Karaboudjan Life Boat (The Crab with the Golden Claws)

The Crab with the Golden Claws (French: Le Crabe aux pinces d’or) is the ninth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised weekly in Le Soir Jeunesse, the children’s supplement to Le Soir, Belgium’s leading francophone newspaper, from October 1940 to October 1941 amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. Partway through serialisation, Le Soir Jeunesse was cancelled and the story began to be serialised daily in the pages of Le Soir. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to Morocco to pursue a gang of international opium smugglers.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The story:

The Crab with the Golden Claws is probably one of the most important, and pivotal, of all the Tintin albums. By 1940, Hergé had a decade of Tintin work under his belt. While The Blue Lotus earlier marked the turning point in his career where he no longer considered the writing and drawing of Tintin’s adventures to be just a game, The Crab With the Golden Claws marks the period where the game turned deadly serious.

With The Blue Lotus, Hergé began injecting a healthy dose of realism into his work – including some not-so-veiled political criticism of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. A few albums later, Hergé tabled King Ottokar’s Sceptre, an even more thinly-veiled criticism of Nazi Germany, and had just begun Land of Black Gold, a Tintin adventure poised to make a few comments about the powers-that-be and their desire to control the flow of petroleum. However, then suddenly, almost overnight, the Nazi’s waltzed into Brussels and the appetite for political/economic satire disappeared completely. Tintin’s regular home, le petit vingtieme is closed, taking Land of Black Gold down with it. When he reappeared in Le Soir Jeunesse, the political edginess was absent, replaced almost entirely by high adventure.

Although sometimes I think about what was lost, basically what if Tintin had been allowed to grow along that same arc of artistic freedom that he’d been picking up speed on. But, I guess World War II got in the way of a lot of people’s growth, and Tintin is most definitely a product of the Twentieth Century. So it’s somewhat of a moot point. Besides, regardless of what we might have lost, think of what we gained – Captain Haddock.

After Captain Haddock’s appearance in Crab with the Golden Claws, the “classic Tintin” tales really start to take shape. He becomes the running gag to Tintin’s straight man, with a truly epic command of the art of cursing without ever actually saying a bad word, usually fuelled by his preferred (albeit fictional) drink of choice – Loch Lomond whisky.

So, even though the yellow float plane is probably the better known “star subject” on tap for the Crab with the Golden Claws entry in my Tintin project, the lifeboat that Captain Haddock drunkenly sets on fire is almost the bookend to it. It also didn’t hurt that there’s a commercially available kit to work from.

The build:

Well, sort of. Truth be told, though I love the scene, I hadn’t really seriously considered including it until after I started browsing through the boats and ships section of my local hobby shop. I was on the hunt for a 1/75 scale Heller boxing of the Niña that I planned to turn into the Arabian dhow that rescues Tintin and Snowy in Cigars of the Pharaoh, when I ran across a small little box of Zvezda’s Medieval Lifeboat.

One look was all it took, and I thought that if I could get two of them, saw them in half and stick both the rounded ends together, it would be just about perfect. Turns out I was right.

Of course it wasn’t quite THAT easy, getting the line perfectly straight and blending the cut without simply sanding away all the very nice wood grain detail was a bit of a challenge. However I wasn’t too worried because I wanted to try out a little technique I’ve seen done, but never tried before – using clear silicone caulk to create a water effect. It took a couple of tries to get the colouring just right, but I think I succeeded in the end. I’m not quite sure if there’s a way to use the silicone caulking to depict calm water, but it works pretty well for raging seas. The big “Ah-Ha” moment for me was when I realized that I could use some silicone with a bit of Tamiya clear orange acrylic paint to act as a diffuser for the LED light. That really sold the fire, as far as I was concerned, although the cotton-on-a-bit-of-wire smoke was the capping touch.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the result, but feel free to tell me what you think.

The Crab with the Golden Claws marks a turing point in the Tintin albums. It is the first of the albums produced during the German occupation of Belgium during WWII. as such, it lost nearly all of the witty political satire of the albums that preceeded it.