Back to Komodo Dragon Central The Herge Foundation, official site.

Tintin and Komodos I believe that my first exposure to the Komodo dragon was from reading Flight 714, one of the lesser-known of Hergé's Tintin adventures. Flight 714 was the second-to-last Tintin. The French edition (unavailable to me) was published in 1968. Flight 714 is a peculiar Tintin. For starters, Captain Haddock doesn't get drunk once, and hardly screws up anything! Although there is considerable farce in the bedraggled millionaire Carreidas, adventure-story elements are prominent. Tintin and friends are spirited away to a small pacific island somewhere between Java and Australia where the people speak Indonesian. There is much gunplay, and though nobody gets shot there isn't any "I shoot your gun in two and make you angry" stuff either. Tintin and Captain Haddock wield submachine guns. More importantly, the narrative goes strangely awry at midpoint. In his later graphic novels, Herge grew bored with normal narratives and invented various ways of disrupting expectations. For example, the Castafiore Emerald is a virtual shaggy-dog tale. In the case of Flight 714 halfway through aliens start directing Tintin telepathically! It turns out that, for no logical reason, the tiny pacific island Tintin and friends have been spirited to is an ancient meeting place between humans and aliens, with temples showing astronaut spacemen and other shades of Erich Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods (published the same year). Eventually aliens save the day, erase everyone's memory and essentially bring everything back to the way it was at the start of the tale. In any case, the appearance of the monitor is the first intimation that the island is stranger than first supposed. The monitor itself does not reenter the story, but the careful reader has been alerted. Then again, I may be overthinking this.