A lot of tintin comics were funny growing up but in retrospect they were pretty chock full of racism
Yeah there's a reason Britain prosecuted Herge for fascist collaboration.
The political commentary is all over the place, with the fictional countries of San Theodoros, Syldavia, and Borduria mixed in with the real ones, and that’s ignoring how herge draws different races, especially indigenous Americans, Africans, and Japanese people.
The indigenous Americans in Tintin in America are absolutely portrayed with an exoticist kind of racism, but I would actually give Herge a bit of credit for also portraying the racist cruelty of the US against them. https://issuu.com/tintinebook/docs/03-tintin_inamerica On page 31-32 Tintin accidentally discovers an oil well in native lands and US treatment of native americans follows. I would actually say it's a pretty strong condemnation of the US. Too bad it's not the focus of the story. I think this particular book is one where you can plausibly use the "racism of the times" argument.
And the racist portrayal of Japanese people can almost be downright excused. Because then we're talking about The Blue Lotus, where he actually attempted to be culturally sensitive for once. He had had some pretty racist (if rare) caricatures of Chinese people in his earlier works, and someone opposed to racism had pointed out that if he was going to set a book in China, would he PLEASE talk to some actual Chinese people first? He put Herge in touch with some Chinese students and it actually worked great. Herge did a complete 180 and provided a stunningly accurate and sensitive depiction of China in the 1930s. He wrote the story in 1934-1935 and set it during the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. And while his Chinese collaborators may have had an incredibly positive influence on his portrayal of Chinese people, they also probably influenced his portrayal of the Japanese. My point is that this racism has its roots in him befriending Chinese people in order to better portray China and Chinese culture and rid himself of his racism against them, and in the process he formed his views on Japanese people based on what the Japanese army had done to what he by that point considered friends. The portrayal IS still racist, but the major reason is that the attempt to get him to stop being racist against Chinese people worked TOO WELL.
...I have absolutely no excuse for Tintin in the Congo. The depiction of Africans is just obscenely racist, even for its time.
Yeah, I agree. There is a context to herge’s racism against Japan and he did some positive portrayals of indigenous Americans. But the Congo is straight up racist. And a lesser known one is the virulent antisemitism in a few panels of the one comic whose name I forget, the shooting star I think, with the mushroom on the cover. Herge wrote it while Germany was occupying Belgium so he just wrote it to be antisemitic and portray the Americans as evil, which, the latter is alright but for the wrong reasons.
