Totally Tintin Show Notes

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?