"Tintin"politically correct and conspiracy filled

Most of us are familiar with Georges Remi, better known as Herge, the creator of Tintin & Snowy, was born a century ago. He left us an exceptional legacy, at the center of which was Tintin, but also included much other work besides Tintin's cartoon adventures. From generation to generation the popularity of his creation has carried on and been extended, to such a degree that whatever their age, many readers feel they have grown up with Tintin.being of a french background i have grown reading mostly his comic book instead of the ever famous marvel comic book series. recently i have pulled my old comic books and noticed several politically inclined and conspiracy filled stories. here are a few examples .
-flight 714 1968: ca.youtube.com...

-Tintin in the land of the soviets 1930 :communist government conspiracies
en.wikipedia.org...

-Tintin in Congo 1931 :al capone diamond smuggling ring in congo
en.wikipedia.org...

-Tintin in America 1932 :depicts the real life problems of gangsterism in 1930's America during the great depression and the brief depiction of Al Capone
en.wikipedia.org...

-Tintin cigars of the pharaoh 1934 : opium smuggling
en.wikipedia.org...

-The blue lotus 1936 : Tintin persued an international group of drug distributors trough the middle east & India, becomes involved in the resistance to the Japanese invasion of China.
en.wikipedia.org...

-The black island 1938:While talking to the old local in the pub, Tintin mentions the Loch Ness Monster which had been the subject of recent newspaper reports.
The famous "Surgeon's photo" of the monster by Robert Kenneth Wilson had been published in newspapers some three years earlier 1934
en.wikipedia.org...

-The shooting star 1942: one of my favorites because of the resemblance with perhaps planet x. It's the END of the WORLD!" declares Professor Phostle, as an enormous star hurtles towards the earth. But he is disappointed - the star brushes past, leaving only a vast meteorite which falls in the Arctic waters. However, there is no mistake about the Professor's discovery of a valuable new metal in the meteorite; it is worth a colossal fortune, and in a hazardous search in polar regions Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock encounter some of their strangest adventures. [AR]
www.tintinologist.org...
ca.youtube.com...

-Explorers on the moon 1954estination Moon and Explorers on the Moon were written well over a decade before the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing and several years before manned space flight. Hergé was keen to ensure that the books were scientifically accurate, based on ideas about space flight then available.The rockets bear a striking physical resemblance to V-2 rockets, the only rockets to have struck popular imagination by the early 1950s. The similarity even goes as far as including the checkerboard pattern on the hull, which the V-2 designers used to measure the roll rate of a rocket during test flights.Herge already mentioned it in passing on pages 36 and 37 of Explorers on the Moon. There is ice on the moon! With this long story which began on March 30, 1950, in Tintin magazine, Herge undertook and extraordinary bibliographic study enlisting specialists in the field...

march 5th 1998 NASA PRESS RELEASE: 48yrs later
LUNAR PROSPECTOR FINDS EVIDENCE OF ICE AT MOON'S POLES
www.asi.org...

-Tintin in Tibet 1960: Tintin has a vivid dream that his young Chinese friend survived a plane crash, and awakes with a violent start, yelling ! and throwing the whole room into chaos.Believing that his dream was a telepathic vision Tintin travels to Kathmandu where he encounters the yeti. www.cryptomundo.com...

[edit on 26-12-2008 by accuroman]

No but heard of the scare crow "had no brain''

Tintin is a brave and adventurous young investigative reporter. The Tintin books are full of conspiracies because exposing conspiracies is one of the things investigative journalists do. The conspiracies in Tintin are fictitious conspiracies*.

On the subject of 'political correctness', however, there is much to be said. For example, the book Tintin in the Congo was condemned by the UK's Commission for Racial Equality:

The commission was alerted to the book by David Enright, a solicitor who found it in the children’s section of Borders. “I was aghast to see page after page of representations of black African people as baboons or monkeys, bowing before a white teenager and speaking like retarded children,” he wrote.

“The book shows Tintin’s dog, Snowy, being crowned king . . . You are promoting the racist view that black people are disposed to violence and must be led, guided and commanded by white people and even dogs.”

- 'Tintin book is crude, racist and must be banned, says watchdog', The Times, 12 July 2007

Even Hergé, who wrote and drew the book in 1920, apologized for it later. He also apologized for Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which exposes a fiercely right-wing - though by no means inaccurate - view of Stalin's Russia, and accuses British Socialist intellectuals of being apologists for Soviet tyranny and stalking-horses for Communism.

Hergé was a creature of his time and place: a right-wing Catholic Walloon (French-speaking Belgian) who seemed quite content to accept and cooperate with the Nazi invaders of his country during the Second World War. Afterwards, he was accused of being a Fascist and a collaborator. The controversy continues to this day.

Personally, I couldn't care less. I first met Tintin and his friends (and enemies) as a child, when I was barely old enough to read. I re-read the books over and over again throughout my childhood and early adolescence, and if I stumble across one today I'll read it just as eagerly. Yes, the stories are full of colonial paternalism, racial stereotyping, right-wing views and unflattering portrayals of non-Christian belief from Inca sun-worship to Tibetan Buddhism, but they are also wonderful works of art, beautifully conceived, drawn and written, which those of us who know and love them well would be a great deal poorer without.

The conspiracies, though, are fiction.
*As are the conspiracies on ATS for the most part, but that's another issue.

reply to post by accuroman


He was one of those ahead of his time type people.
He wrote some thought provoking material for sure.
BUMP!