Post a controversial opinion

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.

yeah again, not to be all deadhead-ish but the early ones you read aren’t so good

idk I thought the ones I listed were all over the place time-wise. The one we just read (Flight 714) is one of the last ones - ends with a totally nonsensical deus ex machina after a bunch of convoluted capture/rescue/shootout sequences with too many characters

yeah I loved that one as a kid. You’re probably right.

Flight 714 rules fuiud

Besides the racism, the other obvious issue is that Tintin is a child doing an adult job.

it just feels like none of his stuff follows any kind of standard narrative structure - there's no themes, no sense of pacing the action, no building-to-a-climax, no real resolution, a lot of these stories feel like just a lot of random stuff that happens as an excuse to draw Tintin in a jungle, or a desert, or in a submarine or whatever.

xps

Tintin is a child doing an adult job.

haha yeah is this ever given any kind of explanation? I feel like after having read a lot of these I should have some grasp of where the character comes from and why he's in the position he's in and yet... like, where is his family? is he an orphan? Does he have a job (sometimes he appears to be a reporter, for some reason)? Why does he do any of the shit he does?

and don't say "it's for children, who cares!" Uncle Scrooge's motivations and defining characteristics, as a counter-example, are crystal clear. Even Little Nemo is based on a premise that serves to explain all the nonsense.

fwiw when i love comics did a poll like 15 years ago tintin ranked no. 1!

tintin himself is kind of a strange character -- not just ageless but kind of without any real personality at all, he's more like a stand-in for the reader than anything

yeah it's v weird, he's a nullity

which is by intention, I would think.

Herge himself seems to have been something of an empty vessel*, who also started his life's career as a school-aged teenager.

* he married a coworker on the orders of their boss, who kept a portrait of Mussolini in the office and conducted the wedding ceremony

The reason Tintin is a kid doing an adults job is because the strip was originally about teaching kids about the world. It was a newspaper strip in the kid section of a right-wing newspaper, and was just meant to indoctrinate about Soviet, Congo, US, etc.

It never really moved beyond that serialized mentality. Every page is it's own thing, and yeah, a lot of it is bad excuses for pretty drawings. That was indeed the point.

Britney Spears is a Republican.

In the 1991 Nardwuar vs Sonic Youth interview, Nardwuar was the bully and SY were within their rights to lash out.

I have no idea what anybody finds amusing about that terrible terrible cunt

^^ otfm. Baffled by the love for him. I don't get the "nardwuar is a national treasure he may not die!" but I'm guessing it's one of those #lolUSA things I'm better off not understanding anyway (yes, I know he's Canadian).

I don't understand why everybody doesn't just headbutt the fucker and then kick him to death tbh

the man does research!

????????