Kawasaki Ki-10 ”Perry” (The Blue Lotus)

The Blue Lotus (French: Le Lotus bleu) is the fifth 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 August 1934 to October 1935 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1936. Continuing where the plot of the previous story, Cigars of the Pharaoh, left off, the story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are invited to China in the midst of the 1931 Japanese invasion, where he reveals the machinations of Japanese spies and uncovers a drug-smuggling ring.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

THE VIDEO:

The story:

As I said earlier, The Blue Lotus was always a favourite of mine. So it seemed a shame to limit its inclusion in my Tintin build project to a single entry, the Wlosely armoured car.  However, as I looked through the book there didn’t seem to be too many other options.  Besides Mr. Wang’s car and a couple of shadowy others, there’s not a lot to choose from.  Then it hit me, why not build one the trio of search planes?

While most of the vehicles that Hergé drew into his comic albums are instantly recognizable, in The Blue Lotus the three Japanese search planes that are dispatched ahead of the armoured car appear only in very small silhouette (you can see just how small in the banner at the top of this page).  However it just so happens that those same three bi-planes appear on the cover of the May 16, 1933 edition of le petit vingtième (n° 20).

If you look at the drawing, it’s easy to see that Hergé was probably more familiar with the British Hakwer Hart two-seater fighter-bombers, and the rendition of the planes reflect that.  However, given his later works, it’s also easy to guess that given half a chance, Hergé would’ve preferred to include something a little more authentic.  Luckily, in the interests of doing something a little bit different in my project, I decided to give Hergé that chance myself.  So in this case I will simply assume that what he meant to draw was a Kawasaki Ki-10 ”Perry” instead.  It’s much more likely that the Imperial Japanese Army would have dispatched a trio of Ki-10s to hunt down Tintin in Shanghai circa 1933 anyways.  It also didn’t hurt that there just happens to be a relatively readily available Kawasaki Ki-10 ”Perry” kit from ICM in 1/72 scale.

The build:

The build itself is more or less out of the box, however I did acknowledge that Hergé had distinctly drawn these planes as two-seaters (even though the Ki-10 was a single-seater), so some modifications needed to be made.  I did also try to strike a balance between the Ki-10’s usual light grey/green colour scheme and the white/dark grey one depicted on the cover.  The subtle grey/green tone might’ve been too much for printing technology of the era so I avoided the problem that with by making yet another assumption as to what was intended.  However I think Hergé’s choice for the dark grey nose is pretty blatant, so I kept that as per the illustration.

Besides cutting out a second seat behind the main cockpit, and scratch building almost the entire interior as a result, the only other major modification was to open up those beautiful vent flaps under the nose.  I think I managed both of those alright, but the major learning moment from this project was the disaster of trying to glue the upper wing assembly in after it had already been painted.  Lesson learned – glue first, paint later.

For the base, I decided to depict an “in-flight” scene (even though it’s a ghost plane with no pilot!), so it was quite simple to just add some cotton ball clouds over top of some green grass.  Simple, but relatively effective I think.

THE UPDATE (2023/11/17):

Unfortunately, this project was one of the worst hit by the “Great Shelf Disaster of 2023” – basically one of my glass shelves was knocked off it’s supports and came crashing down and crushed the models on the shelf below it. A few of them survived relatively unscathed, and a couple needed some minor repairs, but the Ki-10 Perry was more or less damaged beyond repair. That’s probably a relative term, mind you, but since I had another box in the stash, why not rebuild it, right? Especially when it gives you the chance to upgrade the project by adding a small DC motor to power the spinning propellor.

As you can see from the pictures below, there’s not much to tell in terms of the rebuild itself. Since I knew that I was going to have pilots sitting in the seats, I didn’t bother fiddling around as much with the cockpit interiors, and in fact I scavenged some of the bits to reuse. I also decided to incorporate the surviving landing gear sub-build, and re-use the tail. I might have been able to do a better paint job on it this time, but somehow it felt right to maintain a bit of the continuity between the old and the new builds, and the tail, with its rising sun motif, seemed to contain the “soul” of the previous build. I also opted to try using decals this time for the big round red dots.

Check out how I managed it and let me know what you think: