The Adventures of Tintin is a well-known comic strip written and drawn by the Belgian writer-artist Hergé. The hero of the series is a young reporter named Tintin, who travels around the world landing himself in a variety of adventures.
The narratives are diverse: some stories are swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, some are mysteries or science fiction, others have political or cultural commentary. The most notable stories take place in well-researched early-20th-century historical settings. All include plenty of slapstick humor.
The comic has been admired for its stylish drawings, its exceptional direction and, in later stories, the painstaking research that went into the background story. It fits in with other comics in the great 20th century tradition of the European humouristic adventure strip (such as Franquin's Spirou and Goscinny's Asterix). The series was an inspiration to famous movie directors such as Steven Spielberg and to painters such as Andy Warhol.
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A great number of other characters also occur in more than one of the books:
The earliest stories in The Adventures of Tintin have been criticized for racist and colonialist leanings, including caricatured portrayals of non-Europeans. However, Hergé changed his views sometime between these early works and The Blue Lotus[?]. This story, set in China during the then-current Sino-Japanese War, was the first for which he did extensive background research. It helped to dispel popular myths about the Chinese people. From then on, meticulous research would be one of Hergé's trademarks.
Some of the early albums were altered by Hergé in subsequent edition, usually at the demand of publishers. For example, at the instigation of his American publishers, many of the black characters in Tintin in America were re-colored to make their race white or ambiguous. The Shooting Star originally had an American villain with a Jewish name, who was changed to a South American with an less ethnically-specific name in later editions.
For a further discussion, see The ideology of Tintin.
(Also see the legend below)
BW | Black and white, only published much later in book form. |
+ | unfinished work |
F | film adaptation |
n | where n is a number. Several stories are spread over two books, the numbers indicate which books go together |
The books are listed in the order in which the stories first appeared in newspapers or magazines. Land of Black Gold was started in 1939, but was put on hold when World War II broke out. (Sceptre and Gold actually deal with the rising threat of a second big war.) Gold was not finished before 1971.
These fall in to three rough groups (rough outline follows. There are books on this...):
In 1993, after the death of Hergé, his friend Frederic Tuten published Tintin in the New World: A Romance (ISBN 0-7493-9610-5). In this story Tintin loses his boyish innocence and lives fully, even to excess.
Another is Nuevo Rico[?] in South America, mentioned in The Shooting Star[?]; this was added for the publication of the comic in book form (specifics needed here -- the original newspaper version had the bad guy masterminds as stereotypical Jewish puppet-masters -- the book vesion darkens their skin tone and inserts Nuevo Rico as a hasty reference.). Nuevo Rico may be another name for, or the capital of, San Theodoros; there is a newspaper clipping in Sharks with the headline "Coup d'�tat in Nuevo Rico: Alcazar overthrows Tapioca".
See also:
Trivia: There is a female character in the puppet series Thunderbirds named Tintin Kyrano, but the similarity of names appears to be coincidental.
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