Legos leads to Tintin

About a year or so ago I signed up Ian to receive the Lego Magazine. It is a free subscription and comes every other month or so. Ian would love to have it come more often. He asks me almost everyday if a new Lego magazine came for him. Many of the features in the magazine are stories told in a comic book style and little lego men are the characters. They are usually an episode from Star Wars, Indiana Jones or sometimes a story that goes along with the latest lego sets that are out and that they are promoting. (The magazine is really a big advertisement for legos. Which is why it is free! Thanks to Uncle Ryan my boys now have "little legos" and can build ships and have a number of Star Wars guys to fly them. )


My boys love to have these stories from the Lego Magazine read to them and they clamor for more and more. My husband is usually the one reads the magazine with the boys and after finishing the latest magazine he told me that we should see if we could find some other comic books for the boys. I looked for comic books at the library and didn't come up with much more than Calvin and Hobbs or Garfield. Calvin wouldn't be too bad but it wasn't quite what we were looking for. It wasn't comic strips we were looking for but graphic novels as they are now called. We really enjoyed Rapunzel's Revenge by Shannon Hale not too long ago so I knew we needed to look for something along those lines.

Most graphic novels are in the Teen section of the library so I was a little leery of them at first. Then shortly after having this discussion with my husband and sort of half heartedly looking at graphic novels my friend Alison posted about some books that her husband read and loved as a kid when he lived in Europe and had just found again at his parents home. I thought they sounded fun so went to our library website to see if they had any of the Tintin series. I love our library system. They seem to have just about everything. They had the series and I quickly put the first two books of The Adventures of Tintin on hold. Each book is a compilation, so actually has 3 stories included.

My boys, including my husband, have thoroughly enjoyed them. Tintin goes everywhere. He started in America and had adventures with indians (Native Americans, the books are from the 30's and 40's and aren't PC) and then in the next one he is in Egypt and exploring the pyramids, and then in the next he is in China and then on to Scotland. They are looking forward to when Tintin goes to the moon and under the ocean. The boys can't tell me which story is their favorite so far, they just love them all. I think they have now finished 6 and are on their 7th book in the series.

There is some violence. Some bad guys have to get their just rewards and Tintin and his trusty dog snowy are there to make sure they do. Or at least so I am told. I haven't actually read any of these myself. I just know my kids, including Sophie love them. No it may not be great literature but when quiet reading time comes each day the boys will revisit the stories and Sophie steals the books whenever she can. Each night my husband has to go and find the latest book in Sophie's room, where she was up late reading them.

So, no, it isn't shakespeare but my kids are reading and having a good time doing it. I love to hear them all laugh and laugh at some of the slapstick humor that is prevalent in the books. They are always bringing me the book so I can see the funny parts. My husband enjoys his daily dose of Tintin too. So if you have any boys, or girls for that matter, that would enjoys some graphic novel type stories these are very fun. And I am sure we will have to revisit them in a number of years so the boys we get some of the satire and political commentaries that Herge put into his stories. This is what my husband enjoys about them. The kids just like to see the bad guys get their just rewards and Tintin to somehow always get out of the scrapes he finds himself in.