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.

Characters

• Tintin - the hero of the series
• Captain Haddock - seafaring captain, introduced in The Crab with the Golden Claws. Often badmouthed, Haddock is usually the target of the slapstick-like scenes of the comic.
• Professor Calculus (Professeur Tryphon Tournesol - lit. Professor Tryphonius Sunflower) - A deafish professor, inventor of many objects used in the series, such as the moon rocket, a one-person submarine and an ultrasone destructive device. His inventions are usually disliked by Haddock, although Calculus usually interprets this the other way round.
• Snowy (Milou) - Tintin's faithful four-footed friend
• Thomson and Thompson (Dupont et Dupond) - Two clumsy detectives who look like twins, providing many of the comic reliefs throughout the series.

A great number of other characters also occur in more than one of the books.

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)

• In the Land of the Soviets (BW)
• In the Congo
• In America
• Cigars of the Pharaoh
• The Blue Lotus
• And the Broken Ear
• The Black Island
• King Ottokar's Sceptre
• The Crab with the Golden Claws
• The Shooting Star
• The Secret of the Unicorn (1)
• Red Rackham's Treasure (1)
• The Seven Crystal Balls (2)
• Prisoners of the Sun (2)
• Land of Black Gold
• Destination Moon (3)
• Explorers on the Moon (3)
• The Calculus Affair
• The Red Sea Sharks
• In Tibet
• The Castafiore Emerald
• Flight 714
• And the Picaros
• And Alph-Art (+)
• And the Golden Fleece (F)
• And the Blue Oranges (F)
• And the Lake of Sharks (F)

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.

These fall in to three rough groups (rough outline follows. There are books on this...):

1. Tintin as a reporter / detective, exploring real countries (Soviets - Crab)
2. fantasy adventures: treasure hunts (Unicorn), ghost stories (Crystal Balls), Science Fiction (Moon). Tintin is joined by a crew of secondary characters: Haddock and Tournesol. These were written during the buildup to World War II and the occupation, when Herge had to steer clear of anything that could be construed as political
3. Coming of age: Herge returns to political intrigue seen in Ottokkar, the odyssies seenin Ear, but with a much broader stroke. Most are set in, or involve fictional countries. Characters from old adventures make reappearances, eg Dawson from Lotus.

Fictional Countries

Herge devised several fictional countries later in the series. Syldavia in particular is described in considerable detail (history, customs, language etc).

• Syladavia in the Balkans
• Khemed, in Arabia
• San Theodoros in South America.

Another is Nuevo Rico in South America, mentioned in The Shooting Star; this was added for the publication of the comic in book form (specifics needed here -- the original newspaper version had the bad guy masterminds as stereotypical Jewish puppet-masters -- the book vesion darkens their skin tone and inserts Nuevo Rico as a hasty reference.)