Totally Tintin

This week on Totally Tintin, we travel to the magical country of Syladavia to find King Ottokar’s Sceptre. Let’s join Ian and Dave as they take a look at Hergé’s last pre-war book.

This week on Totally Tintin, Dave is really excited to be talking about The Black Island – one of his favourite Tintin stories! Ian thinks it’s pretty good too and that’s because it is! Forgers, a mysterious German doctor and more airplanes than you can shake a stick at; Tintin travels the length of Great Britain to crack the mystery of the Black Island!

When I started putting together this edition of the show notes, I thought there wouldn’t be much to say about The Blue Lotus. Hergé actually changed the book very little during its updating to colour in 1946. It had a special place it had in his life, but it is also a watershed moment in his career as a cartoonist – the point that he became the Hergé we know. Much to my surprise though, there is actually a lot to say about the little changes, the big changes and the no changes!

When Hergé began planning The Blue Lotus, the intervention of Christian missionaries who had actually spent time in China gave him the opportunity to research and prepare the story more carefully than he had ever done before. Most importantly, as part of this research, Hergé was introduced to Chang Chong-chen, a Chinese student and fellow artist who had firsthand knowledge of life in China.

Chang Chong-Chen

Hergé gave himself an unusually long break between the completion of Cigars of the Pharaoh and the start of The Blue Lotus to prepare material for the book and work out a more detailed plot. Before, as when he finished Tintin in America on October 20, 1932, he quickly jumped into Cigars on December 8th – just a little over a month between books; however, The Blue Lotus didn’t appear until August 9, 1934, seven months after he had completed Cigars. This break gave Hergé time to explore China through Chang’s experiences and to draw on his wealth of knowledge not just of Chinese history, but Chinese philosophy, art and calligraphy. If Hergé was drawn to the subject matter as a way to expose Japan’s role in the Mukden Incident of 1931, it was Chang who gave him the real story of Japanese imperialism in China.

Hergé, Germaine and Chang

Chang was also invaluable to Hergé’s artistic development. He gave Hergé Chinese brushes as a gift and taught him brush techniques and Chinese calligraphy. These lessons seeped into Hergé’s own style and we see in The Blue Lotus the first steps in the development of his “clear line” style. As he began to pare away his linework to its essence, we could say that the lessons in Zen Buddhism and Taoist philosophy also found their way into his art. Together, they drew Shanghai street and market scenes – Chang providing the authenticity – and worked on drawing faces, trying to find the most economical way to show the difference between Chinese and Japanese facial characteristics.

Unlike his earlier, cruder black and white books, with so much time to prepare the plot and the giant strides forward he was taking as a cartoonist, Hergé actually had little reason to redraw The Blue Lotus. He did choose to redraw the first four pages, but probably did that reflexively, thinking that, as before, he would have to make so many corrections that it would be easier to redraw it, rather than spend the time needed to resize the original panels and rearrange the pages to suit the new 62-page album grid. If you look at the black and white version of the fakir’s tricks, it is remarkably similar to the colour version.

After four pages, Hergé probably wondered why he was bothering to do redraw perfectly good pages and let it drop – making small changes here and there. We can see from this sequence that the only changes were the transformation from the narrower black and white three tier grid to the wider four tier grid of the colour versions.

If we compare this two page black and white spread of the Thompsons meeting with the Chinese chief of police, we can see how little Hergé changed during the transformation from black and white to colour.

One of the bigger changes Hergé made to the story was having the toughs who come to beat up Tintin in jail changed from a group of squaddies to three Sikh police officers. (I had read that the original characters were Scotsmen, but, unless they are wearing some sort of Highland regimental uniform, I don’t see it.)

The use of the Sikh police officers is absolutely true to how British colonial administrations worked – not necessarily the corruption, but the presence of Sikhs in the colonial British military and police forces was ubiquitous during this period. In some ways, it’s more accurate to have police officers, who would be on hand at the station, to administer the beating rather then a group of soldiers, who would have to be called in – bringing attention to the brutality. This sequence shows the efficiency of the four tier grid adopted by Hergé for the colour albums. Tons more information could be conveyed in that format than in the old black and white format. (Admitttedly necessity is the mother of invention as Hergé had to make it work within the 62 page limit.) The two sequences show the growth of Hergé as a cartoonist. In the original, we see Dawson goading the soldier into beating up Tintin, then we cut to Tintin looking forlorn in his cell and then an immediate cut to the him hearing the keys in the lock. (By the way, that is the most brilliant way to indicate him hearing the sound of the keys.) What’s better in the 1946 colour version is that after Dawson and Wilson speak, we see Tintin looking forlorn in his cell, then we cut to Dawson goading the Sikh police officers. What this does is give a sense of time passing with no indication of how long Tintin has been sitting in his jail cell. With the three panel sequence of Dawson talking to the policemen (the three burly policemen is better than the one burly soldier too); Tintin hearing the keys in the lock; and then the three big men entering the cell. You feel that little time passed between Dawson’s goading and their entering the cell. The sequence ends with the portentous “clac” of the door – sealing Tintin’s doom. I mean, what is he gonna do against those three big guys???

Some changes were simply aesthetic: fpr example, the wonderful panel of Thompson and Thomson walking through Hukow in their Mandarin get ups was… I don’t want to say “simply drawn” because Hergé drew all those people and that’s no walk in the park, but let’s say unadorned. When he and Edgar P. Jacobs were working on the colour version, they added more background detail into the drawings. You can also see the added detail in the sequence in Maharajah’s palace. The colour version is much more ornate.

(Speaking of Jacobs, apparently he was obsessively precise and spent weeks trying to find a suitable Chinese-coloured red. He finally hit on just the right shade of red only to have the printers at Casterman mess it up anyway.)

Another big change was the cover of the book for the new 62 page colour albums. The original cover image was a red dragon against a black background with gold highlights. At Casterman’s insistence, Hergé had to reverse the colours and have a black dragon against a red background.

The original cover image.

(I guess Casterman really wanted to rub that whole red thing in Jacob’s face.)

Frankly, I think the original is better. It has an interesting three dimensional quality and there is more of a sense of foreboding. (I still don’t think it’s the greatest cover though.)

Speaking of covers, I’ve spent a lot of time (maybe too much time?) wondering why The Blue Lotus was strangely placed in the upper corner on the old Methuen/Magnet covers and not chronologically with the rest of the albums and then it occurred to me the other day. The Blue Lotus was the last book published by Methuen (in 1983!) so they probably didn’t want to mess up the nicely decorative grid and just stuck The Blue Lotus off in the corner, out of the way – forever confusing little obsessives like myself!

Finally! That puzzle is solved! (We also talk about this in our newest episode 0f Totally Tintin “The Broken Ear”.)

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you next time.

Welcome back to another episode of Totally Tintin! This week Ian and Dave take a look at Tintin’s first adventure in South America, his first adventure that starts and ends in Brussels and his last adventure as a “reporter” – The Broken Ear. Dave loves it, as usual, but Ian thinks it’s repeating some material from the earlier books. Listen to the show and find out why.

This week on Totally Tintin, Hergé takes a huge step forward as an artist – and Ian and Dave take it with him as they discuss The Blue Lotus.

On this week’s show notes, we’re going to take a look at Cigars of the Pharaoh, strangely, the last black and white Tintin book converted to colour. For whatever reason, Hergé didn’t get around to updating the book until 1955 – almost ten years after the other books had been transferred to the now familiar 62-page colour album format. Perhaps in light of his later, more heavily researched books, the knockabout style of Cigars no longer appealed to him; perhaps his heavy workload prevented him tackling a book he knew he would have to entirely redraw; or perhaps the restless period between the shutting down of the collaborationist Le Soir and the launch of Le Journal de Tintin ended before he’d had time to take on this last book.

At any rate, Hergé took advantage of the re-formatting of Cigars to entirely redraw the strip – cutting down the 124 page black and white version to the 62 page colour format inevitably meant that there would be some alterations to the story – although not as many as you might expect due to the number of panels on an average colour Tintin page (around fourteen) compared to the older black and white pages, which contained around six panels per page.

One of the most significant changes to the story takes place during Tintin’s discovery of the secret tunnel. In the black and white version, Tintin is confronted by a nest of cobras and then almost drops through a trapdoor into a pit of crocodiles.

Just as he always sought to simplify his drawings, Hergé also sought to simplify his stories for maximum effect. All this was cut out of the colour version – probably due to issues of space, but also because it is a fake climax before the real high tension scene of Tintin’s possible unmasking at the meeting of the hooded secret society. So rather than let these little incidents detract from the final confrontation, Hergé cut out the scenes entirely. I mean, the crocodile incident is just a throwaway two panels – hardly worth a mention.

Less explicable is the change of maps between the different colour editions:

Besides some different cropping of the image, the maps of the 1955 version and the 1987 version are virtually the same. The map in the 1970 version was altered for no good reason at all. Even if, as has been suggested, the Suez Crisis of 1956 shut down the canal for a brief period, the 1970 version was a full fourteen years after this incident! Furthermore, the dialogue remains the same in the 1970 version. So Tintin is telling Snowy that they are going to be travelling to Bombay (Mumbai), Colombo, the capital city of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, but the map shows a tour of the Mediterranean with stops in Port Said, Piraeus, Istanbul, Naples, Marseille, and Gibraltar and others.

Meanwhile, in the English version from 1987, although map has been returned to its mostly original form, the dialogue had been changed to match the altered 1970s map! Whoops!

Sometimes Hergé had difficulty with the space-time continuum and his revisions could almost result in charcters from Tintin’s future meeting him in the past. Like the Thompsons standing on the platform of the train station in Tintin inthe Congo – at least two years before they would even meet Tintin in Cigars.

In the final revision of Cigars of the Pharaoh (from 1970), there is the real head scratcher of a scene when Tintin is invited into the tent of Patrash Pasha, who is a big fan of Tintin, and shown one of his books.

In the 1934 black and white version, Tintin is shown Tintin in America, which is fine. It is an adventure that happened just before Cigars. In the 1955 version, Tintin is shown Tintin in the Congo – once again, an adventure that took place before his current adventure. In the 1970 version, however, they have crazily made the book Destination Moon – an adventure from the future with people he doesn’t even know yet! I hope he didn’t look inside. It would probably drive him crazier than a dose of rajaijah juice!

The final variation between the various versions of Cigars is more of a mental lapse than an intentional revision. In the 1955 version of the book, there is a scene at the maharajah’s palace after Snowy was rescued by the Thompsons. However, in the 1955 version, Snowy is shown with Tintin at the palace, although he was still with the Thompsons. This was easily corrected in the 1970 version.

Finally, let me leave you with an assortment of Le Petit Vingtième covers from the run of Cigars of the Pharaoh. You can imagine how evocative these covers were every week as Tintin fans ached to know what was happening to their hero:

See you next time!

This week on Totally Tintin, Ian Boothby and Dave Dedrick from Sneaky Dragon take an admiring look at Hergé’s fourth adventure of Tintin, The Cigars of the Pharaoh.

Hi everyone,

Ian and I hope you are enjoying the show! In case you’re wondering what the heck we’re talking about though, I thought it might be good to post some of the alternate images here so you will have an idea what we’re talking about during these episodes.

Tintin in the Congo

First, Tintin in the Congo (Tintin au Congo), which was originally published in Le Petit Vingtième from 1930 to 1931 before being collected as a black and white book in 1931. Hergé completely redrew the comic in 1944 at the instigation of his publisher Casterman, who felt that colour albums would sell better.

Interestingly, Hergé made very few changes to the overall story, which was episodic and incoherent – especially as his storytelling had improved by leaps and bounds by that time. He did attempt to soften some of the Colonial attitudes, but the condescension and paternalism – some might say racism – remained. In light of this, references to Belgium were removed from the classroom scene and replaced with a math lesson – albeit, an insultingly simple math lesson, as Ian pointed out on the show.

Here are the two versions, the original black and white version, in which Tintin tells the students about their “fatherland” Belgium; and the updated version from 1944, in which Tintin teaches the students – who are clearly ten or eleven years old – how to add two plus two. (No wonder some of them are chatting!)

Since Hergé was redrawing the entire comic, the changes were mostly aesthetic. For instance, at the railway station, we can see Hergé’s other Petit Vingtième characters Quick and Flupke in the crowd sending off Tintin. Quick is the small boy with the striped scarf and Flupke the slightly taller boy with the black cap.

When it came time to redraw the image for the colour version, Hergé not only kept the cameos by Quick and Flupke – now in slightly different positions – but, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, added himself and assistant E.P. Jacobs to the drawing. (Hergé can be seen behind the reporter and Jacobs behind Hergé.) Although they hadn’t been created at the time of the original Tintin in the Congo, he also added Thomson and Thompson in place of the generic railway employees in the original panel. Fortunately Hergé did not destroy the universe by having Tintin meet the police detectives.

Unlike Tintin in America, where many black characters were whitewashed out of the book,  Tintin in the Congo was never published in North America so the portrayal of blacks went largely unchanged between the 1931 version and the 1944 version. In fact, Hergé defended his portrayal of blacks and was genuinely hurt by the criticism of his drawings in The Red Sea Sharks (Coke En Stock), which was in part an exposé of the modern slave trade. Franco-Belgian comic art has always portrayed blacks in a way that makes our more modern selves uncomfortable, whether it was Uderzo (from Goscinny and Uderzo’s Le Tour de Gaule d’Asterix, 1965):

Or Franquin (from Franquin’s Le Gorille A Bonne Mine, 1956):

Many cartoonists of that time period drew blacks in this manner, including the American cartoonists Will Eisner in The Spirit and Walt Kelly in his Our Gang comics. As I stated on the show, to us these drawings have racist connotations, but I don’t believe that they were done out of hatred or as an attempt to demean black people. As Franquin said, “I draw ridiculous blacks just as I draw ridiculous whites.”

In Hergé’s defense, he never defended the attitude behind the drawings in Tintin in the Congo. In a 1973 interview he said, “It was 1930. I only knew things about these countries that people were relating at the time: Africans were big children…Thank goodness we were there! Etc. And I portrayed these Africans to these criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which existed then in Belgium.”

Another “it was a different time” matter is the treatment of animals and the wanton destruction and possible depopulation and extinction caused by Tintin throughout the book. Even in 1946, Hergé had no problem with drawing a children’s character shooting elands or gazelles by the score, killing an elephant, blowing up rhinos, skinning a monkey and other things that cause our 21st century hearts to go all a-flutter. In 1975, whilst preparing the book for publication, Hergé’s Scandinavian publisher requested that he draw a new page to replace the original rhino hunting gag, which was felt to be too graphic for children. Hergé obliged with a new and, I think, improved gag that was also used for Egmont’s publication of the book in 2005 – the first time the book was ever published in English.

Tintin in America

Tintin in America (Tintin en Amérique) was begun in 1931 – shortly after the conclusion of the Congo adventure – and was completed in 1932, at which time a black and white album was published by Le Petit Vingtième. In 1946, Hergé undertook the colourization of the book and, like Tintin in the Congo, completely redrew the story. Most of the changes he made were aesthetic: updating some of the vehicles used, for instance, or improving the flow of the book by correcting the direction of the drawings.

In the original 1932 version, the scene below is “chopped up” by Tintin arbitrarily changing direction. He enters the door and looks left; then looks right out the window; runs left out the door; and then is riding off on his horse to the right. Rather than flowing together into one scene, the drawings break up the story into a series of individual drawings.

In the 1946 version, not only does Hergé improve the general level of draftsmanship (look at those marvelous horse drawings), but he seems to have learned how to pace a sequence to increase the excitement. In this sequence we see Tintin pull up on his horse heading to the right; having dismounted, he walks right towards the door; standing in the open doorway, he stands facing left, but looking right – effectively giving a brief pause as we imagine Tintin scanning the room; heading right, Tintin looks out the window; running right, Tintin exits the cabin; mounted on his horse once again, Tintin gallops off after Bobby Smiles. As we can see, this new version of the sequence has much more forward momentum and pulls us along with Tintin at a breakneck pace.

Other aesthetic changes made by Hergé was to tone down the cartoonishness in light of the more realistic later Tintin stories. So the rather fantastical scene of a rabbit riding a speeding tortoise was removed and replaced by a more general rabble of animals running to escape the brushfire:

In a way, the colour sequence is more effective by having so many animals fill the first frame – heightening the sense of panic – and only having the one squirrel in the second as Tintin turns to see the oncoming fire – as though only that one last straggler remains between Tintin and impending disaster.

Unlike Tintin in the Congo, Tintin in America was published in America, where Hergé’s stories were subject to a different sort of censorship than they would have had  in their original home of a conservative Catholic newspaper. As Hergé explained in a letter to a reader: “What the American editor wanted was the following: No blacks. Neither good blacks nor bad blacks. Because blacks are neither good nor bad: they don’t exist (as everyone knows, in the USA).” So for Hergé, the whitewashing of Tintin in America wasn’t done to appease our squeamishness about the portrayal of race, but for reasons that Hergé clearly saw as racist.

So we see this sequence, as the doorman at the bank is black in the original 1932 version and the 1946 version, but becomes white in the 1973 version.

Or the sequence where Tintin is searching for the dognapped Snowy and runs in on the mother and her baby. Once again, from the original 1932 version to the final changes made in 1973:

When Casterman proposed colourising the book in 1946, they wanted to change the cover image of the book to a picture of Tintin standing on the running board of a speeding car. Hergé refused, feeling that Native Americans had suffered enough without being “pushed” off the cover of Tintin in America. The irony is would people find the book less offensive if, like the Indians being forced off their land in the face of the American military, Hergé had allowed his beloved Indians to be removed from the front cover?

This week on Totally Tintin, Sneaky Dragon’s Ian Boothby and David Dedrick take a look at Hergé’s third book Tintin In America. Finally, a book they can really get behind.

On this episode of Totally Tintin, Ian and Dave take a look at what is probably the most controversial and problematic of Hergé’s books – Tintin in the Congo.

Welcome to Totally Tintin. This week we begin at the beginning and take a look at Hergé’s most unusual book The Adventures of Tintin Reporter for “Le Petit Vingtième ” in the Land of the Soviets. There is no other book quite like it in the canon, but its rambunctious joie de vivre is enough to get past the rough art and the possibly rougher story.