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otm, there just isn't any such thing imo

As stupidity? How noble of you.

i've certainly never seen any

Stupidity should be seen and not heard

people are stupid all the time but any one person is very rarely always stupid and vice versa

you can fool some people most of the time if i may

people are stupid" is at worst untrue and at best a poor explanation of anything

stupidity, which is a kind of intractable inability to learn things, certainly exists, but ignorance and credulity explain a lot more of what often gets called stupidity.

Anyone who has worked in a service job understands the specific kind of extrapolated "stupidity" that is observed when dealing with people at their worst in large volume. If the service person understands that the nature of their job pretty much requires them to filter out the good qualities of the customer to only focus on the qualities that have often brought the them to seek the service that they are providing, I can accept the statement, "People are stupid" as a sort of lazy shorthand for, "dealing with a lot of people who ____, and are impatient or angry about it, sucks". Otherwise, I agree that it's a shitty and wrong thing to say, and that the person saying it is probably at least as stupid as the target of their vitriol.

controversial only to the left internet:

the U.S. Democratic Party is not right-wing
a market economic system is not inherently right-wing

Bad Santa is overrated

I used to think so

but it's grown in my estimation over time

you can shave yr own butthole you just gotta be fuckin delicate, touch like a feather

― unproven (darraghmac), Wednesday, November 14, 2018 6:09 PM bookmarkflaglink

original lyrics to "Creep" iirc

🎶I use Veet🎶

lol neanderthal

what the hell are you putting there
it don't belong there
i don't belong here

Tintin is bad. Writing is exceptionally poor, pacing is random, characters are little more than stock phrases and caricatures (often racist caricatures, especially in the early books), stories are a hodge-podge of "exotic" locales and meandering plots that rarely follow any kind of narrative structure. The one thing that is exceptional is the line-work and the fine level of detail. Unfortunately even this can't make up for the overall flatness of the effect, compounded by his reliance on stiff layouts and an apparent compulsion against every varying the POV or scale of what's going on within the panel borders. I never read these as a kid but since they're everywhere now I've read my son probably about a dozen and was surprised to discover that I've enjoyed approximately zero of them.

ever varying

They're super Orientalist in the mystical-easty way that passed for acceptable up through the last decade. I feel the same way about Curious George.

They never really got completely past it, but The Blue Lotus was some kind of breakthrough. It was pretty rare to have anyone point out what militarized Japan was doing, much less so a children's cartoonist. The whole series is honestly a lot weirder and uneven than people say.

itt Οὖτις acting the goat

idg the Curious George ref. Where is there Orientalism in Curious George? I only know the original 7 titles, and those all take place in NY, with no depictions of any non-white ethnicities that I can recall

and with Tintin it goes beyond Orientalism - Native Americans, Africans, middle easterners, they all get the treatment.

tbf there's other stuff from the era (or even earlier - thinking of Windsor McCay primarily here, and Barks afterwards) where the overall style and imaginative execution on display is so overwhelming I'm willing to accept the racist context that they were operating in. But Tintin doesn't pass that bar ime.

and of course there's this classic with the Jews
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c7/Herge_cartoon_-_Tintin_and_the_Jews.jpg/330px-Herge_cartoon_-_Tintin_and_the_Jews.jpg

Οὖτις have you read your son The Shooting Star? It's got a background villain that is markedly antisemitic (certainly by now standards so er this may serve as a warning if you haven't). These are mostly reasonable (I take issue with the lack of scale criticism as certain expanded panels such as the rocket reveal and lunar landscapes in Destination Moon are so embedded in my imagination from childhood) criticisms of an evidently controversial artist and series of books tho - surprised and interested to read that Tintin is 'everywhere' - I don't have kids to read it to but can share mixed feelings about that.

haven't read Shooting Star and lol I doubt I will now. We've read the following;
Tintin in America
Cigars of the Pharaoh
The Black Island
Red Rackham's Treasure
Flight 714 to Sydney

when I say "everywhere" I mean available at the school library, the local library, and the local comic shop, all of which we frequent regularly.

The opening of Shooting Star is incredible!

I admit if I was reading these for my own pleasure I might approach them a little differently, but the calculus of "do I want to have yet another complicated conversation with my son about racist imagery from the past century" kinda undermines that

You probably need to avoid Tintin In The Congo fyi

I legit don't think i'd have such an overwhelming interest in world cultures, travel and history (including the history of European perceptions of others) if i hadn't been such a huge Tintin fan as a child. Perhaps it's not so important now kids have access to the internet and a million TV channels, but thirty years ago it was a window into the wonder of human existence like few others. It has been a while since i last re-read them but iirc they still stand up well as adventure stories.

i like tintin but the early books (the first 10 or so, maybe?) are indeed flawed for all the reasons mentioned -- tintin in the congo is so horrific in so many ways it actually made me angry when i read it. (tintin in the land of the soviets is pretty funny, though: iirc there's a scene where tintin stumbles on lenin and trotsky's stash of buried treasure, or something like that.)

herge did become quite a bit better later on, though -- the moon books, castafiore emerald, tintin in tibet all display real growth: better art, more convincing characterization, better plotting + humor. if you're not into them, tho, no reason to keep going imo.

Flight 714 is weird!

Don’t you need to read The Secret Of The Unicorn for Red Rackem’s Treasure to make sense?

The other ones you read are early ones, not so great, imo, later ones get much better.

Agree about the racism, obv

The Dalai Llama has praises Tintin In Tibet, fwiw

praised

There's a very good passage in The Blue Lotus where Tintin and a young boy discusses Europeans racist views on Chinese. He got that out of his system, I think. There's still a lot of other stereotypes throughout the series, though

I don’t believe Tintin In the Congo is available in the US? It wasn’t when I was growing up in the 90s anyway

shooting star is (or used to be) my favorite of the early books but it was serialized during the nazi occupation of belgium, which makes the problematic stuff even more disturbing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shooting_Star#Antisemitism

Sorry, stepped away to heat up some pork. I didn't mean to suggest that Curious George is orientalist -- but it relies on period-equivalent icky colonialist attitudes. While it wasn't written to be racist, clearly, it definitely uses shifty power dynamics from the end of imperialism to illustrate power dynamics that reinforce white hegemony.

Tintin In The Congo has mostly been reprinted as a for-adults historical-curio with contextual introduction, it's been many decades since it was available for kids.

A lot of the othering depends on caricatures that a kid today isn't likely to pick up on because the specificity of the caricature has been erased, like the semitic financier in Shooting Star. (It's mordantly amusing that this was originally created under Nazi occupation, and Herge revised the character to remove the specific elements that he thought were Jewish, not just cartoony, for the collected editions. It was still totally obvious by 1950s standards, but doesn't really read today. Vindication at last.)

Herge definitely gets much much better as he goes on, in terms of racism as well as (obv) storytelling. Later books are explicitly anti-colonial and anti-bigotry (eg Prisoners Of The Sun, The Castafiore Emerald), presumably partly as a corrective, and partly just because Herge became quite personally woke. But the computer lettering in the post-2005-ish editions is so painful that they're best enjoyed for the illustrative work by the studio artists.

Idg that at all about Curious George. Can u be more specific? Is it just the white paternal figure steals a monkey from africa? Thats just the first book.

Xps

George always seemed more like a stand-in for a child than for a non-white ethnicity

In a (fairly) well-anthologized kid's lit essay, June Cummins talks about George as a 'mimic-man.' He's part of a mid-century wave of characters that read very differently depending on audience. Article here: https://ziggysroom.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/article-the-resisting-monkey-curious-george-slave-captivity-narratives-and-the-postcolonial-condition.pdf. See also: Oompa Loompas, Babar.

Huh thx

'Tintin is bad' it otm, but hardly a controversial opinion (depends where you live perhaps?). It's one the few cultural touchstones that's been well called out on its racism, at least over here (and ppl here *love* to wave away racism in stuff they used to like as a kid).

In the French-speaking world, these days it's customary to acknowledge that Tintin is hopelessly problematic while at the same time holding it up as a masterpiece of comic book art.

tintin au congo is studied on uk linguistics courses as an exemplar of racist colonial literature

I can't think of a better use for it tbh.

When I was younger the view seemed to be that he was hopelessly dodgy at the start, but then he came over it. And it sorta changes when people say he got over it, from Tintin in America to Tintin in Tibet to never really...

tbc the racism wasn't my *only* complaint - I think he's a pretty shitty storyteller too! some pretty pictures tho. I can detect his influence on all kinds of things I like way more (Moebius, Wes Anderson) but there's a flat, repetitive quality to it that does not appeal.