Udet U12 Flamingo (Tintin in the Congo)

Tintin in the Congo (French: Tintin au Congo) is the second 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 May 1930 to June 1931 before being published in a collected volume by Éditions de Petit Vingtième in 1931. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are sent to the Belgian Congo to report on events in the country. Amid various encounters with the native Congolese people and wild animals, Tintin unearths a criminal diamond smuggling operation run by the American gangster Al Capone.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

THE VIDEO:

The (previously) finished model:

The story:

Tintin in the Congo is an interesting album. As only the second Tintin album published by Hergé, it’s pretty rough around the edges. Sure, unlike Soviets, at least Tintin in the Congo got a colour version upgrade, with some of the really offensive content adjusted, but there’s no hiding that the narrative is basically a string of non-sequitur jokes – plucked from the lowest of hanging fruit – with a quick roll down hill to the conclusion.

Still, this is one of the albums I remember reading as a child in my school library… and I LOVED it! It was probably the first time that learning French gave me a leg up on the world, since the English edition didn’t see the light of day until 1991(!), but I didn’t have a clue about that at the time. It also didn’t really register that any of the content would be considered questionable. Obviously being written in 1930, by a young man from Belgium who’d never been anywhere, the depictions of the African natives follow the racist, paternalistic visions that were prevalent at the time – not to mention the enormous bodycount of animals that Tintin leaves in his wake.

Still, that part was really lost on me. It’s strange, and I’m not sure why I feel that way, but it simply never occurred to me that there would be any link between Hergé’s racist caricatures and actual living people – let alone the black people living around me in Canada in the 1970s. To this day, my experience reading Tintin in the Congo frames my opinion about about the banning or sanitizing of older literary works which don’t quite hold up to the scrutiny of today’s more discerning readership. In a nutshell – don’t touch them.

Even as a seven-year old, I never once considered Tintin in the Congo to be a substitute for a textbook on Africa. But it did something that would eventually lead me to those textbooks – it captured my imagination. I’m not sure why, but the sense of adventure in “deepest, darkest, Africa” that germinated with Tintin in the Congo has stayed with me. Of course, now being older and slightly wiser, I can appreciate the anthropological aspects of native African culture – and the inconsistencies are glaring – but that doesn’t change my appreciation for Hergé’s work, it deepens it.

So, when it came time to add a subject from Tintin in the Congo to my Tintin project, it should come as no surprise that I chose… the Ford Model-T.

The build:

Of course, the Ford Model-T is a discussion for another day. To be honest, the yellow Udet U12 Flamingo that saves Tintin from the stampede at the end of the story wasn’t really on my radar. Although there supposedly is a 1/72 scale short-run resin kit available, I’ve never seen it and I’m guessing I wouldn’t like the price tag if I did.

So, I have to admit that in this case, the idea came first and the subject came second. The idea, of course, was to use the plans from a paper model to build a project in polystyrene. It’s the same basic idea I first used for building the first attempt at the Test Rocket XFLR-6 from Destination Moon. Of course what works for paper and glue doesn’t necessarily work when you’re using sheets of polystyrene. The two mediums don’t really act in the same way. It’s also quite difficult to work in a lot of complex curves, which is why the first Tintin project I first built entirely from scratch was the “box-on-wheels” Wolsely Armoured Car from The Blue Lotus.

Combining the two ideas did seem to have a lot of merit though. If I could find something with a simple structure, but then follow some pre-made 2-D plans, I could probably get some degree of success. So with that in mind, I went looking.

It wasn’t long before I settled on the Udet Flamingo. The plans were easy enough to find, it’s got enough straight-ish shapes to maintain my sanity, and best of all, it allowed me another build from one of my favourite Tintin albums. Check, check, check!

The process itself was relatively straightforward, albeit it a bit time consuming. I first cut out and used a glue stick to attach the paper pieces to a bit of polystyrene sheet and then cut them to shape. Then, once I had all the necessary bits, I cemented them in place to form the main fuselage. Cue tons of putty and sanding to even out the shape. Then I cut out the wings and stacked some sheets of plastic to give it the necessary aerofoil profile… cue tons of putty and sanding to even out the shape. Then I added some thin (0.3mm) strips of polystyrene to the wings to form the ribbing… cue tons of putty and sanding to even out the shape.

In hindsight, about the only thing I think I would’ve skipped was my attempt at using thin strips of polystyrene to create some panel lines along the fuselage. It didn’t quite work and caused several more putty/sanding/painting rounds and than necessary. So many, in fact, that it almost derailed the project in despair. I think the theory is still sound, but it will really test your patience. So in the end I sanded everything smooth and called it a day.

THE UPDATE (2023/04/27):

Of course, after calling it a day…

Despite the fact that I was reasonably pleased with my first result, my foray into the world of 3D modeling opened up a new avenue to tackle this project. For many of the same reasons (i.e. relatively box-like shape), my first “do-over” scratchbuilt to 3D printed project was the ” Wolsely Armoured Car and, given how well that one went, I decided to follow suit with the Udet Flamingo.

Using a set of plans I found easily enough online as a reference image, I built a virtual 3D model. Now, obviously there was (and still is) lots to learn, but I’m relatively happy with how the 3D model turned out. There were a few structural issues that needed to be overcome to be able to print it at a relatively small, 1/72 scale, but after a little trial and error, I was able to get some files I could work with.  As usual with resin prints, there was some putty and sanding required to deal with the pixelation of the print layers, but it was relatively minor. I also had to deal with a slightly misshapen spat on one of the wheels, but a bit of extra putty to build up the depression worked well enough.

If you’d like to try your hand at printing this project too, you can download my files here. Use the coupon code STROBEZ to get 50% off!

All things considered though, I’m quite pleased with the result. Well, feel free to tell me what you think.