• SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Herge, the creator of Tintin, worked for a conservative Catholic newspaper that would publish Tintin stories. His big dream was to do a story about native Americans but his bosses had him make reactionary propaganda instead. This gave us "Tintin in the land of the Soviets", an incoherent mess of anti-communist tall tales and "Tintin in Congo", an absurdly racist celebration of Belgian imperialism that portrays Africans as childish circus clowns that welcomes and benefits from the noble European efforts to civilise them

    Later in his career Herge remade some of his early black and white Tintin stories in colour. The Soviet story was deemed unsalvageable and didn't get a remake. But "Tintin in Congo" was redone. The racism was dialed back a notch but it didn't help much. For instance in one of the scenes Tintin becomes a teacher in a Congolese classroom. In the black and white version he says that "Today I will teach you about you fatherland Belgium". In the colour version he teaches math and the students are too stupid to know what 2+2 equals.

      • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        for years

        Wait, we started out with people recognizing it's too racist to publish in English.....and then someone thought 'it's okay now'?