Friends, it has come to this.

Eight months ago, as radosh.net began to creak into senescence, I explained why I'd do my best to keep it alive rather than pull the plug and make the leap to Twitter.

While that explanation reflected the best information available to me at the time, the statement, as they say, is no longer operative. Among the many ways in which my personal situation has changed since then, I now have even less time than before for blog-length posts, and, perhaps more importantly, I have a new outlet for the kinds of things I used to blog about.

All of which is to say you can now find me on Twitter under the handle @danielradosh. (Some Czech guy with the first name Rados is squatting on @radosh, though I hope to wheedle it away from him eventually).

That doesn't mean I'm shutting down radosh.net. I'll leave the lights on here as long as al in la wants to keep running the anti-caption contest -- and every now and then my new co-bloggers and I may weigh in on something or other. For the most part, though, Twitter will be my new home for Huckapoo, self-censorship and Why Not Bill Keane updates, as well as anything else that can be squeezed into 140 characters.

I'd like to figure out a way to feed a Twitter group of radosh.net approved folks to this site, if only so it doesn't feel too empty here -- like when New York City painted colorful curtains and flowerpots on the boards they used to cover the windows in abandoned buildings. If anyone with time on their hands wants to help me do that (and maybe some other blog housekeeping) I'd be happy to hear from you.

Be seeing you.

10:34 AM :: Comments (12)

It's official: Sleigh Bells is over... now that the band has been discovered by The New York Times.

"The band has already found an audience. For weeks now -- weeks! -- Sleigh Bells has generated blog fervor thanks to a handful of shows and demos. The band isn't even a dozen shows into its life span and it's already an Internet nano-phenomenon."

Well, it's true that some of your lesser music blogs have been buzzing about the Bells for weeks, but faithful readers of this site first heard about "dynamo" lead singer Alexis Krauss four years ago when I told you that the former RubyBlue singer was Huckapoo's vocal coach. (To save you the trouble of clicking that link, and since you probably didn't read that far into the post at the time, my comment was indeed, "Yes, Huckapoo has a vocal coach. Fuck you.")

Huckapoo in fact recorded two songs previously recorded by RubyBlue, and had no better luck in turning them into the hits they should have been. (That honor went to No Secrets.)

In other words, the whole time Huckapoo svengali Brian Lukow was trying to manufacture the next big music thing... the real next big music thing was quietly toiling behind the scenes and he never knew it. They should make a movie like that. Huckapoo can do the soundtrack.

2:50 PM :: Comments (3)

I have to confess that I'd never heard the name Ellie Greenwich until today, but apparently she is one of my favorite songwriters of all time. Among the hits she co-wrote with her husband, Jeff Barry: Be My Baby, Then he Kissed Me, Da Doo Ron Ron, Maybe I Know, Do Wah Diddy, Baby I Love You, Leader of the Pack, (Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry, I Can Hear Music, Chapel of Love, Tell Laura I Love Her, and River Deep, Mountain High.

Start browsing with this playlist (which includes a few tracks written by Barry solo). Track 6 is the Raindrops, a short-lived group featuring Greenwich herself as lead vocalist.

9:52 AM :: Comments (3)

It's been nearly two years since I declared the Clique Girlz — then simply Clique — to be the next Huckapoo. Which I suspect you took to mean that you'd never have to hear about them again except in my fevered rantappreciations. So how did "the youngest pop group in the history of music" go from being a bad joke on an obscure blog (and vice versa) to the front page of the New York Times arts section? To answer that, we must travel back, back, back to the primordial era before the birth of rock 'n' roll.

It is the most famous legend in American musical history. Bluesman Robert Johnson was at a crossroad in his career, as well as an actual crossroad on a road, and he saw his musical future slipping away from him. In this moment of weakness, Johnson sold his soul to the devil. In exchange, Satan made Johnson the greatest guitar player who ever lived.

Cut to the present day.

In their drive to become the Next Big Thing in teenage entertainment, the Clique Girlz have had more opportunities than most.

The youthful trio, backed by Interscope Records and the powerful Creative Artists Agency, have opened for the Jonas Brothers and appeared on “Today,” where Al Roker called them “Hannah Montana times three.” They sang in last year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Interscope has flooded YouTube with over 30 videos.

None of those sparks have started a fire. Instead, the Clique Girlz — Destinee Monroe, 14; her sister, Paris, 12; and their best friend, Ariel Moore, 14 — are in danger of washing out of the entertainment industry before their first full CD comes to market. So far, at least, digital downloads have been anemic, and play on Radio Disney, where programming is based on listener requests, has been modest at best.

But the Clique Girlz, who hail from Egg Harbor Township, N.J., have been thrown what could turn out to be a lifeline — and from no lesser a judge of talent than Michael D. Eisner, the former chief executive of the Walt Disney Company.

What did this shadowy "Michael D. Eisner" offer Destinie, Paris and Jasmine? Great talent? Please. This isn't the 1930s. No, in exchange for their immortal souls, the Clique Girlz got something far more valuable to today's aspiring pop tarts: an endorsement deal for Baby Bottle Pop, the candy treat that saved the Jonas Brothers at a similar low point. Yes, soon it will be preteen London and barely teens Destaney and Aurora who are singing that immortal jingle, "You can lick it, shake it and dunk it." Can you ever!

Continue reading "Hey little girlz, want some candy?" »

9:55 AM :: Comments (9)

So I did some Gigwork for The Daily Beast: an analysis of Playboy magazine's list of the 55 Most Important People in Sex from the past 55 years (here's the essay, here's the complete list).

I wanted to use my TDB space to talk not just about the list itself, but about Playboy's place (or unfortunate lack thereof) in the current culture. Which means that I have a bunch of unused material about the list that editor Chip Rowe shared with me. I don't have time to put it up right now, but watch this space for more about why certain people made the list while others didn't, and why I won every one of my arguments with Chip, even if he won't acknowledge it.

You can post your own thoughts on the list over at TDB, where people will read them, or here, where I'll respond to them. Hopefully Chip will also weigh in on one or both threads, as he did over at Boing-Boing.

9:28 AM :: Comments (9)

1. Update the non-blog pages of Radosh.net. Don't even click that link. It's embarrassing. Or, if you prefer, a nostalgic reminder of what this site used to look like. Of course, this resolution is something of a cheat for me, since what's involved is upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type and transferring all those pages to MT -- and for that, I'm pretty much dependent on the charity of Radosh.net CTO Kevin Shay. So really I can only hope that one of his resolutions is to be more charitable in 2009.

2. Update the blogroll. Or, perhaps, lose the blogroll entirely. The whole idea of that static list of links seems pretty outdated by now. It's not like I actually use them anymore for reading blogs (which is good, since who knows how many of them are dead). What I should probably do is switch to something similar in spirit but more dynamic, more easily kept current, and a whole lot shorter. Open to suggestions.

3. Post more frequently. Used to be I'd put up a one line joke every now and then. These days, I tend to send such slim entertainment to Facebook instead. For instance, yesterday I posted this story to my profile with the comment, "Someone stealing from Dane Cook? That's a switch." It hardly seems worth sharing with a general audience. But since the alternative seems to be silence, perhaps I'm wrong. Similarly, I've never really posted links to stories and other blog posts I've found interesting unless I have something of my own to add to them. I know lots of bloggers do that, but it seemed pointless to me. But now I think it might help keep the site lively. What do you think?

4. Judge the anti-caption contest in a more timely fashion. My sluggishness in this area is a sore spot for some of you, I know. The problem is that Sunday night and Monday are particularly bad times for me to start scrolling through 200 entries. I suspect the solution will be to start posting the results on Friday afternoon. Weekend off for everyone.

5. Tags. At first they just seemed like clutter to me, but I can see the usefulness now. The only reason I haven't taken this step is that the prospect of going back and adding Huckapoo tags to five years worth of posts is daunting.

6. More posts about Huckapoo.

7. Ditch the Amazon affiliate links. I like promoting my friends books -- and I can see from the logs that I do actually sell a few copies every now and then -- but once again, it's such a pain to go into the template and switch them up. Perhaps as a compromise I'll make it exclusively a list of my friends' books, rather than a mix of that and other things I like. That way I'll only have to change the links once, when the paperbacks come out.

8. Try Google ads again. I experimented with them briefly when the service launched, but I found them ugly and didn't make any money off them. I think its worth trying again. Now that people are used to seeing them everywhere, they're less off-putting (right?). Also, it's not like BlogAds is making me rich.

So that's what I'm going to do for you this year. If there's anything I'm overlooking, be sure to let me know and I'll get right on it. For your part, I have to say I'm extremely fortunate among bloggers to have such civil, thoughtful, entertaining commenters. The conversation almost never veers toward Hitler and I don't believe anyone has ever attempted a "first." Every now and then someone will get trollish, posting something outlandish or obnoxious or ridiculous that seems to invite everyone else to pile on. Fortunately, everyone else seems to understand that the best way to put a stop to that is to ignore it. Keep up the good work. Keep feeding me tips as well, I always appreciate that. 2009 will mark my 7th year of blogging. Somehow, I'm still looking forward to it.

8:33 PM :: Comments (15)

It's that time of year again. You're walking along when all of a sudden — boo! — out jumps a newspaper wringing its hands and tut-tut-tutting over how society forces innocent little girls to wear slutty Halloween costumes.

Somehow these thumbsuckers on the evils of objectifying young women always manage to run with photos of young women in skimpy outfits, but that's another story.

The slutoween meme has gotten so tired that this year the Boston Globe ran the opposite way, proclaiming (with the usual lack of evidence required for trend stories) that girls are dressing less sexy this year.

This is one of those issues I've always filed under the heading of parental responsibility — which was, of course, easier to do before I became a parent. My daughter is still young enough that this isn't a serious problem for us yet, but I did consider that my task would be all the more easy if she chose to dress as something that can't possibly be made sexy.

Which is why I was just fine with one contender: Pippi Longstocking. A little girl in rags and dorky hair with a monkey — Pippi is the anti-hot.

But, as I discovered searching for costumes, it turns out that our perverted society really can make anything smutty.

In the end, my daughter decided to be a princess-chef, a persona still uncorrupted by the pornmongers, if only because it's too small a niche for even the most determined fetishists.

Postscript: A little searching also revealed that there is a recent animated incarnation of Pippi, for children, that could be considered inappropriately sexy. After the jump, Pippi looking alarmingly like the sixth Huckapoo girl.

Continue reading "Trick-or-tramp" »

12:02 PM :: Comments (8)

Have you ever had one of those days where you think, No one's coming over, I don't need to shave, or put on clean underwear, or any pants — and then you get downstairs and there's a surprise party where the guests are 400,000 highly judgmental strangers?

As some of you noticed, this afternoon from about 4:00 to 5:30, the entire front page of Gawker was filled with posts from Radosh.net. Recent posts. You know, the ones where I've been pretty much not even trying. Judging by comments, this was not a welcome development. Frankly, I was as upset as any Gawker commenter, though less prone to using words like "cockmaster" and "douchetastic." Have I really spent the last week writing about Wonder Woman and vampires? What a fucking geek.

What happened was this: A couple of years ago Nick Denton set up a way for me to crosspost on Gawker, a tool I have used roughly never. With great power comes great responsibility, and if I wanted to behave responsibly, I wouldn't be writing a blog for 40 people. So today something went wrong with the system — on Gawker's end, I'd like to stress — and I had my Tim Kastelein moment.

In an ideal situation, I'd come out this mishap determined to craft every post with the utmost care and quality, as if it might suddenly appear on Gawker. But that's not really gonna happen, as you can probably tell from this post.

8:51 PM :: Comments (3)

Remember that New Yorker cover as Barack and Michelle Obama as terrorists in the Oval Office? At the time, I sided with Jack Shafer, who wrote, "Although every critic of the New Yorker understood the simple satire of the cover, the most fretful of them worried that the illustration would be misread by the ignorant masses who don't subscribe to the magazine." Shafer mocked Jake Tapper for writing, "No Upper East Side liberal—no matter how superior they feel their intellect is—should assume that just because they're mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won't feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It's a recruitment poster for the right-wing."

Shafer's point was that, "Calling on the press to protect the common man from the potential corruptions of satire is a strange, paternalistic assignment for any journalist to give his peers," and he was absolutely right about that. But it must be said that he, and I, were a little too quick to smirk at the idea that anyone would miss such an obvious (and not particularly funny) joke.

You see, it turns out that those racist Obama Bucks we talked about a couple of days ago actually got their start as a joke about racist Republicans.

Tim Kastelein is a 31-year-old Minnesota Democrat with a penchant for sophomoric, often-grotesque humor and an acid tongue that derides everyone from overweight women to the local real estate agent who delivers advertising mailers...Kastelein, who received a low-level organizing position within the Democratic Party in Minnesota earlier this year, said he meant the cartoon as a satirical look at "right-wingers." He said he created the image to lampoon Republicans who are afraid of government welfare programs and fearful of a Democratic president.

The illustration went viral, stripped of the context of Kastelein's blog, and got picked up by one of those right-wingers, Diane Fedele (who just resigned over the incident).

Had I foreseen, back in July, the depths that John McCain and his supporters would stoop to, I might have tempered my comments on the New Yorker cover. (I'm cool with acknowledging my lack of prescience here because, as Vance recently pointed out, on Sept. 4, I alone pronounced Sarah Palin's convention speech a meaningless performance that would not prevent the country from eventually rejecting her as ridiculously unqualified.)

But here's the quote from Kastelein that really got my attention: "I don't write my Web site for people like (Fedele). I write my Web site for people like me."

That's pretty much my philosophy. I've called Obama an anti-American gay Muslim more times than I can count, because I know you'll get the joke -- and if some people don't, I don't really care. But every now and then I wonder what would happen if I ended up in Kastelein's position, and found my blog scrutinized by clueless outsiders. I mean, some stuff here could seriously be taken the wrong way.

4:45 PM :: Comments (4)

The New York Times reports that the out of print first Jonas Brothers CD, It's About Time, is selling for $160-$200 on Amazon and eBay (prices have fluctuated a bit since last week; it's currently being offered for $250 on Amazon but eBay auctions seem to be topping out at $125). I mention this because I have a copy in like-new condition and I'm trying to figure out the best way to unload it. I picked it up from the free bin at work two years ago and listened to it once. With the exception of a couple of songs it's a pretty crap album, and even those exceptions are just OK, not exceptional.

So here's what I'm thinking. The Brothers are playing Madison Square Garden this weekend. I figure if I stand outside before the show, I can catch fans when they're in that Vegas-like state of suspended reality where concept such as frugality, comparison shopping and common sense don't exist. It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to get $200, right?

What I'm not sure of is whether this is completely legal. I can't see why it wouldn't be, but I don't want some cop to confiscate my golden egg. The input of law-knowing types, or anyone with an even better idea for cashing in, or anyone who wants to offer me $200 for it right now, will be appreciated.

9:36 AM :: Comments (14)

Hey, Washington Post, those aren't just any anonymous babes!

Here's the CG's recent network TV debut -- an off-key rendition of generic faux-humble contemporary Christian schlock. There are days when I'm genuinely depressed at having jokingly anointed the Clique Girlz as the successors to Huckapoo. What was supposed to be a throwaway joke about my failure as a prophet of pop is now haunting me, as the CGs actually do achieve the megastardom that is rightly Huckapoo's. Where is the justice?!

12:06 PM :: Comments (5)

Somebody at Time magazine fucked up big time and named Radosh.net one of the 25 best blogs. Find out why and vote for me here. Or against me.

Update: I suppose I should link some greatest hits for any newcomers, huh? Try these.

The Huckapoo saga (nothing silly about it).

What was wrong with that sex slave story.

The media self-censorship meme. Warning: contains language that the media thinks you need to be protected from. (Come to think of it, hats off to Time.com for not censoring my use of the word douchebag.)

The quest for Kosher bacon.

Regular readers can suggest their own Radosh.net faves in the comments. And, oh yeah, buy my new book.

10:21 AM :: Comments (20)

Google may have downgraded me as a source on Huckapoo, but I still have the number two result for kosher bacon.

That, presumably, is how Dave Lefkow discovered my site and why he contacted me about his new product, Bacon Salt, "a zero-calorie, vegetarian, kosher certified seasoning salt that makes everything taste like bacon."

Dave was kind enough to send me samples of all three varieties of bacon salt, and Gina and I tried them out the other night.

Gina, naturally, read the ingredients first, and pointed out that "seasoning salt" is a somewhat misleadingly mild term for this potent brew of wheat, soy, dairy, natural and artificial flavors, unpronouncable chemicals, sugars and shortenings (a natural version is in the works, but even that is not exactly simple). But if it really makes everything taste like bacon, that's all beside the point, isn't it. This is America after all.

We tried bacon salt on collard greens and hot dogs and, as Gina immediately pointed out, it made them taste exactly like... barbecue-flavored potato chips. It was undeniable: sprinkling bacon salt on your food accomplishes the same thing that emptying the crumbs from a bag of bbq chips onto it would. Now, I happen to like bbq potato chips, but they dont' taste much like bacon, with their cloying faux-smoke flavor and notable sweetness. So I have to say that bacon salt is not yet a kosher substitute for the real thing. Especially if you want to make a bikini out of it.

11:04 AM :: Comments (9)

From late 2004 until at least a few months ago, doing a Google search for Huckapoo would return a link to my exhaustive (and exhausting!) coverage of that band somewhere in the top five results (the exact position alternating with the band's official site, its MySpace page, Wikipedia entry and my New York magazine feature).

Today I discovered that my Huckapoo coverage has been demoted to result number 603. That's right: there are 602 better sources of information about Huckapoo on the internets than Radosh.net, including Les artistes dont la premiere lettre est H.

Now, the upside of scrolling through seven pages of Huckapoo results is that I discovered the previously hidden photographic gem above (see two more from the set here). But the downside is, what the fuck happened over at Google?

Seriously, someone with some tech savvy needs to explain to me why or how my site has been blacklisted as a source for Huckapoo information — which surely someone other than me still looks for now and then.

Clues to this mystery after the jump.

Continue reading "It's a Huckanspiracy!" »

1:37 PM :: Comments (15)

Today's Kurt Eichenwald update.

A New York Times reporter not only gave money to a child pornographer, but did business with him and even signed on to an illegal porn website as a member and administrator, documents unsealed yesterday in a federal criminal proceeding in Nashville reveal. He claims in one court document, he only "posed" as a pedophile. 

4:05 PM :: Comments (1)

No one really wants to imagine is an earth entirely without people. What we groove on is imagining an earth with only one person, ourself. Last person on the planet stories are an age-old staple of speculative fiction, and with today's special effects, they're getting easier to visualize all the time.

Alan Weisman's new book, The World Without Us is something a little different: speculative non-fiction. I haven't read it, and don't necessarily plan to — seems to me like all that environmentalism might kill the buzz of an otherwise cool story — but I did get a kick out of these animations showing the world (i.e., New York City) being reclaimed by nature. Only question: where are the damn dirty apes?

[Via VSL]

11:20 AM :: Comments (6)

It's been a quiet, oh, two years for my "Huckapoo" Google Alert. Basically, the only new appearances of that word on the Internet have been on Radosh.net, or from people reminiscing about the similarly-named 1970s shirts. And then suddenly this morning, the actual band is mentioned in an exciting new press release posted to Business Wire.

Before I get to the substance of this breaking news, let me just point out that the entire venture is already doomed by the poor public relations skills of its principals. I mean, there is exactly one member of the working press who is even remotely interested in news about Huckapoo — but does he get any advance notice, or even a copy of the press release sent directly to him? No, he has to find out from his freakin' Google Alert, which frankly, he had been on the verge of cancelling. What's the matter, Brian, don't you trust me with confidential information?

And yet even this lack of respect can not entirely diminish the tingle I experienced upon reading that Brian Lukow, Huckapoo's notorious Svengalabe, is teaming up with an outfit called Pop Starz Inc "for the purpose of either acquiring the rights to 'Huckapoo' or creating, launching and marketing of a new 'Girl Group'."

That's right, it's return of the living dead time. Details will reportedly be forthcoming after the deal is sealed on July 23, but as I read this, Lukow is going to revive Huckapoo one way or another — even if he has to call it something else, devise new "character types" and commission all-new songs. Presumably he'll be casting new talent either way. For one thing, the original Huckapoo girls are all in their 40s now.

As for Pop Starz Inc, it's based in Florida and seems to have two missions: a hip hop dance camp for kids and an artist creation/marketing division. At right is one of the company's two current artists, Montana Tucker, the 14-year-old daughter of Pop Starz Inc's founder. The other is 16-year-old Morgan Hayes. From the available evidence, neither has a shred of talent.

Fortunately, I gather that there won't be more than the loosest connection between these deadweights and the eagerly anticipated Hucka2. According to the press release, Angel2, Groovy2, Twiggy2, et. al. will be housed in an entirely new division of Pop Starz, which will be run by Lukow and his "long time friend and trusted business partner Randy Lawrence." Knowledgable insiders will read the words "friend" and "trusted" as coded "fuck you's" to Lukow's last business partner, the one from whom he is now trying to buy back Huckapoo.

My fingers are crossed for this new endeavor. I was critical of Lukow's business sense last time around. The guy's a genius on the conceptual level, and can spot a great tune with the best of them, but he fell short when it came to the actually getting the band of the ground part. Here's hoping Lawrence and Pop Starz can take care of that end of things this time around. The press release offers no real clues. I do note that it lacks the obligatory reference to "social networking," but I can't tell if that means they're way behind the curve or slightly ahead of it.

Stay tuned, Huckafans.

10:59 AM :: Comments (2)

Holy Huckapoo! As if it isn't bad enough when David Brooks writes about Iraq, now he's an expert on teen pop. In today's column (free copy) he riffs on three "pretty much unavoidable" summer pop songs: Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats, Pink's U + Ur Hand and Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend.

If you put the songs together, you see they’re about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song 10, let alone 30 years ago.

This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fedup, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She’s like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who’s had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette. She’s disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She’s also, at least in some of the songs, about 16.

Had we but world enough and time, there'd be no end of things we could say about this column, which goes on to draw grand conclusions about divorce, hookup culture and Charles Bronson. But let's stick to the basics. Would this character really have been unheard of 10, 20 or 30 years ago?

Hey, I can answer that off the top of my head! Last week, I put together a mix CD for my drive upstate (yeah, yeah —my iPod is dead) on which I just happened to pair Girlfriend with a certifiable megahit from 27 years ago sung by the same "character." Maybe you know it.

Well you're a real tough cookie with a long history/ Of breaking little hearts, like the one in me. / Before I put another notch in my lipstick case/ You better make sure you put me in my place.

Again, that's the example that just happened to be going through my head. Feel free to suggest your own. You only have to go back 10 years, but it's possible to go back 70 if you try.

Update: Vance points out that Brooks can't even get his ideas right when he steals them.

1:01 PM :: Comments (14)

Earlier this year, schools and libraries in France received thousands of unsolicited copies of a strange and elaborate book called Atlas of Creation, which argues (from an Islamic perspective) that Darwinism is to blame for everything from terrorism to fascism. Now it seems that this incredibly expensive marketing campaign has added American media outlets to its bulk mailing list.

I got a copy of it from a friend who works at a national magazine, where they apparently received eight copies of it. Each copy of the 800-page tome—which is basically nothing but full color images of fossils—weighs 14 pounds, mind you, and that's just volume one of a projected seven. What's it all about?

According to this Reuters report, the book's author—Harun Yahya—held "a bizarre news conference ... aboard a luxury yacht off Istanbul's northern Bosphorus shores near the mouth of the Black Sea" just last month. He refused to discuss his financial backers, however, and Reuters says speculation has ranged "from Turkish Islamists to U.S. Christian activists." If it's Turkish Islamists, that's pretty boring. If it's U.S. Christian activists, that would be interesting, somewhat sinister, and awesome. If, however, it's just some Borgesian design collective, well then someone's a genius, now aren't they?

Has anyone else out there received a copy of this wacky book? (It would be hard to miss in your inbox.) I'd be interested to know. At the moment, it's my own personal Huckapoo.

[Thanks to Rose for passing the Atlas on.]

4:44 PM :: Comments (4)

In the wake of all my Tintin blogging Jim asks, "if I buy one Tintin book, which should it be?"

After some thought I'm going to go with the obvious answer: Tintin in Tibet. Tintin in Tibet is Hergé's masterpiece (that's for you, J). I don't think his artwork was ever better, and certainly his writing wasn't. But I did hesitate just a bit, since it's not exactly typical of the series (slightly more somber and wordy) and it also benefits from some familiarity with the characters. (Also, the Thompson twins aren't in it.)

But then what else could I have chosen? The best of the pure adventure books — Prisoners of the Sun, Red Rackham's Treasure — are continuations of stories that begin in books that, while excellent, are also not the best introductions to the series, being pretty much confined to one location. Red Sea Sharks is great, but a little baroque for a new reader, and Tintin and the Picaros is definitely better once you get to know who everyone is. Flight 714 and was also possibility, but the bottom line is, if you're going to give Tintin one shot it might as well be his best one.

The question is, if you buy two Tintin books, what should the second one be? Probably Seven Crystal Balls, which leads into Prisoners of the Sun. Whatever you do, though, don't buy the 3-in-1 editions. They shrink the pictures too much.

Anyone want to disagree?

If you're a casual Tintin fan, or haven't read the books since you were a kid, I strongly recommend Tintin: The Complete Companion. Drawing on Hergé's personal archives, it reveals his visual source material for every book. You'll gain a whole new appreciation for the work.

Related: Six contemporary cartoonists discuss Hergé's influence.

9:49 AM :: Comments (13)