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Author	Topic: The Adventures of Tintin: "Tintin" is Non-PC
TheBoogieMan Title: Manager Emeritus Registered: Nov '01	Date Posted: 10/1/06 8:25pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	Still haven't read this one, either.
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Shrapnel Registered: Apr '05	Date Posted: 10/5/06 10:59am Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	Of all the Adventures of Tintin, Congo is among the few that almost didn’t make it: right after Soviets, Hergé wanted to send Tintin to America so that he could encounter with his boy-scout years heroes, American Indians (just think that the black and white version is the shortest of Tintin’s adventures, and the story begins with a long sequence at sea and finishes with Tintin heading to America). But again, Abbey Wallez to him to send Tintin to Belgium's colony, Congo, so that youngters would know how great their country was. You have to remind that in Europe's 30s, colonization was seen as a godd thing. Propaganda made England, France, Italy, and Belgium look like that if they were in Africa, it was for Africans own good. Before the revolution of mass media that we know today, it was impossible for them to check the informations that propaganda gave them. A few years later, Hergé realized that this vision was obsolete. So he banned himsef the book and Congo was impossible to find in the 50’s and the 60’s. At the beginning of the 70’s, a magazine from Congo decided to publish the story which was the sign to Hergé that they understood that he didn’t mean to hurt them. In fact, people from Congo were proud because t that time, Tintin was an icon and he visited their country and never visited some richer like Japan, Italy, Nederlands…They also found it quite funny that the silly Westerners tought that they looked like that. Trivia : As you may know, Thompson and Thomson are in the first picture of the book. But Hergé appears as well as the reporter with the pen and paper seen from the front, as well as his friends Edgar Jacobs ans Jacques VanMelkebeke. Also, Quick and Flupke have a cameo. They are other characters from Hergé’s. -----signature----- In confusion, there is opportunity
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TheBoogieMan Title: Manager Emeritus Registered: Nov '01	Date Posted: 10/7/06 5:35am Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	There is a book on Tintin and literature that has just been published. It looks absolutely fascinating. There was an article in the paper on it on the weekend, and an extract. I'll type it up tomorrow so you can read it all.
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Zaz Title: Manager, The Ampitheatre Registered: Oct '98	Date Posted: 10/8/06 9:26am Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	Looking forward to reading it. Read "Tintin in the Congo" We have now progressed to colour, and the style is definitely more Tintin-like, and the images smaller. But Tintin is still extremely aggressive, and the jokes about his wholesale slaughter of animals fall flat. Snowy is the main sidekick, and does most of comic relief--getting bitten by parrot, having his tail stuck in a door, getting eaten by a python, nearly drowning, etc. etc. He's very funny, but somewhat limited. The Congolese are based on stereotypes in American movies. The animals, OTOH, are beautifully drawn. The pacing is bit too frenetic, and the plot device silly.
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TheBoogieMan Title: Manager Emeritus Registered: Nov '01	Date Posted: 10/8/06 7:07pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	The article: How good is Tintin? Do the Tintin books make it as literature? Tom MacCarthy argues there's a lot more to them than meets the eye. The Dalai Lama recently presented Tintin - or, rather, the widow of his Belgian creator Herge - with a Light of Truth Award, in recognition of the comic-book hero's services in promoting Tibetan culture. The award raised several questions, including a po-faced, "Why?" (BBC World Service) and, "What took them so long?" (me). It's simple, really. If you were, like me, a child who grew up on Tintin, your first encounter with Buddhism was almost certainly on the pages of Tintin in Tibet. The same goes for first impressions of Russia, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, the moon and, er, Scotland. Historically, ideologically and thematically, the Tintin books became a lens through which I learnt to bring the whole 20th-century world into focus. When I sat down a few years later to start writing novels, I realised that Herge's brilliance wasn't limited to geography and history. He had as much to tell me about plot and symbol, theme and subtext as Balzac, James or Conrad. Characters such as Captain Haddock and Bianca Castafiore rival any dreamt up by Dickens for sheer strength and depth of personality. Ingenious boxed narratives such as that of The Broken Ear are as complex as the labyrinths of Nabokov or Borges. A huge symbolic register runs through the books that is worthy of a Faulkner or a Bronte. It all raised a question that I couldn't drop - at least until I'd written a book about it. Is Tintin great literature? Certainly, viewed from a literary perspective, the Tintin books are remarkable for their utterly classical structure. Like Aeschylus or Sophocles, Herge chooses as his central theme the house: the noble, royal, ancestral house, domain of Kings, Pharaohs, Incas or the European bourgeoisie. These houses are threatened with decline and usurpation, prey to infiltration by intruders, be they drug-runners who store their opium in the pyramid (as in Cigars of the Pharaoh) or press photographers who snap unauthorised photos of the chateau's residents (as in The Castafiore Emerald). Herge's favourite plot device is the host/guest relationship gone wrong. This is Shakespeare's favourite, as well. Think of King Duncan murdered by his host in Macbeth, then flip to the sequence in Tintin in the Congo in which the Babaoro sorcerer "finds" the tribe's sacred fetish with its head staved in among Tintin's luggage, and cries "Horror and sacrilege!" Look at the arguments that follow King Lear's arrival as a guest in Regan's castle, with his over-staffed retinue, then open The Castafiore Emerald where the diva, arriving uninvited with her entourage at Marlinspike Hall, explains that "We didn't have to ring" - to which Haddock replies: "We? There can't be more than one of you!" There is. Where Shakespeare borrowed from historical chronicles, folk tales and the classics, Herge seems to have inherited his from a source much closer to his own "house". His paternal grandmother, Marie Dewigne, worked as a maid in the chateau of the Comtesse Errembault de Dudzeele at Chaumont-Gistoux. In 1882, she fell pregnant by a visitor to the chateau and gave birth, out of wedlock, to twins: Herge's uncle and father. The gardener was made to stand in as father, and the Comtesse, perhaps in deference to the boys' birth-father, raised them as young aristocrats - only to turf them out at the age of 14. They eked out their adult lives in much-reduced circumstances, but bequeathed to their own children the secret knowledge of a high ascendancy, implying that their real father was the Comtesse's most illustrious guest, the King of Belgium. Whether he was will never be known, and doesn't really matter. What is interesting is the way this secret family story permeates the Tintin books, lending itself to a whole landscape of half-buried secrets, an archaeology of crypts and tombs, a maze of coded puzzles. Serge Tisseron, a critic from France (where Herge's status rivals Proust's), has pointed out that the gift from Louis XIV to his "beloved" Sir Francis Haddock (Captain Haddock's ancestor) of Marlinspike (a history uncovered in The Secret of the Unicorn), probably reflects the 17th-century convention of a monarch giving property to his illegitimate offspring in lieu of recognition. This suspicion is confirmed when a dolphin-and-crown blazon, unambiguous symbol of royal filiation, appears above the chateau's front door in the following book, The Seven Crystal Balls. Louis XIV was known as the Sun King. In the cryptic parchments that Sir Francis leaves his descendants, he writes of ships sailing like children "in the noonday Sunne", simultaneously spelling out and re-encoding Louis' solar, paternal presence. No sooner have they bought the ancestral hall back than Tintin and Haddock set off westwards to South America, break into the royal tomb of the sun and are presented (in Prisoners of the Sun) to the "Sovereign Star" itself - which, once again, turns away and eclipses itself at the vital moment. The patterns repeat again and again, pulsing through the Tintin books like a secret cipher. The overcodings are fantastically dynamic - and yet what, ultimately, is it all about? Cryptic autobiography? Mannerist comedy? Farce? All of the above, and more: like the best writing, it keeps moving, keeps one step ahead of all interpretation. When I first asked myself if Tintin was literature, I thought my answer would be a resounding and provocative "yes". But, as I investigated, I realised it's so much more interesting than that. Herge's work, composed in an emerging medium, a hybrid one in which images and words jostle with one another, occupies a zone below the radar of literature proper: a shady, crackling zone. As Tintin himself, who spends much of his time tuning into illicit radio signals and entering cryptic underworlds, could tell you, this is exactly the type of space that secrets of all kinds - including, perhaps, those of literature itself - make their own. Tintin and the Secret of Literature is published by Granta this week. Fascinating article, huh?
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Rogue1-and-a-half Title: Manager: Amphitheatre Registered: Nov '00	Date Posted: 10/9/06 8:37pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	And I quite agree with it. -----signature----- Don't be a fool, don't be blind Heart of mine If you can't do the time, don't do the crime Heart of mine
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Zaz Title: Manager, The Ampitheatre Registered: Oct '98	Date Posted: 10/10/06 8:09am Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	I wouldn't want to be Leopold II's grandson, if I were Herge. One of the most unpleasant men in history, he was responsible for genocide in the Congo, which belonged to him personally before it became a Belgian colony.
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darkmole Registered: Jul '00	Date Posted: 10/10/06 4:34pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	I love Castafiore Emerald. It's a grower though & took me years & years to get. Now I think it one of Herge's masterpieces.
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Zaz Title: Manager, The Ampitheatre Registered: Oct '98	Date Posted: 10/10/06 4:36pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	"Emerald" is like classic Agatha Christie, with a sense of humour. I agree, it's very good, and gets its yuks by defeating everyone's expectations.
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TheBoogieMan Title: Manager Emeritus Registered: Nov '01	Date Posted: 10/10/06 5:09pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	Bah. It's rubbish and you all know it.
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Rogue1-and-a-half Title: Manager: Amphitheatre Registered: Nov '00	Date Posted: 10/10/06 6:46pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	It tips the culprit in the very first panel. It's genius. -----signature----- Don't be a fool, don't be blind Heart of mine If you can't do the time, don't do the crime Heart of mine
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Rogue1-and-a-half Title: Manager: Amphitheatre Registered: Nov '00	Date Posted: 10/23/06 7:26pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo (1931)
	Tintin in America (1932) This opens the “popular” Tintin series. Starting with this book, they’ve been reprinted in handy three in one volumes and, while purists may object and I do in fact own several of the large albums, these are much more practical, sturdy and economical. Interestingly enough, though many place a stylistic division between the previous two and the rest of the series, this one still adheres pretty closely to the standard format, all the way down to the title: Tintin in (insert country) and a pointless, meandering adventure ensues. The quality is much better here, though it’s still pretty plotless. There are a few instances of pure Herge genius: Tintin’s lynching and the efforts of the drunken sheriff to stop it (an interesting precursor to Captain Haddock). I also find the treatment of the Native Americans to be quite witty and insightful (Here you go, Hiawatha, twenty dollars in beads and half an hour to pack your bags). The hotel detective is an interesting precursor to the Thom(p)sons (Hey presto! Your dog!) and gets a few laughs. It’s also interesting to see an actual historical figure worked into the story, Al Capone himself. I don’t recall any real figures playing a part in any other stories. On the whole, it’s still not concentrated genius and it’s most interesting in the passages where it seems to prefigure motifs that will crop up later and more memorably with Captain Haddock, the Thomsons and Herge's growing sympathy for oppressed indigenous peoples. But I’d recommend it. -----signature----- Don't be a fool, don't be blind Heart of mine If you can't do the time, don't do the crime Heart of mine
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TheBoogieMan Title: Manager Emeritus Registered: Nov '01	Date Posted: 10/23/06 9:57pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin -Tintin in America (1932)
	I dunno, I like this one better than most other people give it credit for. There are several great typical adventure sequences - scaling the wall after the baddie, being abducted in a car with locked doors, planting a fake body to be shot at... it's a lot of fun, most of the time, even if it isn't that coherent.
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Zaz Title: Manager, The Ampitheatre Registered: Oct '98	Date Posted: 10/24/06 4:41pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin -Tintin in America (1932)
	It still reads like Herge picked up the characterizations of the locals in both Chicago and the plains from bad Hollywood movies, a la "The Congo." Snowy is still terrific, Tintin is less bumptious, and he doesn't kill a lot of wild game, thank God. But the plot wanders around a lot, and the villains change from page to page. (Why not stick with Capone?) This, alas, is the only appearance of N. America in the Tintin canon. There is one great satiric joke, the instant city when oil is discovered, and the instant dispossession of the owners.
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darkmole Registered: Jul '00	Date Posted: 10/24/06 4:55pm Subject: RE: The Adventures of Tintin -Tintin in America (1932)
	America is not one of my favourites, but it has its charms. I suspect Herge was still writing it as an episodic comic strip rather than a single album, hence its lack of narrative focus. I love the energy in the drawings - Herge's real achievement with Tintin was his ability to draw movement and speed. The pacing is fantastic throughout. It's the volume where Herge really starts to find his feet.
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