This is another review where I’m unable to be unbiased because these are the ultimate nostalgia reads for me. I read these obsessively until the covers fell off when I was little. It had been a long time (15 years +) since I’d revisited them, so I asked for the complete set for Christmas to round out my library. I got the full-sized albums, not the ones where they jammed four volumes into half-sized books. Hergé’s art is worth reading at full size so you can feel fully immersed in it, and his fine line technique and detail-work are truly beautiful.
Tintin follows the titular Tintin as he has adventures all around the world. He’s a young reporter (although he never seems to do any actual reporting, just runs around saving people’s lives and uncovering conspiracies). Over the course of the series, he gains friends and allies, and it was interesting reading them in order for the first time and seeing how Hergé made the characters’ relationships develop. It was also interesting seeing how Hergé’s worldview and message seemed to shift over the years. As an adult, I saw a lot more subtext and plain text that I’d missed as a kid. And it was personally fascinating to relive my childhood reactions — I didn’t remember the plots and then I would have intense sense memories as I’d read certain sections, so it was like reading it alongside my childhood self. Also, I realized in retrospect that I had a crush on Skut, which connected some dots for me about my later crush on Spike (fictional blondes with cheekbones apparently were big for me!).
Apparently this man was my romantic awakening.
As much as I do love Tintin, this series is riddled through with stereotypes that often are just straightforwardly racist. As the years pass, you can tell that Hergé is trying to be more balanced and nuanced, but he really has a problem with seeing black people as fully human, and even in a later book when he stops drawing them with big red lips, they’re still childlike and simple. And throughout, most people who aren’t European seem to be conceived of as just a little dumber than Belgians. Even as a kid, I knew that some of these drawings were racist, but I missed the anti-semitic caricatures, and a lot of the colonial overtones.
So while Tintin is really central to a lot of my path in life, having helped to open the world of art, travel, and comics to me, it was a complicated re-read. I skipped Tintin in the Congo because I didn’t even want to read it due to the really intense racism and its original purpose as a tool of Belgian colonialism. It wasn’t even included in my box set due to that, although I know Hergé reworked it in the 1940s. I will still re-read these and I think they have a very important place in comics history, but your mileage may vary in terms of having children read them today.
Warnings for: anti-semitic and racist caricatures/sentiments, violence, heavy drinking throughout.
