Toit nam Phàro

by Hergé,

Other authorsGillebride Mac'Illemhaoil (Translator.)
Paper Book, 2014

Status

Available

Call number

PN6790.B44 T5213

Publication

Steòrnabhagh : Dalen Alba, 2014.

Description

On the hunt for an Egyptologist and a mysterious ancient pharaoh, Tintin scours Egypt and India. He makes friends with elephants, narrowly avoids falling victim to the poison of madness and saves a maharajah from a killer tiger.

Original language

French

Original publication date

1934

ISBN

9781906587468

User reviews

LibraryThing member magnuscanis
I've not yet read this thoroughly but I had to buy it because I was so amused by the title. The book is a translation of "Les Cigares du pharaon" (The Cigars of the Pharaoh). While the Welsh version, "Mwg Drwg y Pharo", literally means "The Pharaoh's bad smoke", the phrase "mwg drwg" is usually
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used as a slang term for cannabis (roughly akin to "wacky baccy" in English).
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LibraryThing member Jessie.L
Cigars of the Pharaoh by Herge
TinTin and his dog Snowy are on a cruise ship when they happen to meet Professor Sophocles Sarcophagus and they join him on his expedition. They soon become involved in a complicated mystery involving cigars marked with strange symbols and a poison of madness all while
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evading the Thompson and Thomson detectives for crimes that he never committed.
This book was really hard to follow for me; I kept flipping back because I thought the book might be missing pages. The pictures, for the most part, reflected the text. There was the odd wordless panel though. I also found that the caricatures of people from a different race weren’t exactly politically correct. While other Tintin books have humor and excitement, I thought it was lacking.
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LibraryThing member Shirezu
Continuing on with my adventures with Tintin. This time Tintin is traveling on a cruise when he comes across a strange conspiracy involving cigars, an odd mark and a secret boss. It also introduces the first of the nutty professors who'll eventually become Professor Cornelius.

So far the best in my
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reread this is how I remember Tintin. The introduction of the Thomson Twins was good to see. I look forward to the rest of the series now it's broken out of it's racist origination.
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LibraryThing member Michael.Rimmer
Thankfully, this was a vast improvement upon the previous book, Tintin In America. The plotting was tighter and the character of Tintin starting to be more developed.

The funny bits were actually funny, which helped, and the introduction of Thompson and Thomson gave the story an added dimension
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missing from the previous book.

So, a better offering and a nice set up for the next volume, The Blue Lotus
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LibraryThing member David.Alfred.Sarkies
This is the story where Tintin comes on his own. While it was still written in a serialised form when it first appeared back in 1934, this story has a proper story arc where Tintin stumbles on a sophisticated drug smuggling ring that stretches across the entire Eurasian continent. It is here that
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Tintin's companions begin to be developed (namely the Thompson twins) and we also begin to see Tintin going on real adventures and chasing after a singular bad guy. Where Tintin in America seemed to be a hodge podge of different stories thrown together, here we begin to see a well constructed adventure.
Tintin is on a Mediterranean cruise (much to Snowy's annoyance - and here we begin to see the character of Snowy, the loyal and faithful companion, developed as well) when he runs into the first of Herge's many absent minded professors, Dr Sophocles Sarcophagus. He is travelling to Egypt to uncover a lost tomb. Tintin also meets one of the recurring villains of the piece, the film mogul Rastapopolous. Herge developed this character very well in this book because we do not, at this stage, realise that he is the bad guy, and in fact when the master of the drug ring falls off a cliff at the end, we are left wondering who it was and whether we will ever find out.
While this story can be read on its own, it does carry over to the Blue Lotus, however I never got to read the Blue Lotus until a long time afterwards. As for this story, it is by far my favourite of the Tintin adventures. Some have suggested that Herge had not got the culture element right here, but we will note that after the Blue Lotus, Herge begins to create his own countries where the adventures are placed, and maybe it is a move away from raising clearly raising his concerns to being much more subtle in his criticism.
Yet we do have criticism within this story (as we do with the next one as well). It is not until Tintin reaches India that we are confronted with the destruction that a lot of these drug smuggler's are causing. While as a kid we read this book and considered that drugs smuggling was bad because Tintin is out to get them, it is when he meets the Raj of Gaipajama that the major concern is raised. The Raj is out to stop the smugglers because of the suffering they cause his people (and Herge is obviously trying to raise awareness of the practice, which still occurs today), namely that the smugglers force the peasants to grow opium poppies and purchase the poppies off of them at a significant discount. However, because the peasants are growing poppies they are unable to grow their own food, and as such are forced to purchase food off of the smuggler's at a significant premium.
The comedy is ramped up a lot here as well. Tintin in America was simply silly in a lot of cases, but now we have the Thompson twins, two Interpol Agents (I believe, though the English versions suggest that they are Scotland Yard) who bumble their way through the investigation, and but end up being the assistance that Tintin needs to crack the case. The most amusing part was where they think they see Tintin sitting behind a dune and whack him on the head with a cane only to discover it is a sheik. In the next panel, Tintin arrives at a city that is being mobilised for war because one of their sheiks was attacked. Then there are the three huge Indians let into Tintin's cell, to teach him a lesson, and then we hear the sounds of fighting, and an ambulance rushing off to pick up the wounded, only to discover that it was the three Indian dudes – golden.
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LibraryThing member BenjaminHahn
Tintin # 4 - Tintin runs across a strange heroin drug ring and thwarts their attempts to kill him. The heroin is being run out of an old hidden pharros' tomb and then smuggled out in the shape of cigars. There is one woman depicted in this entire comic. Was Herge just not comfortable with drawing
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women? I've heard that Tintin is thought to be sexually neutral or homosexual, not that I think that matters much, but there are hardly any women in any of the Tintin books so far. Sort of weird is all.
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LibraryThing member brakketh
First re-read of a Tintin adventure that I read as a child and I must say it has lost something for me. Still quite violent and a series of improbable events.

Physical description

62 p.; 30 cm

Pages

62
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