Tintin No. 4 is a big improvement on Tintin in America, benefiting from the revised colouring and illustration that was done to the story in the 1950s. But it also has a real exotic feel with locations in Egypt and India, various secret societies and smugglers (opium and guns), and there is an overall throughline (though it is mostly a series of episodic adventures).The story has two major flaws: Tintin flies in a plane from the Middle East to India and just happens to run into Dr Sarcophagus again, and Thomson and Thompson just happen to see him on a train. This is the sort of lazy plotting that would eventually be eliminated from the series. There is also a bit of silliness, like talking to elephants. On the positive side the characters are strong: we meet the Thomson twins (who are idiots but are smarter than they would be in later books, they really come to the rescue twice - once to save Tintin from a firing squad, once to save Snowy from sacrifice), Sarcophagus is an early model for Calculus, we meet Rastapopulus and Alan. Some moments of real cleverness, like when Tintin wakes up in a coffin on the sea, and escapes from a hospital by jumping on a fat man's stomach.
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