The Adventures of Tintin

Tintin is the best-known comic strip written and drawn by the Belgian writer-artist Hergé.

Tintin is also the name of the hero, a young reporter who travels around the world, landing himself in all kinds of adventures.

The narratives are diverse: some stories are swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, some are mysteries or science fiction, others are political commentary. The most notable stories take place in well-researched early-20th-century historical settings. All include plenty of slapstick humor.

The comic has been admired for its stylish drawings, its exceptional direction and, in later stories, the painstaking research that went into the background story. It fits in with other comics in the great 20th century tradition of the European humouristic adventure strip (such as Franquin's Spirou and Goscinny's Asterix). The series was an inspiration to famous movie directors such as Steven Spielberg and to painters such as Andy Warhol.

Racist elements?

Tintin has been criticized for the alleged racist and colonialist elements in much of the series. Some stories have also been praised for their sympathetic portrayals of non-Europeans.

Examples of the latter can be found in Le Lotus Bleu (The Blue Lotus), in which Hergé helped to dispel popular myths of his time about the Chinese people. This narrative belongs to the historical category. It was the first album for which he did extensive background research; previously Hergé had drawn cartoons merely for amusement. The story is set in China during the Sino-Japanese War. From then on, this meticulous research would be one of Hergé's trademarks.

It is overly simplistic to say that Hergé was or was not a racist. Certainly his early work (before Le Lotus Bleu) shows racist and colonialist leanings in its caricatured portrayals; and certainly little of his work would be considered politically correct if it were newly published. But Hergé seems to have changed his views sometime between the early works and Le Lotus Bleu. In fact, there is evidence that Hergé was embarrassed by his early work.

In some cases Hergé altered stories at the demand of publishers, though this seems more like a series of attempts to censor the work to protect young readers from material deemed inappropriate than intances of racism in the original work. For example, the black characters in Tintin en Amérique (Tintin in America) were re-colored to make their race white or ambiguous. (It is unclear where the racism lies in this case.) Another example is L'Étoile Mystérieuse (The Shooting Star), which originally had an American villain with a Jewish name. In the American editions, the character became a South American with a non-ethnic name.

List of books

(Also see the legend below)

Legend
BW	Black and white, only published much later in book form.
+	unfinished work
F	film adaption
n	where n is a number. Several stories are spread over two books, the numbers indicate which books go together

The books are listed in the order in which the stories first appeared in news paper or magazine. Land of Black Gold was started in 1939, but was put on hold when World War II broke out. (Sceptre and Gold actually deal with the rising threat of a second big war.) Gold was not finished before 1971.