Supermarine Spitfire (Land of Black Gold)

Land of Black Gold (French: Tintin au pays de l’or noir) is the fifteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, in which it was initially serialised from September 1939 until the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, at which the newspaper was shut down and the story interrupted. After eight years, Hergé returned to Land of Black Gold, completing its serialisation in Belgium’s Tintin magazine from September 1948 to February 1950, after which it was published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1950. Set on the eve of a European war, the plot revolves around the attempts of young Belgian reporter Tintin to uncover a militant group responsible for sabotaging oil supplies in the Middle East.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

THE VIDEO:

The story:

The more I read Land of Black Gold, the more I like it. As I’ve mentioned before, as a kid I was always more intrigued by Tintin adventures in Asia and Africa than the Middle-East and South America, but it’s hard to argue that the adventures set in the Middle-East aren’t some of the best.

From the perspective of my 1/72 Tintin build project that’s even more true. There are so many great “desert themed” project opportunities across Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Crab with the Golden Claws, Land of Black Gold and the The Red Sea Sharks that I sometimes forget which ones go with which album. In particular, besides the semi-iconic red Jeep CJ2A on the cover, this album features one of probably the three most-often built Tintin models – the Supermarine Spitfire (with the other two being the the Bordurian Messerschmitt Bf 109 from King Ottokar’s Sceptre and the Khemedi DHC Mosquito in The Red Sea Sharks).

Now the reasons for this likely have a lot more to do with how plentiful the kits are for all of those two subjects rather than their relative importance in the albums. Case in point, the Spitfire appears in a whopping 3 whole panels… but who doesn’t love a Spitfire, right? I guess that I don’t… because this was my first attempt at one. It’s not that I don’t like the plane, but much like the the Bordurian Messerschmitt Bf 109, I just didn’t want to follow the trend. Still, you can’t really call yourself a Tintin model builder without having one of these in the portfolio, so here we are. But that doesn’t mean my offering has to be like everyone else’s, right? 😉

However, despite following a similar path to  Bordurian Messerschmitt Bf 109 (and going with the 109G instead of the more-often base of a 109F because of what Academy kit I had in my stash), using the Academy Spitfire Mk. XIVc set me off to a bad start. Hergé’s version is a bit of an amalgam of several versions, with the smart money being on either the Spitfire Mk. V or the Mk. IX. So I figured I’d just tough it out with the Mk. XIV… but it just looked wrong. After I got the propeller on I realised just how loooooong (and how wrooooong) it looked.

This brought up a bit of philosophical debate I often have with the Tintin builds – what’s the right balance between what you see on the page and what you “expect” to see based on the real life counterpart. Sometimes finding that right balance is easier than others, and in this build it was a bit tougher than usual – possibly because, as I mentioned earlier, the Spitfire is one of the most frequently seen of all scale models.

The build:

As I mentioned, I started off this build using the Academy Spitfire Mk. XIVc I had in the stash. After I got the fuselage together, I decided that it just wasn’t going to work. So I switched gears and went for the Revell Mk. Vb – even though I was slightly stalled when I saw the Italeri Mk. IX on the shelf for the same price. I’m still second-guessing myself on that one, and I might’ve gone for the Mk. IX except that I decided I wanted a 3 prop blade and thought I could scavenge the rest of what I needed. I think I was right, as the Academy kit did end up donating a pair of underside air cooling intake vents and a couple of 6-stack exhausts – so all good.

The build itself was quite straightforward both the Academy and especially the newer Revell kit went together easily enough. I was able to carefully cut off the underside air vents and surgically attach them to the Mk. V with little to no fuss. The exhausts didn’t QUITE fit, but after sanding down the backs to as thin as I dared, I was able to get them in place without any problem either.

My one small regret is that I didn’t really look carefully at the propeller when I installed the DC motor. I should have had it a bit more recessed to allow the spinner to sit more closely to the fuselage. It would have saved some surgery on the spinner, but I got there in the end, so all’s well that works.

One of the trickiest parts was the non-standard canopy. There’s some thought that Hergé might have been using a Hurricane as his inspiration for the canopy, but despite having one in the stash, I didn’t want to hobble a perfectly good kit by stealing a canopy – especially since, with the open in-flight cockpit, it wasn’t likely to work well anyway. Instead I was able to do some surgery on a bit of clear blister packaging from some medication and create the very thin look of an open middle part of the canopy. I did have to mask and paint it twice as my first attempt left the framing looking WAY too thick. However, the second try was as good as I could expect and I was able to carefully glue it in place covering the back half of the cockpit.

Of course the reason I wanted to have it both in-flight and open canopy is because of the scene from the album. The Spitfire appears over the desert camp of Bab El Her’s and drops a heap of pink leaflets. However, how do you convey a leaflet drop in 1/72 scale? There’s a few challenges here. First of all is the actual physical depiction. How do you get a bunch of pink papers suspended in the air? Second of , given the constraints of the size of the diorama, how do you convey the scene properly – actual leaflets being dropped from the canopy of a plane would create a very wide, and relatively low-density field.

After an initial thought of using some fishing line, I realized that a) the line was going to be too thick and noticeable, b) would require quite a lot of glue – and the weight would add up, and c) would end up looking like little pink flags all flying in a row. So, instead I pulled very thin webs of hot glue back and forth through a small pile of square pink confetti. They were the thinnest strands possible to support the weight of the paper, and had the added bonus (if you were fast enough) of being self-sticky. After I was able to create an organic-looking mass of pink confetti, I stretched it out to the cockpit, glued it in place, and then began to thin, trim and stretch it out a bit. I added a short bit of clear plastic rod for added stability, and then CAREFULLY sprayed a coat of matt finish over the whole thing to try and stabilize the paper bits in place. I didn’t want to spray all the paper away, so short indirect bursts were necessary. Although I was happy with my first effort, I thought I could do better, so I replicated the process, but this time, using several hundred more accurate 2x3mm printed “leaflets” which said “Read Tintin in the Land of Black Gold” in arabic lettering.

I think the extra practice paid off and it turned out better than I expected, but let me know what you think: