If this excerpt in the Guardian is any indication, Tom McCarthy's new book on Tintin will be awesome:
The supporting characters, from fiery sub-Guevaran General Alcazar to bitter and twisted multi-millionaire Laszlo Carreidas, billow off the page in all their awkwardness, their childishness, capriciousness. Even the most minor among them exude a presence far beyond that which we might expect from a novelist, let alone a cartoonist: the girthy, thunderous but frightened Americanist Hercules Tarragon of The Seven Crystal Balls; the neatly perverted kleptomaniac civil servant Aristides Silk of The Secret of the Unicorn; right down to the nameless airport official whose constant fiddling with rubber bands so irritates the captain in Tintin in Tibet.... People misunderstand one another. Discussions are shown taking place behind the main conversations, dialogues whose content we can infer from the context. Exegeses vital to the plot are offset by, for example, one participant's continuous attempts to prompt another into offering him wine, as in the sequence in Professor Topolino's kitchen in The Calculus Affair.
