin project : 052

This project was originally completed on 2025/09/05

The story:

Even though he only appears in a few panels of the album The Broken Ear, there’s something quite endearing about Jules, the janitor/security guard at the museum where the Arumbaya fetish is being displayed.

I mean, he really seems to enjoy his work… as evidenced by his breaking out his best rendition of the song Toreador from the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet. And who hasn’t had one of those days at work… you go in thinking everything’s fine and dandy and then you realize you’ve lost a priceless artifact and have to call the boss and let him know you’ve screwed up.

Luckily, despite being caught up in a scheme with international jewel thieves, a murder plot and a globe-trotting boy reporter, all’s well that ends well. The Arumbaya fetish is returned, and Jules gets to finish his song.

The build:

Like most of my “mini-projects” there’s not a lot to tell on the build side. The star of the show, the Arumbaya fetish itself has been 3D modeled by several people and can be found online without too much trouble… however Jules was a different story.

Jules, the Janitor was my third attempt at modelling a Tintin figure more or less from scratch, after Coco, the boy who rides in the Ford Model T from Tintin in the Congo, and Mrs. Wang from the “Lao Tzu Said…” scene from The Blue Lotus.

Luckily he wasn’t terribly difficult to model. I mean, if you look at him, he’s basically a dumpling and a couple of toothpicks. I did cheat a little and used Tintin’s head as a base and then just… fattened it up a bit and added a moustache.

One of the challenges of making a model at 1/72 scale (especially for the characters) is that sometimes you make some bits a little too thin. This happened to the brim of his cap. It was the right size relative to the 3D model, but after printing it was extremely thin and broke. Luckily I was able to shape a bit of plastic “paper” and save the day. Don’t think it’s particularly noticeable.

All in all I’m happy with how this little project turned out, but feel free to let me know what you think.