The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Of all the comics scenes that flashed before my eyes while I was growing up, not one was as haunting and exciting as the nightly attack by Rascar Capac’s mummy in Tintin’s The Seven Crystal Balls.  I must have been about six when I first read that story, and I still remember being afraid to go to sleep, lest the mummy would come to my room and smash a ball to pieces.  When I saw the Tintin musical The Temple Of The Sun a few years ago, I had decided that that would be the scene that would make or break the show for me (it made it).

(the mummy of Rascar Capac from Tintin and the Seven Crystal Balls by Hergé, (c) Moulinsart)

On Actua BD Didier Pasamonik calls the book one of the darkest and most onerous of Hergé’s oeuvre, which reflects its origins and Hergé’s personal troubles at that time.  The story originally was published in the Belgian daily Le Soir during World War II (when Le Soir was one of the news outlets collaborating with the occupying Germans), and cut off when Belgium was liberated.  Hergé went through a very dark period until publisher and former resistance hero Raymond Leblanc took him under his wings as creative director of Tintin Magazine, which published the story again from its inception in 1946.

Last week the Belgian park Paradisio announced it has acquired the mummy that inspired Hergé when he was writing the Chrystal Balls story.  After the famous ornothologist Baron Jean-Baptiste Popelaire de Terloo brought it to Belgium in the 1840s, the Peruvian mummy had been hidden in the private collection of the Belgian count Baudouin de Grunne for decades, and has only once been on public display (during the remarkable Tintin exhibition that was organised in Brussels on the occasion of the quiffed one’s fiftieth anniversary).   It had been put on the market by an Australian gallery, and after a bidding war with a Canadian museum, Paradisio managed to keep the mummy in Belgium.

At the moment, the mummy is on display in the park’s Crypt, along with other curiosities from Latin-American history, but Paradisio plans to use it as one of the attractions of a new project on nature and culture in South-America.

Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium, a land well known for the high incidence of revived, undead mummies rampaging around the countryside; you can read more of his work on his own Ephemerist blog.