Tintin

Date of publication, foreword, historical note – these are not things school kids look for when they pick up comics. This is possibly why I was not aware of some social and political occurrences on which Tintin comics were based.

I’ve been reading Tintin for the last couple of days. Some excerpts that point towards the adventures being satires and social representations of the time, follow:

Tintin In the Congo

Foreword

Tintin au Congo first appeared as a serial from 5 June 1930, 0ver a perieod of a year, in “Le Petie Vingtieme”, the children’s supplement to the Brussels newspapaer “Le Vingtieme Siecle”. In 1931 the story was published in book form by Les Editions du Petit Vingtieme and a few months later by Editions Casterman of Tournai. It is from the former edition that the present book is presented in English translation.

In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Herge reflects the colonial attitudes of the time. He himself admitted that he depicted his Africans according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period. The same maybe said of the treatment of big-game hunting and his attitude towards animals.

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

Foreword

This first adventure of Tintin, the boy reporter, appeared in 1929 in a children’s supplement to a Belgian daily newspaper, Le Vingtieme Siecle. Herge, Georges Remi, then twenty-two years old, was employed on the staff as an artist. He had received no formal art training, but was already showing the originality and wit that would make him a unique figure in the world of the strip cartoon.

Herge’s satire on the Soviet state was very much of its time. He himself had not been to Russia, but had read a book published the year before, Moscou sans voiles: Neuf and de travail au pays des Soviets by Joseph Douillet, a former Belgian consul in Rostov-on-Don. Soviet propaganda to persuade the world outside Russia that the economy was booming was a particular target for Herge, as were the activities of the secret police, the OGPU. Incidentally he errs on one occasion in the story when he calls them the Cheka, their name before 1922.

Publication in Le Petit Vingtieme began on 10 January 1929. In 1930 the adventure was issued in album form, now a very rare book greatly sought after, the 500 copies being numbered and signed “Tintin et Milou”. There were, it is believed, nine subsequent editions, differing only in the layout of the print on the title page. With the exception of a reissue in 1969 for the personal use of the author, again limited to 500 copies, and some pirated editions, more than forty years elapsed before this adventure was again published, in the first volume of the Archives Herge. This volume (in which the original versions of Tintin au Congo and Tintin en Amerique also appear) includes a page which originally appeared in Le Petit Vingtieme No. 60, omitted for no apparent reason from the first edition in album form. This is reproduced here as page 97A.

The Blue Lotus

Historical Note

Herge first published Le Lotus Bleu in the magazine Le Petie Vingtieme in Brussels in 1934-5: the story itself is set in 1931. At that time Japanese troops were occupying parts of the Chinese mainland, and Shanghai, the great seaport at the mouth of the Yangtze Kiang, possessed an International Settlement, a trading base in China for Western nations, administered by the British and Americans. Herge based his narrative freely upon the events of the time, including the blowing up of the South Manchurian railway, which led to further incursions by Japan into China and ultimately to Japan’s resignation from the League of Nations in 1933.