I picked up this copy of a Tintin comic in a waiting room. My first time reading Tintin as an adult. These comics are racist as f**k. The coloniser gaze is everywhere. As a child, I felt it but could never articulate it.

Edit: I found this Wikipedia page about it. This is indeed one of the most racist of the Tintin comic albums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Congo

I remember one Tintin comic calling gypsies (the Roma in Europe) thieves and other names.

@rohini yikes. That book is unacceptable in any era, but really should not be put out as browsing material in a waiting room today!

@mlncn well, most of the material in that waiting room was present-day Hindu supremacist stuff. So, the choice of Tintin kinda makes sense.

@rohini I have a set of Tintin books called “The Complete Collection” but this isn’t in it as they like to pretend it doesn’t exist. Not even a mention if it, “too racist even for us” or anything.

@aegir I remember another one in which 'gypsies' (the Roma) are called names.

@rohini i remember seeing a very good thread over here about the first comic they ever made actually, turns out Tintin started as a comic published in an explicitly fascist magazine pre-WW2.

@mehluv well, 'explicitly fascist' clocks.

yup. they’re horrible.

i grew up in Puerto Rico, so my exposure to TinTín was via a kids’ magazine from Argentina called Billikén. at one point they added them as a mini zine in the middle of the mag. i’d just ripped it out immediately.

it’s so horrible, i use TinTín as a measure of how racist someone is. cannot tell you how disappointed i was when Stephen Spielberg went out and made a whole ass movie. then i checked the credits. it gets worse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin_%28film%29

@rohini

@rohini whelp, that's a lot of "yikes" compressed into three pages.

@rohini Oof - that was your first one?! That’s the one that usually is banned along with “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” for the same reason (I think).

@rohini Belgium in a nutshell. They are still selling little chocolate hands in the shops and in you order a Lumumba in there, they bring a "hot chocolate with a shot" as if history was a joke.

@KarlHeinzHasliP sigh.

@rohini wait for "the blue lotus" :/

@seanbala first one as an adult. I read some in childhood.

@rohini Ahhhhh. Okay. That is slightly better. I first saw Tintin in the animated series before I read them all as a kid. I wonder how may books we read as kids become even more problematic when you read them as an adult. The Goblins that run Gringots in Harry Potter come to mind.

@rohini My first comics were Astérix, Mafalda and Tintín. As I aged I found Mafalda the funniest WRT the real world, Astérix as the funniest and best plotted all around, and the clear line of Tintín as the most stylish, but the plots were… sincerely, except for 'the Secret of the Unicorn' and its continuation and 'Objective: the Moon' and its own, they were forgettable and I can only remember most of them because I read everything I had recurrently and had no library card.

@rohini Sherlock Holmes calls street urchins Arabs; different times. This Tintin book was written in the 30s no? Very much an era of colonialist racism in general.

@seanbala the same for cinema. Films I watched in my childhood/ teens and even liked, seem horrible now.

@BubblegumYeti There is no note in this album contextualising it as a product of its time. It's up for sale and distribution in the present day. It's not an out-of-print copy. It will likely be read by children who will have less discernment than you and me.

@rohini my God. The story, the cringe illustrations. This is the worst thing I've seen since the Sambo comic. Yikes!

@rohini @mehluv A magazine in Nazi-occupied Belgium, to be precise - he was at worst a reluctant collaborator with the fascists (by working for a compliant magazine instead of, idk, getting work as a farm labourer), not someone going out of his way to be fascist

"Tintin in the Congo" is shocking however

@rohini @BubblegumYeti

Wikipedia also says that the first _english_ Edition of this appeared in 2005

@rohini Oh I was a big fan when I was a kid and could not find that book in English and after stumbling through it in French, it was very obvious why.

@einsiedlerspiel @BubblegumYeti The copy I read today was fairly new. No markings of wear and tear.

@rohini yes agree, that shouldn’t be the case

@rohini Wait until you experience the Weissmuller era Tarzan films :-)

@rhempel I've read the book. I know it has some of the same issues. I couldn't be arsed into watching the movie after that.

@rohini this wasn't published in English for decades. Eventually when it did ship, it was shrink wrapped, only for sale at adult graphic novel sections (not kids comics), and was functionally only intended for completionists

The Belgian treatment of the Congo was egregious, even by the standards of most of the colonial powers of Europe of the time, and this comic reflects that

Funnily enough, this edition contains some toned down sections, mostly relating to animal cruelty.

@rohini
In all honesty, Tintin was not the worst piece of white Supremacist propaganda that came out in the 1930s. Hergé(Georges Remi) had a long history of churning out propaganda for the far Right. After WWII he came close to getting thrown in jail for enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis.