007 - #blogjune 004 - ROCKET MAN

"A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon." - Nancy Gibbs

In my fast collection of comic books, there is one book that holds a VERY special place in my heart. It is probably also one of the oldest books that I have had for the longest time. A bundled book of TINTIN stories. It that belonged to my father when he was young. The copyright info states 1947 to 1954!

The insides do have some severe signs of aging, due to acid fingers and prob some destructive powers of me as a toddler. I think at some stage I must have been un-supervised and expressed my early creative skills with a blue pencil right in the corner of one of the pages.



The book itself consists of four Tintin albums, The Broken Ear , Destination Moon,  Explorers on the Moon and a couple of stories about Jo, Zette & Jocko. The latter are some other characters by the late great Hergé that most people would never have even heard of.
It's the adventures of Tintin on the moon, that REALLY resonated to me as a young Dutch boy. To imagine that these stories were created before the first ACTUAL moon landing. So much of it is pretty accurate and it inspired me later as a teenager to even create a moon surface from chicken wire,  papier-mâché and cement (!) to have a surface for my Tintin figurines to play on. I WISHED I had photos of that! But those days we didn't have camera phones and you didn't waste you film on anything but events, birthdays or family back then.

These rocket pages were very inspiring growing up.

Now, it is easy to just snap a few photos of my treasured book, featuring my favourite rocket man Tintin and add it instantly a blog online potentially for the whole world to see.  Still to this day my complete Tintin album collection resides proudly as inspiration on my office book shelf and a special Tintin themed corner is on permanent display in the living room.   .