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Flight 714

Synopsis

Carreidas is injected with the serum, but instead of revealing his Swiss bank account number, insists on confessing his childhood criminal behaviour. Lunging in anger at Dr. Krollspell, Rastapopoulos accidentally injects himself with the truth serum, then begins confessing his criminal plan to eliminate his accomplices. Piqued, Carreidas tries to top him, confessing to shady business dealings, while Rastapopoulos attempts to outdo his confessions.

History

Background

By September 1966, Hergé and his publishers at Tintin magazine, which serialised The Adventures of Tintin two pages per week, and Casterman, which published Tintin in book form, faced stiff competition from Asterix, the French comics series and its magazine Pilote. Asterix, now only six years in publication, had just published its eighth volume that sold 600,000 copies, matching the productivity Hergé had enjoyed decades previous. The French weekly L'Express claimed that Asterix had left Tintin trailing in the dust.

Hergé complained to his publishers of missed opportunities, who informed him there could be no publicity without a new product to present; it had been three years since the completion of The Castafiore Emerald. Hergé had been considering several ideas; wishing to involve Tintin in a conventional adventure told in his classic style, but involving him in an encounter with extraterrestrial life.

Hergé had been reading about the ancient astronaut hypothesis in early writings of Robert Charroux.

Hergé employed the airbrush technique to this Tintin adventure, enriching the gouache and watercolour scenes.

Hergé refused to let Tintin magazine publish the story until he had completely finished it.

While the artwork was the collective effort of the Studios, Hergé laid the groundwork by first designing each panel's composition, employing cinematic techniques such as the long shot and the close up more extensively than in previous adventures.

Hergé took the opportunity to humiliate two of his long-time villains. Allan loses all of his teeth and Rastapopoulos, after first being dressed in a pink cowboy outfit, has his mouth taped shut, is clothes shredded, his eye blackened, and receives a bump on his head that never leaves from that point onward. "Dressed like that, Rastapopoulos was so grotesque that he ceased to threaten," said Hergé a few years later.

The character Laszlo Carreidas blurred the line between good and evil. Selfish, greedy, and a cheat at Battleships, Carreidas is barely nicer than his kidnapper Rastapopoulos (with whom he tries to compete for the title of Nastiest Child in Europe).

Carreidas was based on the French aircraft industrialist Marcel Dassault, manufacturer of the Mirage Delta wing and the Dassault Mystère military aircraft, who wore a hat and scarf, sneezed often, and avoided shaking hands due to an obsession with germs.

The mysterious scientist Mik Kanrokitoff, who has harnessed the use of telepathy, is based on Jacques Bergier, creator of the French Planète magazine.

At the arrival of Kanrokitoff, the story shifts from a straightforward adventure to an encounter with extraterrestrial life, evidence of which the characters noticed had been adorning the massive underground temple. The question of alien visitors to Earth was a popular topic at the time of the story's serialisation and book publication. Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods? in 1968, convincing many of the evidence that extraterrestrials had made contact with life on Earth thousands of years previous.

Members of the Studios Hergé had been researching the new story. Bob de Moor went to the coastal city of Ostend to study bunkers of World War II. Michel Demarets researched aspects of the Brussels Airport and details of the Boeing 707. Readers from Jakarta had been asked to send photos of the control tower and terminals of the Kemayoran Airport.

Hergé was slightly disappointed in his ending to Flight 714, partly because he knew he hadn't the strength of his convictions to show more of the aliens than just a flashing light in the sky, and also because, despite what he thought had been careful planning, he had created 64 rather than the required 62 pages for publication. As a result, he decided to cut two pages of the climactic end of the adventure, jumping from a scene in which the heros are in peril to the final scene in which Jolyon Wagg and his family are watching television.

Hergé suffered with eczema rashes on his drawing hand and, for long periods during the two year project, could not work at all.

In 1968, Hergé confessed to English translater Michael Turner, "I've falled out of love with Tintin. I just can't bear to see him." After completing Flight 714 in 1968, he wanted to retire and had no desire to consider a new Tintin adventure in the forseeable future. The reason he gave was to not interfere with the new animated films Tintin and the Temple of the Sun (1969) and its sequel Tintin and the Lake of Sharks (1972). "It was a pretext", said Bob De Moor.

Influences

Hergé based Laszlo Carreidas, the misanthropic aircraft industrialist, on the similarly dressed and similarly behaved French aerospace magnate Marcel Dassault, manufacturer of the Mirage Delta wing and the Dassault Mystère military aircraft. Dassault wore a hat and scarf, sneezed often, avoided both tobacco smoke and shaking hands due to a fear of germs, and was not above purchasing paintings just to keep a rival from acquiring them.

Critical analysis

"Artistically, the book is his greatest achievement" says Harry Thompson, referring specifically to scenes inside the temple and in the volcanic crater before it erupts.

Pierre Assouline spoke of the story's "undeniable graphic and technological accomplishments", yet believes it did not measure up to the quality of Tintin in Tibet or The Castafiore Emerald. "It did not incite the reader to dream in the same way Explorers on the Moon had."

References

Bibliography

• Assouline, Pierre (2009) [1996]. Hergé, the Man Who Created Tintin. Charles Ruas (translator). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-539759-8.
• Thompson, Harry (1991). Tintin: Hergé and his Creation. London: Hodder and Stoughton. ISBN 978-0-340-52393-3.