Anyone read this? I'm just about to - on my desk courtesy Amazon today.
To balance things out I'm also reading Tintin: The Complete Companion in tandem with reading Tintin stories to Jenny at bedtime. To pick up a conversation from a while ago, I don't think Herge was fascistic at all - just a product of his times.
Nope, not yet.
ReplyDeleteRe: Tintin - the fascist thing is an exaggeration, but he was definitely anti-bolshevik, and didn't have very enlightened views of africans, chinese folk etc. - although probably normal for a 1950s Belgian. His drawings were really fantastic though. Although Asterix was funnier.
One thing I hadn't realised was that Tintin and the Shooting Star and the Red Rackham duology were written during German occupation and there's stuff in TATSS that reflects this - the scientists that set off to find the crashed meteorite are all of Axis / neutral nationalities; they're in competition with an American research ship funded by (err) very Jewish looking financiers...
ReplyDeleteBTW the Julian Barnes book is FUCKING AMAZING.
ReplyDeleteI remember visiting the cartoon museum in Brussels (actually while on John's stag do, in 2001) which has some great Tintin stuff. I bought "Tintin in the Congo" there, which you can't buy in the UK, or at least not easily. I guess you'd call it embarassingly rather than wickedly racist, and it's the cartoons (principally of gollywog Africans) rather than the text which are most problematic.
ReplyDeleteBtw, I had a look at my copy of Tintin and Shooting Star this morning, and Good God you're right - the chief villain looks like something straight out of a Nazi education film!
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