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Commenting on the inclusion of a wide range of characters from "The Adventures of Tintin", Harry Thompson referred to the story as "a Tintin family reunion", commenting that it was "a story unusually full of the type of people Captain Haddock liked to avoid". Michael Farr believed that in reviving so many older characters, Hergé had given "The Red Sea Sharks" "a marked retrospective quality". Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier felt that the "crowded" nature of the story left little room for series regulars Professor Calculus or Thomson and Thompson, and resulted in the new character of Skut serving only as "a nice supporting character, but nothing more". The Lofficiers stated that "Hergé was doing some house-cleaning of his past works and characters before embarking on something more serious and with more personal resonance", "Tintin in Tibet".