“Huh? But I thought these stories were about Malay people, they don’t use the Chinese calendar,” you say. True! But read on for the explanation…

In the fourth Malay Mysteries book, Sita’s Shadow and Other Stories, I play with time quite a bit: my stubborn refusal to name any dates in the actual stories continues, but the main storyline of the series takes place in 1910, during the last few decades of the Dutch colonial period. Sita’s Shadow is made up of three short stories, and the first of them is told by Marsiti, the medicine woman, one of the two main characters in the continuing story.

In her story, Marsiti tells of encountering a Dutch plantation owner who’s tormented by a ghost. This is her first chance to get to know a Dutch person, and she gets some insight into the experience of the colonizers from their perspective.

We find out in the third book in the series, Island of Glass and Ashes, that Marsiti’s a bit older than she looks. A few little visual cues in the story tell us that the events she describes in Sita’s Shadow took place several hundred years prior–the Dutch occupied Indonesia for close to 400 years, starting in 1602. Marsiti’s not just being vague about when her story occurred out of vanity: she doesn’t want to alarm her impromptu audience at a food stall as they enjoy breakfast together by revealing that she once used witchcraft to extend her life unnaturally.

It’s the second story in the book that involves the Year of the Dragon. One of the people gathered at the food stall where Marsiti and Hidayat have stopped off for breakfast is a traveling merchant. Marsiti’s tale of a foreign woman reminds him of a story involving another foreigner, one from a bit closer by: a Chinese exile. This woman and her father come to the Indonesian islands after something drives them away from their home to the north, and she eventually marries a native, a fisherman who lives on the southern side of Java.

The Chinese woman, despite her assimilation into her new culture, does keep some reminders of where she came from, one of them being the practice of keeping track of the passing years according to the Chinese zodiac calendar. On the night of the Chinese New Year, she presents her husband with a cloth she’s embroidered for him, in celebration of the Year of the Dragon: a beautiful piece worked in silk threads of green and yellow, from among the few possessions brought from her homeland.

This cloth, unfortunately, gets the man into a bit of trouble, but in a sense also gets him out of it–and also gives the merchant who’s telling the story a chance to relate a legend of the southern shore of Java that I heard when I lived in Indonesia. I’ll let you find the details by reading the story. (Here’s a short video with some details about the story, if you’re curious in the meantime.)

(I will mention here, since the story itself gives no dates, that the merchant’s story takes place in 1868 by our calendar, in the Year of the Earth Dragon, which turns out to have some significance in the story, and yes, most authors I know worry obsessively about details like this that they never explicitly reveal in the actual narrative.)

The last story in the book concerns a haunted shadow play, but that deserves its own treatment. So for now, happy Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dragon is said to bring sweeping change and mystical power. May it bring you peace, joy, fortune, and the achievement of your greatest dreams.

This one is meant to “protect children” (like the last one was intended to “stop piracy”)–seeing a pattern? Talk about Bad Thing (child predators, piracy), whip up hysteria—because, you know, people are too lazy and stupid to learn anything about how the internet works and will respond instead to fear mongering—then slip in laws that subvert civil liberties, violate privacy, and bypass due process. Here’s information about the new law, “Protect Children From Internet Pornographers” (read: “All Your Base Are Belong to Lamar Smith”), and here’s some more.

I do not share Lamar Smith’s views on the stupidity of the American public or the world citizenry of the internet. You know what to do.

Original post:

In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard all the hullabaloo about SOPA/PIPA, they are two bills currently wending their way the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, respectively–have a look at the Wiki article about it if you’re not familiar with the issue.

These bills, by their names alone (Stop Online Piracy and Protect Intellectual Property), seem like good things. Even those who guiltily BitTorrent gigabytes of TV shows, music, and other material will acknowledge that hard-working creative professionals should be fairly paid for their work, and that piracy is theft. There’s no argument for it, only a free buffet for those willing to bend their morals a bit.

In fairness, I’ve resorted to torrenting things on occasion–I’m proud to say less than half a dozen times–but only when I absolutely could not locate the items in question through any of the usual channels, through which I’d happily have paid for them. But, as a content creator putting my work out there, I fully appreciate how piracy harms large and small alike, I’ve seen it from all perspectives, and I would not dream of ever pirating content today.

One especially memorable moment was when, thoughtlessly, I suggested ripping a DVD to toss on a laptop to take along on a trip with a dear friend (who works in film). This didn’t occur to me as being wrong, as the DVD was one that I own. But the crestfallen look I saw on my friend’s face made me realize that it’s all too easy to make copies of work and, even with not-bad intentions, for it to seep out into a weird demimonde where people endlessly download things they haven’t paid for. It’s a short throw from “let me rip this DVD for myself” to “you’d love this movie, I’ll make you a copy.” And from there, “I’ll trade you a copy for a copy of something you have (and I don’t really care where you got it).”

In this age of Netflix and iTunes, it’s even harder to justify such piracy. Depending on how much Netflix streaming you watch, you’re consuming movies for mere cents, and can access them any time. For most, all it takes is personally knowing any content creator–be it a graphic novelist, filmmaker, or visual artist–to become more responsible and better educated about the whole thing.

Then, of course, there is the gray area of ridiculousness called the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), an organization that legally pursues “pirates”–including 12 year-olds. It was recently discovered that the RIAA’s own staff consumes a massive amount of bandwidth illegally downloading content, along with some of their chums at the Department of Homeland Security. Of course RIAA denied it (after all, who would want to fess up to downloading massive amounts of Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Law and Order?), but the incident just served to illuminate how widespread the practice is, even amongst those who take a righteous position about it.

So then SOPA and PIPA. I would love to believe that they are somehow intended to afford legal or other protection to content creators whose work is being ripped off (something a bit more credible than RIAA’s brutal legal persecution of pre-teens). Upon researching the bills, however, it was quickly evident that:

1. They were written by complete morons who have no understanding of technology or even the most basic workings of the internet;
2. After whatever nincompoop or /s drafted the thing and conceived the totally stupid means by which intellectual property would be “protected” (the same methods, incidentally, that are employed by the Chinese government and various Middle Eastern potentates), corporate interests like the RIAA and others got involved and made the bills more convoluted and stupid yet also less effective; and
3. Both bills had evolved into something quite other than protecting content creators from piracy, and turned instead into a means of giving organizations like the RIAA carte blanche to prosecute (without due process) anyone they chose to target. God forbid someone should post a picture of Rick Astley on Reddit or YouTube: if SOPA/PIPA were to pass, either site could be shut down, all their ad revenue seized, and traffic to their domains blocked (yet, laughably, users could still access their sites by typing in an IP address).

Yes. This is total BS.

As I’ve said, I’m against piracy, in a big way. Being a content creator and knowing many, some of whom struggle unbelievably yet continue creating their work in spite of a lack of commercial success, I have a position on whether it’s right or wrong to steal others’ work.

But the solution to piracy is not repressive laws or giving bumbling, ignorant government agencies technologically stupid mandates, from there to become even more the tools of corporate interests. SOPA/PIPA, as they’re written, would not protect me in any way, for example, if someone stole my work and put it up on PirateBay. It would, however, allow government agencies to cluelessly take down Twitter if someone dared to share a picture of someone holding a Kanye West poster over Instagram.

No, the solution to piracy is for our society to grow into the new means we have to share information. These days, anyone can become a content creator, so I really believe this can happen. It’s no surprise that laggard industries that cling ferociously to revenue models that made them billions (I’m looking at you, record industry, publishers, and movie studios) are big backers of SOPA. Like remorseless colonial governments, they shuffle about sheepishly when talking about the halcyon days of ruling the market and pretend they’ve joined us in the digital age. But in truth they miss being the gatekeepers and bristle at the idea that we are evolving a market in which someone like Amanda Hocking can become a phenomenon. The leash has slipped their grasp, and this is how they intend to get the dog back under control: with a taser.

Let me put it another way. The ultimate solution to the problem of murder is not devising new tortures for those who commit it and empowering governments with sweeping powers to punish in ever swifter and more horrific ways: it’s for society to evolve to a stage where it realizes, with as few exceptions as possible, that killing people is wrong, and that one shouldn’t do it. This is how justice is supposed to work–moving away from tyranny and toward greater social conscience, not the other way around.

Repression is never the answer to a problem, no matter how severe. There’s an Arthur C. Clarke quote (or several) that I could slip in here, but you get the point. SOPA is idiotic, and it makes me miserable and fearful that people who have no clue about how any of this works may have the power to censor the internet. It’s mind boggling.

So do your bit to get SOPA and PIPA off the table. There’s a tiny hope that the Beltway worthies who have assistants to print out their emails (you think I’m exaggerating?) and use phrases like “interweb” might realize that perhaps they should consult an expert or two, or risk looking even more foolish. Or, heaven forfend, lose votes and campaign funding.

I’ll give the whole system a bit of credit: I really do think this was mostly caused by stupidity and not by depravity, at least at first (though, of course, powerful lobbies and interests inevitably lurk near any pocket of ignorance within government, so they came quickly to the table with this one). But it’s encouraging to see that, as of this writing, ten lawmakers have, smartly, distanced themselves from the two bills.

And once you’ve signed a petition or contacted your senator or congressperson (unless, that is, you really want Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and, well, pretty much any site, application, or information system to go on the scrap heap), give the real issue a think. You could be a content creator in our new digital world. Chances are, you may already be one. You ought to be fairly paid for your work, just as you should not steal others’. That’s the real solution to piracy.

More videos in this series:

• Consider This: Garlands of Moonlight

More videos in this series:

• Consider This: The Ghost of Silver Cliff

There was much celebration at Shoto HQ as the Twitterverse lit up with the highly anticipated news: Amazon released the spec!

We eagerly downloaded all the tools and read the publishing guidelines document. It was obvious from the start that it would be a significant amount of work to get our books into the new format, but we saw that coming. The question was just how much work and how long it would take.

Others began to express their outrage and confusion almost immediately on various elements of the specification. For us, the key was whether the new spec describes how to build comics and graphic novels. It doesn’t. From page 24 of the guide:

• Do the new Kindle tools that were released accurately preview comics and graphic novels? Or do we have to wait for ones that do?
• How many functions are unique to comics, vs. the book type Amazon does provide a spec for (children’s books)? We don’t want to start coding up our books on a guess and have to rework them completely when the comic/graphic novel spec is eventually released.
• What’s the deal with Kindle devices other than the Fire? (This one’s been bugging people for a while. The tools Amazon recently released butcher KF8 files to unworkability for supposed “compatibility” with older devices, the function is totally useless.)
• If our books won’t be compatible with non-Fire devices, do we have any ability to specify that our books are only readable on the Fire?
• Why is Amazon not releasing the comics/graphic novel specification? Obviously it’s in use: as we’ve reported, DC and other publishers are releasing titles built in this format.

Meanwhile, in typical fashion, Amazon’s reps are zero help. Here’s the latest we’ve received from them, a cut and paste job in which they didn’t acknowledge the problem.

Hello,

Thanks for your interest in the Kindle Format 8 Guidelines and Publisher tools.

At this time, we are unable communicate an estimated time frame for releasing additional instructions for formatting graphic novels.

Please keep checking our Kindle format 8 page here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000729511

and our forums periodically for an update on this here: http://forums.kindledirectpublishing.com/kdpforums/forumindex.jspa

Thanks for your patience.

The very large community around ebooks is trying to figure out some of the questions by picking apart the format, but it’s slow going and wouldn’t be necessary if Amazon gave a release date or even some additional guidelines.

So Amazon, if you’re reading, here’s our beef. We understand that you have deals going on with some publishers and not others. This is neither surprising nor a problem. If you were more transparent about what’s going on, rather than announcing things without dates and then stringing along small publishers and readers alike, no one would be complaining, they would just be excited about the new things. Instead we sit on our hands and readers and publishers have no idea what’s going on. This is bad.

The waiting continues. We’re eager to bring you our books in this new format, but we don’t even know if that’s possible at this stage, without the information we need to do so. Stay tuned.

We still wonder why they were so cagey about it, and why, when giving big publishers a 3-month head start they didn’t just say, “we’re giving big publishers a three month head start because that’s what they demanded in order to release their content in this new format” (to which we, and everyone else, we imagine, would have said, “huh, okay, I’ll mark my calendar,” and promptly stopped fretting). Regardless, the tools are out. And now we dive into them. More to follow.

Here, incidentally, is Amazon’s actual announcement.

Update 2: Amazon, you’re killin’ us. From page 24 of the new guidelines (emphasis ours):

In Amazon-KF8-ese, “shortly” seems like it would take longer than “soon,” which was three months. We hope otherwise. Nevertheless, some spec is better than no spec, and allows us to start work on or illustrated books. More to follow.

Original post:

We periodically write to Amazon’s KDP team requesting whether there is any new information on Kindle Format 8. Yes, yes. Knocking on the same door, and all that. But there’s still the hope that our emails will flit across the desk of some sympathetic soul, or coincide with the exact moment that Amazon decides it’s ok to let the hoi-poloi into the party. (Springs eternal, right?)

Alas, the weird lockdown continues. Here’s the latest:

Thanks for your interest in the Kindle Format 8 Guidelines and Publisher tools.

At this time, we are unable communicate a release date; however, we’ll notify our Authors and Publishers very soon via e-mail. Please keep checking our forums periodically for an update:
http://forums.kindledirectpublishing.com/kdpforums/forumindex.jspa

Thanks for your patience.

So, it’s encouraging that “soon” has become “very soon,” and there’s at least lip service paid in the form of “thanks for your patience.” But no news. We do note, with some amusement, that the only discussion of KF8 in Amazon’s forums is someone griping about how it hasn’t been released to anyone but the major companies thus far. Very informative, thank you!

For those who’ve been following this issue here and elsewhere, with very little idea about how Kindle Format 8 works, it’s potentially weeks of time we’d need to invest converting our illustrated books to the new format. In the meantime, we continue to eagerly await news.

(Anything, Amazon? It’s three months since the announcement of the new format, two months since the Kindle Fire came out, and new titles from major publishers continue to appear while the rest of us wait.)

The press releases continue to flow forth from Amazon and major publishers describing newly released illustrated books and trumpeting KF8, hinting at new features especially for graphic novels, and talking about how great it is to read graphic novels and comics on the Kindle Fire (like this one, announcing that hundreds of DC Comics titles are now available this way). We’d love to get a hold of the spec! We’re ready to start adapting our books so that Kindle owners can buy them.

The only problem: Amazon and the big publishers are keeping the spec under wraps so small publishers can’t create books for it, so all you, as a reader, can get in the way of comics and graphic novels are the blockbusters and titles from mainstream publishers. Don’t get us wrong: we admire Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and others deemed “significant” enough to merit access to the new technology. But we hope you also like Superman, Batman, Kangaroo Boy, and Martian Warbler Alternate Universe Mash Up Crossover #320 (with three cover variations), because that’s all you’ll get besides.

You see, independent creators of illustrated works aren’t even being allowed to see Amazon’s new format to determine whether it’ll be possible for them to adapt their titles. We don’t even get a full features list (nor do you!).

Amazon’s reps, meanwhile, tasked with dealing with irate publishers and readers alike, have resorted to lying outright and claiming that the format doesn’t even exist yet despite the obvious promotions around mainstream titles created using the new toolkit.

Amazon has long been considered a pioneer of commerce in the digital age. They started out by offering books, then other products, at a considerable savings, delivered conveniently by mail. They shaped important parts of the all-digital economy, setting standards for digital distribution. They created a means for independent publishers and authors to make their work available to anyone who wanted them, on inexpensive, easy-to-use devices that consumers actually like.

So color us perplexed that they came up with (or agreed? capitulated? caved in?) to back room deals that favor panicky “traditional” publishers who fear the slightest competition or they’ll yank their valuable content, meanwhile narrowing the market in a way that harms readers’ choices. Remember when you couldn’t get certain books except at the whim of your local book store (chain or otherwise)? Feels like those days again.

Amazon will eventually release the spec, but not until the big companies have had a chance to have some (already, in digital terms, extended) period of exclusivity during which they’re the only game in town on the new devices.

What a shame. We love you, Amazon, but what are you doing? Do you really think someone won’t buy V for Vendetta if they also have the option to buy our books? One step forward, two steps back.

The Malay Mysteries book 1: Garlands of Moonlight

The Malay Mysteries book 2: The Ghost of Silver Cliff

The Malay Mysteries book 3: Island of Glass and Ashes

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The Ghost of Silver Cliff in iBooks

Island of Glass and Ashes full spread

Island of Glass and Ashes storybook page

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Livia did not question her impulse as she dialed Éster’s number late on the night she had asked Rubén to leave. She had taken two shots of brandy after her shift; she was operating on instinct. Éster was sympathetic; she invited Livia to her studio.

“Sí, es un hijo de puta. I could have told you that a long time ago, but people never want to hear that mierda while they’re still trying. Bueno, ya está… You’ve never seen my paintings, have you? I’ll get a bottle of wine; you can sleep here if you like. Maybe you don’t want to sleep there all alone tonight. Ya veremos.”

Éster was from the Dominican Republic. She was tiny, petite, with long black hair and a face like a Murillo Madonna. While Éster was opening a bottle of red wine, Livia observed a strange tattoo on the flesh of her new friend’s left arm, just below the shoulder. Livia asked her about it.

“It’s a double-edged axe,” Éster said. “It represents my saint, Santa Bárbara.”

Livia innocently inquired if Éster had been born on the day of Saint Bárbara.

Éster laughed a laugh surprisingly big for her tiny body and took a drag off of her cigarette. “No, no, no. I chose her. You know… For, bueno, cosas de santería.”

Livia looked around the studio. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed the candles and herbs, the medallions with faces full of eternal suffering and infinite love, before. She was usually much more observant. The break-up with Rubén must be affecting her more than she would like it to. Éster’s studio was dark, except for the tenuous light of flames from the candles placed at random around the trapezoidal space. There were solemn icons on the walls, interspersed with the somber colors and haunted faces of Éster’s paintings. “They’re all self-portraits, de una manera u otra,” Éster explained. “They’re kind of about my father, too. He was schizophrenic, but my mother didn’t want to put him in an institution.”

Éster’s mother had sacrificed the best years of her life to care for her husband who, often enough to have made a deep impression on her daughter, raved madly and had to be tied down. When Éster’s mother had managed to calm him (whispering words that Éster never completely heard), she placed him in a rocking chair, una silla mecedora. He stayed there for hours, moving the chair so slightly with his exhausted legs that Éster sometimes thought she had imagined those minute backward and forward motions. Then, and only then, would she dare to climb into his lap. Sometimes his sick hands held her weakly; sometimes there was no response at all.

Éster showed Livia a photograph of her father, taken the year before his marriage to her mother. The photograph was yellowed, a corner torn. The torn edge was feather-soft; you could see the individual fibers of the paper, silky like threads of gossamer. Éster’s father, in the photograph, was a young man of no more than twenty-five, with jet-black hair, longish. The face was slightly elongated as well, with pale, ivory skin like Éster’s.

“My father was Spanish,” Éster told Livia. “Well, he was the son of immigrants. My grandparents were from Madrid.”

Those grandparents had eventually returned to the narrow streets and late nights of their homeland, exhausted by the tropical heat and lethargy of the strange and beautiful island where Éster was born. But Éster’s father had stayed, and three years later he met Éster’s mother. Éster’s brother was born, and then Éster; five years after Éster’s birth, her father became ill.

Someone, Éster’s mother told her after his death, when she was old enough to possess such information, had put a spell on him; that was the explanation for his illness. Well, not just someone—a lover he had left after she got pregnant. When Éster’s father abandoned her, she put the spell on him. His spurned lover, in her vengeance, had painstakingly collected the dark hairs scattered on her pillow, among the bedclothes. She found one lying in an exaggerated S curve on her belly—that one had been the most detrimental to the father of her unborn child. Éster couldn’t remember him otherwise. Her brother, three years her senior, barely could.

The paintings were about Éster, about her father’s illness, about the foibles of men (not women, men), about the devastating effects of the other magic, not santería, but voodoo. There was an altar-like structure at the back of the studio with three candles, green, pink and white, all lit. There was an incense burner beside the candles, and a smell unlike any incense Livia had ever smelled. Of course. Santería.

When I was a kid growing up in India, there were three types of comics I had access to.

The most easily accessible (and voluminous) were the Indian religious comics that everyone from the subcontinent has seen. Companies like Amar Chitra Katha cranked these out by the millions. The vast majority of them are ghastly in some way or another (or several), but they always surprise me with how well they hold together.

My parents worried about this being my primary reading material, but overall they were pleased that I was reading at all, so they left me to it. I spent hours with these comics and, at points in the last ten years, have gone to great lengths to obtain them (they now have a website–and bless them, they haven’t changed their logo). That’s a post for another day.

The other two types of comics I grew up on were Asterix and Tintin. I’m amazed now that I liked Asterix, because you really need to know at least a little bit about European culture and history (for example, to know what Gauls are and why they were in conflict with the Romans, or, for that matter, anything about druids). To say nothing of English, or the original French, to absorb the wordplay in the names, otherwise many of the gags don’t make sense. I can assure you they don’t work at all in Hindi. Maybe I just liked the pictures and slapstick humor (and who does that better than the French?).

But Tintin. He was universal. The boy detective (as I thought he was–turns out he was actually a journalist) with his little dog, galavanting around the world and having tremendous adventures. Anyone who’s read my work can see Tintin’s influence all over it, and a few people familiar with the series have pointed it out, to my delight.

Hergé wasn’t perfect, by an means. Some of his writings (most particularly the rightly criticized Tintin in the Congo, which celebrated brutal European colonialism in Africa and was full of racist tropes, for which Hergé was apparently later regretful) are too much a product of their time. A significant swath of that time took place during World War II–and Hergé was a soldier for part of it.

For me, though, this is more than tempered by the wanderlust that comes through on every page, and the enchanting depictions of exotic locales (for me, one of those was Tintin’s native Belgium, which looked like nothing familiar to me). I also loved the cars and the faithful recreations of detail from the time period, right down to the women’s shoes. I’ve no shame in admitting that Tintin is a source of visual reference for a story I’m working on that’s set in the late 30s, thanks to Hergé’s relentless accuracy.

And I do remember, as a child, being a bit amazed that a European artist took the time to draw pictures of his hero traveling to India. Looking at them now, I find many of Hergé’s portrayals of Indians (to say nothing of all the other non-Europeans in the Tintin books) troubling (yes, he did resort to the inevitable fakir in the marketplace), but still. There are human, believable characters of all races in the books. Most of all, it says a lot about the series and the sincerity behind it that it has been translated into so many languages.

Then I heard about this film. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson doing Tintin? SHUT UP. I was beside myself. I still get giddy when I tell people who don’t know anything about Tintin the stories of his various adventures and the fun, often silly characters that populate the series. It shouldn’t surprise me that Spielberg and Jackson love him as much as I do, but it is somehow gratifying nonetheless.

I was lucky enough to see an advance screening of the film, in 3d no less, which will be released to the public on the 23rd.

So I’ll get this out of the way: as a Tintin diehard (and I’ll dare anyone to challenge me on trivia and lore from the series!), I liked it. Throughout the film, I fell into the images and the voice acting was authentic enough that the characters seemed to be speaking naturally and as I would imagine them to. The CGI-motion capture aspect of it was very well handled, for the most part. Details like fabrics, depth of field, and light were especially exquisite, somehow true to the original though the comics were all in flat colors.

There were two things I had quibbles with: the enlarged heads (the people in the original comics don’t have heads that are so out of proportion to their bodies; Hergé was an artist who had an engineer’s eye for scale, anatomy, and perspective), and the slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am chase scenes. These felt gratuitous. The pacing of the original comics was incredible and as finely tuned as any film noir, and so to sit through a 10-minute chase, full of elaborate visuals and eye-popping 3d, dropped me out of the Tintin experience, though every effort had been made to insert inside jokes into these sequences.

Who knows, perhaps this is what it takes to bring my childhood hero (I idolized Tintin to the point of trying to spike my hair up like his, to my mother’s chagrin) to the young people of today. Mercifully, the explosions were kept at a minimum, and there wasn’t any noticeably greater amount of violence than I remember from the comics.

Oh, and one other thing: Marlinspike Hall didn’t feel all that grand in the film, at least compared to how I remembered it from the comics.

As a Tintin fan, I did feel a bit confused at points, because elements from several of the comic book stories were used in the storyline of the film. Sometimes I thought I knew where they were going but then they’d veer off into territory that, as often as not, wasn’t in any original Tintin material. Yet it was clear that they’re trying to follow continuity at least to an extent, because a sequel (which will presumably be built around Red Rackham’s Treasure) seems inevitable.

(Red Rackham, incidentally, is the very first Tintin comic I read–it left me completely bewildered, not least because one needs to have read The Secret of the Unicorn beforehand in order to understand what’s going on. Next up was The Seven Crystal Balls, which scared me to death, because it featured a grinning, emaciated Inca mummy with large, heavy-looking bracelets, vengefully smashing crystal balls full of poison–an image that still haunts me. You can see why I loved these books.)

One thing that made me particularly happy, though it broke Tintin continuity a bit, was the inclusion of operatic diva Bianca Castafiore (the dreaded “Milanese Nightingale”). She was always one of my favorite characters in the books (right after Professor Calculus), and she felt the most true to what I remember imagining from the comics. The filmmakers, in a moment of brilliance, had her voiced by Renée Fleming, who hits a perfect high C loud enough to shatter glass at a pivotal moment, conveniently moving along a plot point. Clever. One senses Spielberg’s hand in that. She did not, however, sing the “Jewel Song” from Faust, the aria with which she tortured her fellow characters and shattered glass in the comics and which, funny enough, has been famously sung by Renée Fleming.

Anyway, thank you, Spielberg (and about 600 other people that must have worked on that film–hats off to Jamie Bell in particular though, if Tintin had a voice in my head it would be his). You brought a beloved childhood hero to life well enough that, for those 180 or so minutes, I was transported, and will certainly see it again. You’ve got me for Red Rackham as well.