The Shooting Star

"I was aware that there is some controversy about quite a few of the Tintin books because of racial stereotyping, but I didn’t realise this was one of the books. I first read it in the late 1970s, when I was seven or eight years old and I enjoyed it for being an adventure that had this slightly weird twist to it. I travelled a lot as a child and Tintin was always a thing that I would read sitting on aeroplanes. The Shooting Star was probably the first one I read. It begins with an end-of-the-world thing going on, there are plagues of rats and tar melting on the roads. Scientists claim that the world’s coming to an end because this meteor is going to crash into Earth, but when it does hit the Earth, it doesn’t destroy the planet, it lands out in the ocean somewhere and there’s a race to get to it. When Tintin arrives, the meteor is a sinking island with exploding mushrooms growing on it. Tintin discards an apple core and it grows into a tree, and a spider grows to become enormous. That was what interested me, the weirdness of it."