Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8491471" data-attributes="member: 18">Tintin Au Congo was already widely regarded as racist and unacceptable in the UK even since the 1940s, and when other Tintins got translated over the decades, it did not. So that was so racist as to be unacceptable in the 1940s here, to be clear.Finally in 1991 the B&W version did get translated as a sort of historical artifact with a fairly limited print run (and likewise with the 1946 colour version in 2005). I was like the world's biggest Tintin fan when I was a kid, and thanks to my mum liking the art style (she's an illustrator herself) I got all the Tintin books, including weird ones like the one about the Russian revolution (which I think never got inked and is thus B&W), and yes, Tintin Au Congo, which my mum took pains to explain to me was racist and unacceptable, but which we had to show how attitudes were messed-up in the past, and we needed to learn from. Even as a kid, even if it hadn't seemed racist (which it did - I was at school with Black kids and so the way they were drawn here was pretty insane to me), the cartoonishness of the portrayal of the Africans (and even the animals - I had the version with the rhino-dynamiting) was harshly at odds with the general Tintin vibe so I hated it.(Also damn "Your country, Belgium" is indeed pretty special - that is really "a different era" stuff in the way 1988 was not - Wikipedia tells us that even the 1946 redrawn version Herge put out - the one I had - removed all that stuff. So that was unacceptable even for 1946! I'm surprised you were able to find that version in the 1980s.)[URL unfurl="true"]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Congo[/URL]There was also a lot of other less-extreme racism in the Tintin books, but weirdly a lot of it seemed to almost accidentally lampshade itself, like when Tintin is taking a photo of some poor Native American, the guy looks really put out, and it makes Tintin look like a tourist-y jerk. Even as a kid I remember thinking "Tintin, don't do that...".(Also reminds me that there was an amazing Tintin-specific shop in Soho (or thereabouts) in London in the 1980s I remember going there on a dark/rainy night and just being amazed by it - it had white walls, bright lighting and a high ceiling, oh and minimalist decor as was common in the '80s, I remember that.)The Asterix one is particularly messed-up because IIRC that's not from the '80s, that's way later, like the '90s or something, and should obviously never have happened. Asterix also has a weird problem where Roman slaves are disproportionately shown as Black, which was like, wildly historically inaccurate and kind of super-racist as a result (even beyond racist portrayals in terms of features and so on).Lucky Luke wasn't as racist with its art (notice the leader of the Native Americans is about as handsome and well-proportioned as Luke himself, I guess as befits a "Noble Savage" ugh), but jesus the colonial attitudes in that panel are something else.Tintin Au Congo was not good, but yeah, Tintin as a whole was, if sometimes a little fashy (as we would say now).</blockquote>

Verification