Tintin in America
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Tintin in America (Tintin en Amérique) is one of a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero.
Tintin in America is the third in the series. The first strip was published in "Le Petit Vingtième" on September 3, 1931.
It was published in a black and white album in 1932. The album was reworked and published in color in 1945; this version was shortened to a standard 62-page format. The first American edition was issued in 1973. For this occasion many of the black characters were re-drawn to make their race white or ambiguous.
It is the earliest Tintin album readily available in English translation; the two previous ones can be found, but not easily.
Tintin's best-known disguise in this book is when he wears a cowboy dress because he feels a bit out of place.
Storyline
Tintin is sent to Chicago, Illinois to clean up the city's criminals, after encountering Al Capone's gangsters in the last book, Tintin in the Congo. After being attacked by gangsters several times, he pursues Bobby Smiles - leader of the gangs opposing Al Capone - across the United States and eventually captures him. Tintin mails him in a packing crate to the Chicago police. After capturing several other gangs, Tintin is given a ticker-tape parade and then returns to Belgium.
Notes
The book is rife with historical inaccuracy - particularly the depiction of the Wild West, complete with cowboys and Indians. At various points, American cars are depicted with right-hand steering columns--perhaps Hergé assumed that Americans drove on the left side of the road like other former Colonial subjects of the British. Discrepancies like these were common of Hergé's works before The Blue Lotus.Hergé does show sympathy for the Indians: in the first black-and-white strip Tintin was shown photographing an Indian who was holding a begging bowl. Later in the story an Indian tribe is given twenty five dollars and driven off their land by armed soldiers so the government may access the oil found there.
It is a matter of debate that Tintin's would-be arch-enemy Roberto Rastapopoulos makes his first appearance, albeit simply in a one-off cameo. Someone looking a lot like him can be seen sitting next to Tintin at the banquet from which the hero is then kidnapped. Next to that character is a young blond-haired woman: in the 1932 black-and-white edition of the book this woman is referred to as the actress Mary Pickford, an appropriate companion for a movie mogul.
In the 1980s, some panels were redrawn in order to remove some stereotyped portrayals of African Americans. [link]
External links
- [Tintin in America], in Tintinologist.org
- redirect
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