Year: 1942

Important Characters: Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock

French Title: L'Etoile Mystérieuse

The Shooting Star was the first of the Tintin adventures to be drawn for its definitive Casterman colour edition.

It was in 1936 that the idea of putting Tintin into colour was suggested to Hergé. He responded by proposing the insertion of several colour plates in the black and white books, which he did for the first edition of The Blue Lotus and reprints of Tintin in America and Cigars of the Pharoah.

The shortage of paper during the war led Casterman to ask Hergé to put his stories into colour and to adopt a strict 62-page format for Tintin's adventures. To conform to this format, the pre-war books had to be recast. To cope with the volume of rearranging and colouring work, Hergé set up a "sort of studio that could specialise in this sort of work". This was the beginning of the future Hergé studios. He also used this as an opportunity to improve the narrative and comical effects in the previous adventures.

Despite all this work, progress was made and The Shooting Star could appear in its new format by the end of 1942, and The Black Island, The Broken Ear and The Crab with the Golden Claws were almost ready. On their release, the colour books were an immediate success and have remained so to this day.

Unable to choose a topical subject for fear of the censor in occupied Belgium, Hergé was forced to choose as his theme something far removed from everyday life at the time: the search for a meteorite. But this story was not as detached from reality as it seemed. It is not hard to identify the opening pages with an implied description of war and its effect on the general public. Certain discrete signs of self-censorship are to be found in the book. The Black Island and Tintin in America had already met with trouble from the censor so Hergé had to be careful. For example, the scientists taking part in the European Foundation for Scientific Research were all from Axis powers or neutral states.

In the first edition of the book, however, the rival expedition carried an American flag. The underhand methods used by this expedition forced Hergé to change the flag in the 1954 edition to that of the fictitious state of Sao Rico. Another thing that bothered Hergé immensely was the name he gave the financier of the rival expedition. Blumenstein had distinct Jewish overtones, so in the new edition he changed it to Bohlwinkel, which he thought was more harmless. He was to find out later that this too was a Jewish surname. It also troubled him that he had not used a model for the drawings of the expedition ship Aurora. In the next book he set about remedying this.