The Cliff (Tintin in Tibet)
Tintin in Tibet (French: Tintin au Tibet) is the twentieth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. It was serialised weekly from September 1958 to November 1959 in Tintin magazine and published as a book in 1960. Hergé considered it his favourite Tintin adventure and an emotional effort, as he created it while suffering from traumatic nightmares and a personal conflict while deciding to leave his wife of three decades for a younger woman. The story tells of the young reporter Tintin in search of his friend Chang Chong-Chen, who the authorities claim has died in a plane crash in the Himalayas. Convinced that Chang has survived and accompanied only by Snowy, Captain Haddock and the Sherpa guide Tharkey, Tintin crosses the Himalayas to the plateau of Tibet, along the way encountering the mysterious Yeti.
– courtesy of Wikipedia
THE FINISHED MODEL:
THE STORY:
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Tintin in Tibet is one of the most popular of all The Adventures of Tintin albums. The amount of fans that I’ve met that list this one as their number one album seems quite high. It’s not all that surprising when you consider a) it’s one of Hergé’s later albums, which show all the polish and perfection he’d acquired over his career, b) it’s not SO late in his career that he’d lost a bit of that spark of creation, c) it’s such a clearly personal work by the author, and d) it has a Yeti.
I mean… a YETI! How awesome is that?!
Still, this project was one of the few I didn’t think up myself. Of course, I’ve already completed a project that depicts Tintin’s arrival in New Delhi on a L-749 Constellation – and it has a special place in my Tintin project – but the one thing going against it is… my sheer lack of shelf space. A 1/72 scale Constellation is BIG. So, unfortunately, it currently sits apart (although near enough) to the rest of my Tintin model collection. However, that does leave a blank spot on the shelf where a more modestly-sized Tintin in Tibet project should be.
So, I did have a plan for a project, but just not this one exactly. I’d originally planned to do a depiction of the cover… Tintin, Tharkey, Captain Haddock and Snowy following some Yeti-looking footprints through the snow (I like Yeti’s… so sue me!). However, after I posted some of my Tintin projects on a Facebook page for Tintin collectors, I started getting “special requests” for projects. You can see both the Boodle, Boodle, Boodle! scene from The Shooting Star, and the Nice Little Llama scene from Prisoners of the Sun, as similar examples.
But, unlike those two – which were fun little side-projects – this one captivated me. It really is probably one of the most defining moments in the whole album.
THE BUILD:
Since this one was 3D printed, there wasn’t really much of a build to speak of. The three main challenges were a) scale, b) pose, and c) physics.
The challenge with the scale is the sheer size of the cliff. I’m quite happy that I did this one (like all my other projects) in 1/72. It allowed me to really have Captain Haddock dangle a fair distance below Tintin, and really gave it the same feeling of “bleak white empty expanse” that the album artwork is known to convey. I carefully counted out the distance and used about 10 Haddock body lengths to capture the scale.
The second part was posing the characters properly. I’m actually quite proud of how Tintin turned out. Hergé is the one who designed the pose of Tintin straining with all his might against the rocks, but I’m glad I could make a fairly good result of capturing it. All by themselves, both Tintin and Captain Haddock’s body positions feel a bit abnormal. So fighting the urge to “correct” them took some doing. I’m glad I stayed the course.
Finally capturing the physics of the scene was also a challenge. It might just look like a clump of rocks, but that ledge needed to have just the right placement of boulders to be able to properly brace Tintin, and still let the rope fall smoothly down below. I did cheat a bit and add some CA glue to the thread to keep it stiff and taught (like it would be with the weight of a 190cm man on the end of it). But it’s still got enough flex in it to dangle and swing properly.
I used some paper-based “angel clay” for the snow. It was a matter of “just enough and not too much” and after a couple of tries I think I got the ratio right.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with the result, but feel free to tell me what you think.
