A decade and a half before Neil Armstrong, a Belgian boy reporter, his dog, a whisky-sodden sea captain and a deaf professor went to the Moon in a red-and-white chequered rocket. Hergé did his homework, and the two albums get an astonishing amount of the science right, from the problems of weightlessness to the dangers of spacewalks, while also finding time for Captain Haddock to discover that whisky in zero gravity forms a floating golden ball.
It is still the best introduction to Tintin for an SF reader: an adventure story with a spy plot and an honest sense of danger, drawn in the clear line that Hergé perfected and half of Europe copied. The final sequences have a real moral weight, which surprises readers who remember Tintin as nothing but quiffs and exclamation marks.
