Tintin and Oriental Ism

8/2/2019 Tintin and Oriental Ism

1/18

33

AJPC 1 (1) pp. 3349 Intellect Limited 2012

Australasian Journal of Popular Culture

Volume 1 Number 1

2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ajpc.1.1.33_1

KEYWORDS

TintinHergorientalismChinaethnicityrace

PAUL MOUNTFORT

Auckland University of Technology

Yellow skin, black hair

Careful, Tintin: Herg

and Orientalism

ABSTRACT

This article frames Hergs The Adventures of Tintin in terms of its treatment of ethnic,cultural and geographic Others. The series has been accused of bundling right wing, reac-tionary and racist viewpoints into its codes of visual representation and storylines. I arguethat the pervasiveness of the series, its institutionalization in francophone culture, and itscurrency as a global franchise makes the question one of particular relevance at a timewhen big-budget productions by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson look set to furthercement Tintins place in popular culture. With other critics I see Tintins Chinese adven-

ture,The Blue Lotus (19341935), as central to addressing these concerns, as even thoughthis fourth album in the series continues to perpetuate certain Orientalist assumptions itrepresents Hergs first serious attempt to depict the Other in less than pejorative terms.What this article does is seek to place The Blue Lotus within theAdventures and theircultural-historical contexts, as well as the corresponding evolution of Herges ideology,thus broadening the Orientalism of the title to encompass not only Asia and the Mideastbut the subaltern and Europes own internal Others.

Herg was one of the most prolific and popular of twentieth century comicsartists, but the shades of ethnic chauvinism that colour earlyTintin adventures

and ongoing questions surrounding his politics have considerably nuanced


2/18

Paul Mountfort

34

1. The Tintin seriespresents challengesfor referencing specificeditions of volumes.For instance, The BlueLotus was serializedin black and white inFrench from 193435 as

Les aventures de Tintin,reporter en Orient/The Adventures ofTintin [Reporter] in theOrient Vol 2 (Vol 1 beingCigars of the Pharaoh).It was first publishedas a stand-alone blackand white volume in1936 in French titledLe Lotus Bleu, followedby a colour versionin 1946. This colourversion was translatedand published in

English in 1983, witha facsimile black andwhite version onlyavailable in English asa collectors edition in2006. In this article Irefer to texts from theAdventures accordingto their originalproduction dates andfirst (colour) Englishedition (unless a blackand white facsimileversion is beingreferred to) followedby page numbers andthe graphic framesconcerned prefixed byan f. E.g. the famousscenes on pages 67frames 57 and 13respectively, in whichthe businessmanGibbons threatensa Chinese rickshawdriver, are referencedas follows: The BlueLotus (193435; Herg1983: 6 f57, 7 f13).

2. Please note: this

article follows theconvention in post-colonial criticismof referring to bothwestern, eastern, thewest, and the eastin lowercase i.e. notcapitalized to reflectthe fact that suchterms do not reflectactual localities andreinforce hegemonicdiscourses such asthose critiqued in thisarticle as Orientalist.The term Mideasthas been adopted

critical reception. This article seeks to contextualize Hergs representationof ethnicity and place in mid-1930s China in The Blue Lotus,1 a work that is

widely regarded as both a masterpiece in its own right and a turning pointin Hergs evocation of the Other. In it he challenges prevailing sinopho-bic stereotypes, foregrounding Tintins friendship with a young Chinese boyhe meets in the course of the adventure and championing a Chinese viewof Japans invasion of Manchuria, the backdrop against which the text is set.Even so, The Blue Lotus is unable entirely to shake off an Orientalist gaze, andraises its own problematics for contemporary audiences, eastern and western.2Contextualizing this pivotal album and the position it occupies within Hergsoeuvre requires consideration of the preceding and subsequent volumes inThe Adventures of Tintin , particularly the works set in Russia, the Congo,the Mideast and Mitteleuropa, locating the Orientalism of the title withina continuum that encompasses the subaltern in general, including what onecritic describes as internal European Others (Wallace 2008: 46). While thescale, complexity and satirical edges of the Adventures defy attempts to scripta straightforward narrative of progressive evolution in Hergs ideology, the

outlines I trace bring into sharp relief the centrality of The Blue Lotus to thedebate.

What makes representations of the Other in this classic series of ongo-ing relevance? Dylan Horrocks could have been speaking for Australasia andmuch of the former Commonwealth when he reminisced that Like manyNew Zealanders, I grew up reading the adventures of Tintin [] Curling up

with a Tintin book was like sneaking off into a private paradise (Horrocks2004). However, Jean-Marie Apostolids, echoing Althussers line that thereno such thing as an innocent reading (Althusser 1968), sounds the cautionthat Tintinology today has permitted us to read Tintin in a very complexmanner [] There is no innocent reader any longer (Apostolids 2010b). This

is particularly true of representations of ethnicity. Summarizing Will Eisner,Derek Royal (2007) points out in Introduction: colouring America: multi-eth-nic engagements with graphic narrative the fact that comics are a heavilycoded medium that rely on stereotyping as a way to concentrate narrativeeffectiveness and further, that

Authors may expose, either overtly or through tacit implication, certainrecognized or even unconscious prejudices held by them and/or theirreaders. In comics and graphic art there is always the all-too-real dangerof negative stereotypes and caricature, which strips others of any uniqueidentity and dehumanizes by means of reductive iconography the bug

noses, the bug eyes, the buck teeth, and generally deformed features thathave historically composed our visual discourse on the Other.(Royal 2007: 8)

This caution could have been scripted specifically for early works in Hergsoeuvre; indeed Royal goes on to cite the Adventures in the very next lineas one such transgression. Another, unnamed, critic cited by Apostolidsattacks Tintin with a curious blend of liberal and reactionary vitriol for thisand other sins:

This hypocrite, this boy feigning innocence, this ugly little monkey

cannot fool us any longer. Its time we exposed him for what he reallyis. Tintin is a forty-year-old dwarf, a colonialist, and a zoophile, with


3/18

Yellow skin, black hair Careful, Tintin

35

in preference tothe more commonMideast because whilereferring to the samegeographical diasporait has not yet accruedthe same connotationsas the latter term. It is

capitalized as, unlikewestern and eastern, itcarries some force asan actual geographicaldeterminant.

homosexual tendencies to boot. This is the despicable character we setup as a hero for our dear little children.

(Apostolids 2010a: 1)

The reference to Tintin-the-hero raises an additional danger in whatRoyal describes as a graphic narrative (2007: 13): its graphiateur to usePhillippe Marions term for the dual author/artist role (Baetens 2001: 147) can produce a more sustained and damaging fiction than a mere caricature.

While a cartoon, for instance, may display reductive iconography for one ortwo frames, sequential art can extend the graphiation and therefore enuncia-tion of a stereotype in time and space. The nature of the medium means thatprogressive dehumanization can occur over the course of a whole novel; inthe case of theAdventures, potentially, an entire series, immersing the readerin a fully-fledged cultural myth. Concomitant to this, graphic narratives thatrevolve around a hero/ine often valorize his or her particular ethnic group, itsfeatures and values, while Other/s become marked, whether consciously or not(try for instance imagining Superman as Meso-American or even Belgian).

The issue should be one of critical concern given the formative place Tintinoccupies in popular culture, particularly in the non-United States anglo-phone and francophone worlds. As a cultural product, the franchise enjoysenviable market penetration: it remains a fixture of many childrens readingdevelopment as well as viewing pleasure, is frequently employed in additionallanguage acquisition, and its iconography is so ubiquitous as to be instantlyrecognizable around much of the world, as attested by the myriad fansitesthat memorialize Tintin in a variety of languages globally. Although he feltmarginalized within the visual arts, Herg was fted by no less influential popartists than Warhol and Lichtenstein (see Lichfield 2006; McCarthy 2006: 31),

whom he influenced, and the inauguration in 2006 of the Herg Museum in

Louvain-la-Neuve the same year a major retrospective of his work openedat the Pompidou Centre in Paris has institutionalized the franchise as partof Belgian-French culture.

In recent decades the Adventures have received significant critical atten-tion, from the tomes of enthusiast Michael Farr to Tom McCarthys Tintinand the Secret of Literature (2006) which pitches the series as a comedic socialtableau comparable to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Molire, Balzac, and the Bronts,as well as modern greats such as Stendhal, Eliot, Faulkner and Pynchon(McCarthy 2006: 9). It is regularly cited in emerging discourses on graphicnovels and comics media, and has been read from a variety of theoreticalperspectives, attracting a particularly vital body of French criticism, including

a seminal work by Jean Marie Apostolids titled Les Mtamorphoses de Tintin/The Metamorphosis of Tintin: or Tintin for Adults (2010a [1984]) that providesboth psychoanalytical interpretations of the albums and a study of Hergsshifting ideologies. There have of course been a number of film and televi-sion adaptations; already a huge commercial concern scrupulously policed bythe Herg Foundation, the franchise looks certain to undergo a major boostin visibility and bankability with the upcoming 3D film versions of TheSecret of the Unicorn (Herg 1959d) andRed Rackhams Treasure (Herg 1959c)to be directed by Spielberg and Jackson respectively. The oeuvre thus occu-pies multiple sites of consumption, clustering around the entertainment,educational and aesthetic complexes of contemporary western culture, where

among other things it interacts with the wider semiotic codes through whichwe construct and engage the Other.


4/18

Paul Mountfort

36

It is no secret that Georges Remi the nom de plume Herg is formed bya reversal of his initials, giving us R. G. imported wholesale into his early

work the right-wing leanings of the staunchly conservative and CatholicLe Vingtime Sicle/The Twentieth Century newspaper where he worked as anillustrator (Farr 2001: 12). Tintins first appearance was in a strip cartoon inthe supplementaryLe Petit Vingtime/The Little Twentieth, where Tintin in theLand of the Soviets was serialized from 10 January 1929. Its reactionary editor-in-chief, a cleric named Father Norbert Wallez, overrode Hergs preferencefor an American debut, stipulating instead the politically charged setting ofBolshevik Russia. Explicit within what would become Hergs signatureseries of ever-rising scrapes and scapes by which Tintin foils the panto-mime cut-outs (McCarthy 2006: 7) of the strips Soviet villains is a doctri-naire vein of anti-Bolshevism common in bourgeois Western Europe at thetime. In one frame Tintin tells Snowy, Look, English communists beingshown the beauties of communism as the working-class dupes commentapprovingly on a showcase Soviet factory that is soon revealed by the boy-hero to be a complete sham (1929; Herg 1989: 26f2). In another, party appa-

ratchiks are pictured soliciting a show of hands in a street-side plebiscite with raised pistols, to which the masses respond with bowed heads (1989:33f2). As Herg later stated, Catholic at the time meant anti-Bolshevik(McCarthy 2006: 37). His subsequent embarrassment over the works propa-gandistic nature meant that it was never issued in colour and he later excusedit, along with the following installment Tintin in the Congo, as one of the sinsof [my] youth (Farr 2001: 14).

Though Herg based his view of Russia partly on compelling contempo-rary accounts of the vices and depravities of the regime (Farr 2001: 12), he

was considerably more reticent on the subject of the Nazi occupation of hisBelgian homeland. The issue of Hergs capitulation or otherwise has been

widely debated, and this article focuses more strictly on Orientalist represen-tations and enunciation in the series. However, it is of course impossible todivorce this from the broader question of Hergs politics, and, certainly, thereis tacit in the very first of Tintins heroic journeys a chauvinistic vein thatplayed well to its reactionary audience and inevitably recalls the rising tide ofnationalism in Europe at a time when the National Socialists were poised toseize control of Germany. Herg himself corresponded with Lon Dagrelle,leader of Belgiums own fascist movement, the Rexists, and shared affinities

with their thinking, though he was not personally a member (Apostolids2010a: 9; Farr 2001: 18, 19, 92 and 118). Early installments of the serial

were quite literally performed on this wider social stage: to coincide with

the dnouement ofLand of the Soviets a teenager with a blond tuft enacted theboy-heros victorious return to Brussels via Cologne to be greeted by raptur-ous crowds (McCarthy 2006: 6), while some weeks later the opening scenesofTintin in the Congo (1930) were also jingoistically enacted by the same actor,

who symbolically departed from the station bound, ominously in retrospect,for the Congo.

The shift to a subaltern setting was to throw into even sharper relief theyoung Hergs reactionary tendencies: his representation of native Africansis of the grossly caricatured juju-lipped Negro variety that mars early Disneycreations, along with many other early/mid-century cultural artifacts. Bundled

with these visual codes is the whole raft of colonialist prejudices: Africans as,

variously; credulous, untrustworthy, bloodthirsty, servile, lazy and childlike.There is little of the documentary realism of the artists later work: Herg, who


5/18


37

unlike his famous creation rarely travelled, did much of his research at theRoyal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren in Belgium (Gewald 2006: 471).The museums very existence is a stark reminder of the historical backdropagainst which Herg drew and wrote: the Belgian Congo was a territory sobrutally administered under King Leopold II, who turned the territory intoone vast labour camp, that it rates as one of the most iniquitous colonizationsin modern European history, the horror of which was immortalized by JosephConrad in The Heart of Darkness (1899). It is estimated that the Congolesepopulation was halved under Belgian occupation from 18901920 fromtwenty million to ten million in a genocide undergirded not only by summaryexecutions but also by the routine torture and mutilation of men, women andchildren (Bate 2003). This would appear to make it all the less forgivable thatHerg unthinkingly reproduces the dehumanizing racist stereotypes used to

justify Belgian colonialism, including the now notorious white mans burdenmotif: in one panel Tintin is attributed the Wisdom of Solomon when hebreaks up a tussle between a pair of Africans who are arguing over a hat bycutting it in two, handing half to each. They respond, as the English transla-

tors have it: White master very fair! Him give half-hat top each one. (1930;Herg 1991: 47). In another, blatantly imperialistic, scene (1991: 64 f2) Tintintells African schoolchildren while pointing to a map Today Im going to talkto you about your country: Belgium! (This was replaced with a basic arith-metic lesson in the French coloured version of 1946, one of many such actsof revisionism in this case spearheaded by Herg, but in other instances bypublishers throughout the artists career.) Recently a Congolese resident inBelgium, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, has litigated to get the album banned,or at least relegated to the adult shelves of bookshops and libraries. At thetime of writing the case, backed by black rights groups, is still working its waythrough the Belgian legal system (AFP 2010).

However, it must be acknowledged that extensive censorship by theBelgian state meant that the full genocidal horror of the occupation was lessevident in 1930 than it is today. There is indeed ongoing discussion of a curi-ous form of selective cultural amnesia framed by Antoon Braembussche in hisarticle The Silence of Belgium: Taboo and Trauma in the Belgian memory(van den Braembussche 2002). With regards to Herg, Serge Tisseron andBarbara Harshav (2002) note in Family secrets and social memory in Les aven-tures de Tintin that he does indeed demonstrate that when it came to racism,he faithfully reproduced the xenophobic mood of his time, especially in Tintinau Congo (Tisseron and Harshav 2002: 145). The artist himself later admittedas much, explaining in the following mea culpa:

The fact is that I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society inwhich I moved [] It was 1930 [] I portrayed these Africans accord-ing to such criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which then existedin Belgium.

(Farr 2001: 22)

For all that, cartoonish caricatures of Africans continue to pop up in theAdventures throughout the 1930s and are often retained in later reprints. The visual codes deployed in Cigars of the Pharaoh (193234) are little differentfrom Tintin in the Congo , as evidenced in various frames that depict Africans

as virtual slaves with, again, exaggerated ju-ju lips representations whichpersisted unreconstructed into the colour version of 1955 (Herg 1971a: 13


6/18

Paul Mountfort

38

f13, 14 f3, 18 f2, 14 f3 and 19 f1), though they do arguably challenge the earlierstereotype of African idleness. While the kitchen-hand throwing slops over-board in The Land of Black Gold (193940; Herg 1972: 11 f2) is penned alongrelatively naturalistic lines, the black serving-boy in The Broken Ear(193537;Herg 1975: 15 f5) is depicted in a convention reminiscent of the now-excisedgolliwogs of early Enid Blyton editions. This frame survived translation fromthe French colour version of 1943 into the colour Methuen edition thatappeared in English in 1975 and, indeed, continues in print.

Yet it is unfair to label Hergs political impulses as solely reactionary,even in the 1930s. As Tom McCarthy notes: almost as soon as this right-wingtendency gets going it becomes shadowed by a left-wing tendency (2006:38). The original black and white version ofTintin in America (193132) offersa blistering critique of capitalism, both implicitly in its depictions of down-trodden urban Black Americans and in its explicit representation of AmericanIndians as the victims of colonial dispossession and ongoing oppression atthe hands of capital, backed by the US Army at gunpoint. Of course, critiquesof Anglo-American capitalism are far from necessarily left-wing in motiva-

tion in francophone Europe to this day. As Apostolids (2007: 55) has argued,Herg placed Tintin in charge of soothing the concerns of a rightist Europecaught in the conflict between communism on one border and capitalism onthe other and that [u]nregulated capitalism was abhorred even more thancommunism (Apostolids 2010a: 9). For all that, it is a testament to Hergsgrowing commitment to verisimilitude it is likeness to reality, after all, that ismost likely to provoke censorship that the colour French (1946) and English(Herg 1978) editions progressively bowdlerized key scenes at their publish-ers insistence, so that, for instance, both a black doorman and mother with

wailing child are literally bleached white in the colour version (Herg 1978: 29f12, 47 f15), along with their implications of ghettoization, due to the unsuit-

ability of mixing races in a childrens book destined for an American audi-ence. Similarly, frames depicting Red Indians as abject were severely toneddown (1978: 16 f78). What remains, however, is an unflattering portrait of

American society as essentially a gangster state: when Tintin as the inno-cent and immaculate (Meikle 2003: 116) visiting European is kidnapped byCapones men they are, tellingly, masquerading as cops, and indeed Hergsdepiction of law enforcement in the Midwest looks like little more than state-sanctioned graft.

Setting The Blue Lotus in mainland China raised the stakes in Hergsrepresentations of the Other, as China was arguably the most Othered civi-lization for Europeans of the period. I use Tintins aside to himself Yellow

Skin, Black hair [] Careful Tintin as a punning point of entry, la Hergsown style, into this multivalent textand the critical issues it raises. In fact, thespeech balloon appears (Herg 1983: 3 f37) when an oriental of preciselythis description, of whom Tintin has been forewarned by a fortune-tellingfakir, visits him in India where he has been domiciled at the Maharaja ofGaipajamas palace from the close of the previous volume, The Cigars of the

Pharaoh. But the phrase can serve as an ironic cipher warning of the risks thenew album posed to Herg in his handling of depictions of race and place inthis ambitious sequel. His cameo roles for Chinese in Tintin in the Land of theSoviets (1929) and the black and white version ofTintin in America as po-facedtorturers (Herg 1978: 67 f3) and executioners (cited in Farr 2007: 78), respec-

tively, were hardly promising. Consequently, when the setting of The BlueLotuswas announced in 1934 a chaplain at the University of Louvain, Father


7/18


39

Lon Gosset, wrote to Herg suggesting introductions be made to some of hisChinese arts students to encourage him to avoid falling into such sinopho-bic stereotyping. Herg accepted, and the resulting friendship and collabora-tion with Jesuit-educated Chang Chong-chen represented a virtual epiphanyfor the Belgian artist. Chang introduced Herg to Chinese art, poetry and,crucially, the political situation (Farr 2001: 5455). The friendship led Hergto strive for a far greater degree of realism than in previous albums. He alsoadopted not only stylistic elements from Chinese line-drawing, contribut-ing to his signature ligne claire (clear line) style, but a sympathetic portrayalof Chinas plight during the Mukden incident and subsequent invasion ofManchuria. Indeed, in The Blue Lotus Herg creates a fictional double of thereal-life Chan Chong-chen in the figure of the youthful Chang, whom Tintinsaves from drowning in the Yangtze River. Thus the Tintin/Chang friend-ship performs metafictionally as a double for Hergs affection for his real-life friend. Less flatteringly, perhaps, McCarthy (2006: 47) reads Chang asa metonym for Hergs remaking of himself as apolitical friendship overpolitics as he put it in an attempt to counterbalance and arguably camou-

flage his earlier chauvinism. This tension between Hergs genuine affectionfor the real Chang and use of his fictional avatar as part of his ongoing proc-ess of revisioning and ideological repositioning sets up a perhaps unresolv-able ambivalence for the critical reception of this and other implicated albums,especiallyTintin in Tibet(195859).

That said, the work is a milestone in the Tintin oeuvre: it remains the mostethnographically, historically and politically rooted of all of the Adventures,praised by Levi-Strauss for its precision and ethnological accuracy (Tisseronand Harshav 2002: 145). Its physical settings are both concrete and redolent

with significance. Tintin enters China via Shanghai, the great port city on theHong-poi tributary of the Yangtze River opened up in the nineteenth century

by colonial powers to international trade and settlements that, along withthose established in other Eastern seaboard cities, acted as quasi-independentterritories dominating the subjugated mainland economically and politically.In the Orientalist European gaze of the early decades of the twentieth century,Shanghai stood as a complex cipher for neoimperial avarice and exoticizeddesire, summed up in such well known epithets as The Pearl of the Orientand The Whore of Asia (Wasserstrom 2001: 263). Others, such as The Parisof the East and The Hollywood of the East, point beyond concrete allusionsto the leafy French Concession and booming movie business of the period toShanghais ambiguous status as an international city at the intersection ofEast and West with an evocative, filmic power for image-making. As a setting

for a graphic novel it places The Blue Lotus within a continuum of contempo-raneous representations of the city including Andre Malrauxs La ConditionHumaine/The Human Condition (1933) and Mao Duns Midnight (1933), andfilms such as the famous Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932) andthe Shirley Temple vehicle (Wasserstrom 2001: 264) Stowaway (William A.Seiter, 1936). Subsequent shifts in the balance of economic and thus geopo-litical power have of course propelled Chinas great metropolis global centre-stage, making interrogation of the various palimpsestic layers of its graphicdepiction more germane than ever.

How then does The Blue Lotus acquit itself in rendering the city and itscomplex intercultural and political relations? Under Changs guidance, Herg

displays acute awareness of the political and economic situation in the early1930s. The International Settlements established by colonial powers French,


8/18

Paul Mountfort

40

3. Translations of all theChinese charactersthat appear in TheBlue Lotus can befound at http://www.tintinologist.org/guides/books/05bluelotus.

html.

British, American, Japanese are evoked with sharp documentary realism, asare the interactions that take place among their representatives. When a rick-shaw bearing Tintin stumbles into a rich American on the street, the busi-nessman, Gibbons, is shown raising his walking stick to cane the Chineserickshaw driver, only to have it seized by Tintin and snapped in half (Herg1983: 6 f57, 7 f13). Later the same bow-tie and spats-wearing compradoris seated in a Shanghai restaurant. He asks his fellow capitalist cadres Cant

we even teach that yellow rabble to mind their manners now? (Herg 1983:26 f57, 7 f13). The White Mans Burden theme that Herg reproduced sounthinkingly in Tintin and the Congo is explicitly parodied. Gibbons rages thatIts up to us to civilize the savages and goes on to extol all the benefits ofour superb western civilization. He is interrupted only when his expansivegestures upset the tray of a Chinese waiter, who is abused by Gibbons asyellow scum and threatened with a beating: Ill teach you respect for yourbetters! (Herg 1983: 6 f712). Running parallel to these implicit critiques isan often explicit subtext supplied by Chang Chong-chen in Chinese charac-ters in street scenes where banners and streamers proclaim statements such as

Abolish unequal treaties (6 f5) and Downwith Imperialism (7 f1) (Tintinologist 2007).3 While The Blue Lotus was fted byChiang Kai-shek and Herg consequently invited to visit China, it was addedto the long list of banned foreign books during the Cultural Revolution anirony, given the longstanding complaint exploited by the Communists in thelead up to the founding of the Republic that the unequal treaties of the1800s that had allowed foreigners to exert control over Chinese land haddone enormous damage (Wasserstrom 2001: 268). Some of Changs slogans

were later censored on other grounds: for example, in the 1983 MethuenEnglish-language release Down with Japanese products! becomesthe innocuous Great Luck Road (The Blue Lotus 2010), reflecting

Japans growing status as a western ally and industrial powerhouse.Hergs Shanghai is brooding and oppressive, anticipating the stifling feelof later filmic evocations of occupied wartime territories, such as Casablanca(Michael Curtiz, 1942). Beyond Shanghai, China is brought alive with a sympa-thetic eye, quite unlike the crude and inaccurate depictions of Russia and theCongo. Japanese militarism is comprehensively demonized, most specificallyin the famous series of frames (Herg 1983: 2122) depicting the cynical stag-ing and propagandistic use of the Mukden incident the so-called Manchuriancrisis as a pretext for the full scale invasion of the Chinese mainland.

But does The Blue Lotus evidence a fundamental shift in Hergs represen-tation of the Other? On the surface the text reads or may viewed as a form

of atonement for the crudely biased representations of his earlier albums. In apivotal set of panels (43 f113) where Tintin rescues a drowning Chang fromthe Yangtze River, the bewildered boy asks Tintin, But why did you save mylife? The pair then go on to trade their respective cultural stereotypes. Amongthem, Tintin observes, Lots of Europeans still believe [] that all Chineseare cunning and cruel and wear pigtails, are always inventing tortures, eatrotten eggs and swallows nests a direct intertextual allusion to Hergs ownpig-tailed Chinese torturers in The Land of the Soviets (1929). They must becrazy, the people in your country, Chang replies laughing. Other stereotypes,including culinary practices, are then dissected.

Comments on discussion blogs by Chinese undergraduates in a Popular

Genres course I taught from 200408 provide some insight into how acontemporary Chinese audience may view this and related scenes in the


9/18


41

album. The discussion threads invited participants to comment on the inter-cultural relations underpinning the work. While many found the fictionalfriendship of Tintin and Chang compelling, some felt that in his defense ofChinese customs against European stereotypes Herg perpetuated furthermisunderstanding. For instance, several students pointed out that in Chinapreserved eggs are relished and that birds nest soup is a great delicacy.

Arguably, there is an attempt here to make the Other palatable to a Europeanaudience by stripping it of elements that are too powerfully Other; ironically,in other words, a sympathetic portrayal involved some degree of de-sinoiza-tion of the Chinese. Other students, while taking pleasure in Chang Chong-chens strategic placement of anti-imperialist slogans throughout the text andcondemning Japanese atrocities on the mainland, took exception perhapssurprisingly, given the periodic resurgences of wartime resentments toHergs representation of the Japanese villain Mitsuhirato as pig-snouted andtherefore risibly subhuman.

These anecdotal responses touch on a paradox identified by critics at the heartofThe Blue Lotus: in order to humanize the Chinese not only are the Japanese

dehumanized, as is emblematic in Mitsuhiratos depiction (18 f13) according toa visual lexicon that reproduces almost perfectly western anti-Japanese wartimepropaganda, but markedly Chinese features are arguably erased, albeit, perhaps,unconsciously. Alexander Lasar-Robinson writes in An analysis of Hergsportrayal of various racial groups in The Adventures of Tintin:

If we can assume that racism can be defined by the identification ordisengagement from a group of peoples, then we can begin to see inThe Blue Lotus the deasianization of the Chinese versus the hypera-sianization of the Japanese.

(Lasar-Robinson n.d: 6)

He argues that the typical reductive iconography of slit eyes and other exag-geratedly Asian features are attenuated in the depiction of the Japanese butlessened for the Chinese, who are represented with more neutral i.e.European features in order to make them appear less alien and confront-ing. This racial typing anticipates intensifying anti-Japanese graphiation asthe war progressed, typified by Milton Caniffs Terry and the Pirates (193442)strip (see Mullaney 2007). Panels printed in both guidebooks for AmericanGIs shipping out and domestic American newspapers bore titles such asHow to Spot a Jap, pointing out the supposed differences in appearance,behaviour, and speech between the Japs and our oriental allies (Strmberg

2010: 16). It might also be argued that the Tintin/Chang relationship perpet-uates European paternalism in the representation of Tintin as the Chineseboys saviour paralleling Hergs own comment that he assumed a feelingof responsibility for China (Farr 2001: 57) though this is mitigated by thefact Chang will repay the favour, saving Tintins life several times before hesets sail from Shanghai. Nor should we underestimate the relative boldnessof Hergs position: few European intellectuals regarded China, the poor manof Asia, with much sympathy at the time and the artist faced considerablecriticism for his stance, including a Belgian general who fumed at him on thesubject ofThe Blue Lotus, This is not a story for children [] Its just a prob-lem for Asia! (Farr 2001: 55).

There is also the question of the extent to which the album represents aturning point in Hergs wider body of work. Here it is necessary to briefly


10/18

Paul Mountfort

42

address the most damning accusation levelled against Herg: his allegedcomplicity with the Nazi regime following the occupation of Belgium in May1940. Herg cannot be characterized as pro-Nazi: he presented himself formilitary service in defence of Belgium but was turned down and retreatedbriefly to Paris. Where his actions become contentious is in his return toBrussels following the surrender in response to Leopold IIIs call to Belgiansto remain in their homeland (McCarthy 2006: 39). There he took up penagain, this time for Le Soir, a stolen i.e. conscripted by the Germans magazine where the Tintin adventures appeared recto-verso with Nazipropaganda, including anti-semitic diatribes. This has placed serious scru-tiny on Hergs productions during this period. Unflatteringly for its author,The Shooting Star(1941; Herg 1961) originally presented a New York-based

Jew named Blumenstein as the mercenary, if bumbling, villain of the piece.Blumenstein happens to be leading an American expedition against the pan-European crew Tintin and his friends have assembled to plant the flag onthe fallen meteor, at the precise historical moment that the collaborationistBelgian government was assisting Germany in the deportation of local Jews.

Ole Frahm, however, argues that Herg was actually seeking to defuse thestereotype of the malevolent Jew by revealing Blumenstein as ineffectual andtherefore, by implication, the Jewish menace as a paper tiger (Frahm 2010).

Yet in its original serialization for Le Soir, The Shooting Starpresents a decid-edly Axis view of the contemporary situation and represents Herg at perhapshis most anti-American in the same year the United States joined the war.Unsurprisingly given the post-war climate, the English colour version (Herg1961: 24 f14) glosses New York as the fictional Central American countryof So Rico while Blumenstein is only half-successfully de-semitized asBohlwinkel. (Moreover the arch-villain of the entire series, Rastapopolous, isclearly Jewish in early volumes though Herg works hard to obscure this in

later albums and reprints.)If it seems that Herg had thrown in his lot with the powers of dark-ness, however, the following work, King Ottokars Sceptre (193839), appearsto argue otherwise. The eponymous king of the fictional Syldavia is a benignmonarch threatened by an attempted coup at the hand of a treacheroususurper named Msstler, an amalgam as Herg later pointed out (Farr2001: 82) of Mussolini and Hitler. Tintin foils the villain and preserves themonarchy, which can be read as a symbolic, if armchair, defence of legitimateEuropean rulers, or at least the anciens rgimes , against Nazis in the years ofthe Anschluss (1938) and invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland (March andSeptember 1939, respectively). Of course, this simultaneously testifies to a vein

of reactionary Romanticism whereby Hergs boy-hero relishes swooning inand out of royalty and the bourgeoisies castles (Madondo 2008: 174). In fact,Ottokars kingdom is an impossible retreat from contemporary political reali-ties into a valorized national/istic past, lending support to accusations againstHerg of, at the very least, extraordinary naivet. As Apostlolids comments:

This type of authority corresponds quite neatly with French modelsof absolute monarchy, and in particular with Louis XIV. This form ofgovernment was also promoted by the right in France and Belgium,between the two World Wars. At the moment when he began his career,Herg personally shared this rightist point of view, which he conserved

for a long time. (Apostolids 2007: 53)


11/18


43

The subsequent wartime double-albums, The Secret of the Unicorn (194243)and Red Rackhams Treasure (1943), reinscribe this Romantic vein in theirfetishization of aristocratic lineage; a fixation that is, after all, a form of chau-

vinism rooted in a quasi-mystical view of familial bloodlines which, as severalcritics have noted, is literally encoded into the very fabric of the Tintin meta-narrative through multiple embedded verbal punning and visual codes (seeTisseron and Harshav 2002: 14753). It is almost as if a politically impotentHergs only response to the pervading Nazi myth of racial supremacy asplayed out on the regional stage is to retreat into a private myth of privilegedgenealogy that maps the way back to a mock ancestral estate.

Orientalist critiques have also been levelled at Herg with regard to whatDickie Wallace, in criticizing Sasha Cohens Borat, describes as internal EuropeanOthers and Europes Oriental-in-the-backyard (Wallace 2008: 46) namely the representation of all things Slavic in King Ottokars Sceptre. Wallacelumps Hergs Syldavia in with a clutch of fictionalized Balkan states:

[] the apocryphal Ruritania, Agatha Christies Herzoslavia, Tintins

Syldavia, Dilberts Elbonia, Lil Abners Lower Slobovia, Chitty ChittyBang Bangs Vulgaria, Tom Hanks Krakozhia, or modern dentistry-lessMolvania, or Grouchos Freedonia.

(Wallace 2008: 46)

He goes on to argue that These Balkan sounding every countries are inter-nal European Others, the convenient fictions to the east that make fictionsof the west possible.

Similarly, K. E. Fleming, author among other works of The MuslimBonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pashas Greece (1999), accusesHerg of the fallacy

[] that Balkan countries are more or less interchangeable with andindistinguishable from one another, that there is a readily identifiabletypology of politics and history common throughout the Balkans, thatthere is such a thing as a Balkan ethnic or racial type.

(Fleming 2000: 121819)

She goes on to suggest that in the very act of rendering real-world territoriesas fictionalized pastiches he, like Agatha Christie, reproduces representationsthat are cartoonish and therefore degrading a kind of cartographic equiva-lent of colonialist deracination that erases the genuine contours of the region

concerned:

Yet even as Herg and Christie assume that they know somethingfundamental about the Balkans indeed, that they know the Balkansso well that they can effortlessly construct fictional Balkan worlds both Herzoslovakia and Syldavia point to an even more pervasive, andapparently contradictory, assumption about southeastern Europe. Thisis the belief that the Balkans are so hopelessly and intrinsically confusedand impenetrable that there is scarcely any point in trying to distinguishbetween them; a novelistic or cartoon substitute is, in fact, eminentlymore manageable and presents less of an authorial problem than does

the real thing. (Fleming 2000: 121819)


12/18

Paul Mountfort

44

Arguably Hergs retreat from actual to virtual locations was part of an attemptto couch theAdventures in the realm of the symbolic, since representations ofactual locations had so often proved problematic for him. The resulting simu-lacra do not, however, offer much cover from postcolonial criticism when thebasis of Orientalism in Saids foundational sense is that the Orient is not anactual location but a construct based on various elements Othered in west-ern discourse. However, whether or not his portrayal Orientalizes Europesinternal Others, Hergs Syldavia and neighboring Borduria revisited inDestination Moon (195053), Explorers on the Moon (1954) and The Calculus

Affair (195456) are, while ostensibly Slavic, less Balkan' than Central orEastern European. Arguably the intention of King Ottakars Sceptre is notto construct an ethnically-tinged Balkan every country but a fictionalizedMitteleuropa that frames an old-rightist attack on new-fangled fascism, whilethe 1950s albums cast the region as a site of Cold War anxiety in which west-ern technological prowess is pitted against its would-be usurpers.

Certainly overtly racist and rightist points of view are by now on the wane intheAdventures. If chauvinism persists, it is more of the passive kind that recalls a

collective gestalt in which European societies were less alert to issues that havesince been foregrounded in critical and postcolonial discourses. The Seven CrystalBalls (194344) and The Prisoners of the Sun (194648) show western science andinformation technologies (Tintin knows of an impending eclipse from a scrapof newspaper) triumphing over Incan superstition (he is able to use the knowl-edge to free himself, Haddock and Calculus from being ritualistically sacrificed).However, the Incans themselves are depicted in no less dignified terms than thenarratives European subjects, and the shock created by the intrusion of foreign

visitors into their secretive domain dramatizes in miniature the continents colo-nial history. As far as the Mideast is concerned, there are scenes in The Landof Black Gold penned 193940 but not released in colour versions in French

and English until 1958 and 1960 such as Thomson kicking an Arab at prayersin the backside (Herg 1972: 22 f79) and the two Thom(p)sons crashing theirjeep through the wall of a mosque (34f46) that could land a graphiateur inhot water today, but they do not appear to be racially motivated as such and ifanything reflect on the idiocy of those two perennial dolts more than the localinhabitants. (Similarly Tintin and Haddock don burqas and pose as Arab womenin The Red Sea Sharks [195658; Herg 1960b: 2426]. This may be culturallyoffensive but is nested within a satirical thematic of mask and masqueradethat runs through the volume, making it hard to characterize the episode asactively racist.) In the album followingBlack Gold, The Crab with the Golden Claws(194041), stereotyped Arab characters persist, but Herg presents an apparent

volte-face in revealing a Japanese gentleman, who readers suspect is a villain, tobe a police inspector in fact fighting on the side of the boy-hero (Herg 1971b:5 f1011, 61 f68). It is offered as if to compensate for the deforming carica-ture of Mitsuhirato in The Blue Lotus though of course by this phase in the

war Japan had thrown its lot in with the Axis powers, having attacked Russia in1939 and Pearl Harbor in 1941. As often seems to be the case, Hergs positionin these years was a complex mix of old-fashioned conservatism and alternat-ing ambivalence towards both the Axis and Allied powers, with representationsof the ethnically and politically Other/ed occupying a continuum ranging fromstereotypical to sympathetic, even liberal, views. Hergs later revisionism in thepost-war period further and deliberately complicates the picture.

Another, more comprehensive attempt at revisionism occurs in The RedSea Sharks, where Haddock and Tintin work to rescue African pilgrims from an


13/18


45

international people-smuggling ring. Here ruthless Arab traders working withinRastapopulous organization have imprisoned a dozen or more African Muslimsin the hull of the merchant ship Ramona, transforming the vessel into a modern-day slave galley. Here Herg confronts in symbolic form the reality completelyelided over in Tintin in the Congo: the tyrannical conscription of African labourfor economic gain that is the historical root of modern Belgiums and indeedthe wests prosperity. In a series of frames distributed over four pages (Herg1960b: 4750) Captain Haddock strives to convince the hapless pilgrims that the

voyage to Mecca is a ruse and that only slavery awaits them. After some guile-less responses that see him fly into a rage and heap abuse upon them (bone-heads [] coconuts, 50 f11) the Africans finally realize their plight and agree tobe guided by the Captain and Tintin. Critical reactions to this episode, however,

were far from what Herg hoped for. As Farr writes:

It [] offered Herg scope to prove that he was not the racist his detrac-tors made him out to be on the basis of the early Tintin in the Congo,a dated and prejudiced view he had tried to distance himself from.

However, his well-intentioned portrayal of trapped African pilgrimsliberated by Tintin and Haddock was to backfire []

[Herg responded] Oh, there, once again, I am a racist. Why? Becausethe blacks speak pidgin! At least thats the opinion of the weeklyJeune

Afriquewhich dragged me through the mud on account of it.(Farr 2001: 152)

The whole incident falls flat in terms of its intended purpose, making Africanslook both foolish and in need of a great white hope to save them. The pidgin,

which is modified in the later colour editions, merely adds insult to injury. Inthis case, at least, the excuse of Hergs naivet seems to carry some force.

Tintin in Tibetis notable for reviving the Tintin/Chang friendship, in hiatussince The Blue Lotus. It is a portentous adventure, commencing when Tintinhas a prescient dream that Chang has suffered an accident. Convinced heis alive, Tintin persuades the reluctant Captain to accompany him into theHimalayas to rescue the boy, who is ultimately discovered in a Yetis cave.Here the reciprocal flow of heroism in The Blue Lotus Chang rescues Tintinseveral times becomes decidedly one way, insomuch as it is Tintin who isunambiguously the hero, reinforcing the paternalistic motif. Further, unlikethe 193435 work, Tintin in Tibet is resolutely apolitical. Despite it dating toa crucial phase in the Chinese occupation halfway through the albumsserialization the Tibetan Uprising occurred and the 14 th Dalai Lama fled thecountry, after several years of unrest Herg avoids levelling the kind of criti-cism Japan cops in The Blue Lotus. The rescue by a European of a Chinesenational stranded in the Tibetan Himalayas is a curiously discordant motifin relation to the albums cultural-historical moment. Where The Blue Lotusseeks to foster our understanding of Asia, albeit from a sino-centric view-point, Tintin in Tibet apparently abandons this project in favour of trave-logue. The albums colourful temple and stark mountain scenes are strikinglyrendered but act as little more than elegant wallpaper against which the mainaction occurs. And yet Apostolids (2010b) notes that Herg regarded thisas the most important of all his works. The text is pervaded with Tintins anxi-ety for Chang, and is fraught with gushes of emotion unique in the series:

a metafictional allusion to Hergs own feelings at a time when he had lost


14/18

Paul Mountfort

46

contact with Chang Chong-chen, who was caught in the upheavals of theCultural Revolution.

Appeals to the personal as a solution to the thorny problem of Hergspolitics lead critics into uncomfortable territory. In A new theory of graphicenunciation Jan Baetens (2001) notes how in the United States the partic-ular traces that identify a graphiateurs work tend to be seen as personalattributes, whereas European criticism, following Philippe Marions Traces enCases/Traces and Cases (1993), prefers to foreground a larger set of elements[comics] share with other media, particularly narrative and communica-tive strategies (Baetens 2001: 146). He criticizes Serge Tisserons recourse toauthorial biography in his psychoanalytical analysis of Hergs work:

Tisserons psychoanalytical readings in his book on Tintin are an especiallyblatant illustration of the traditional biographical mode of decipheringa work of art. Tisseron links characteristic elements of Hergs narrativeand style with his past experiences. [] Although such a reading is stim-ulating, its methodological premises have become completely outdated.

The biographical translation of personal trauma in the work of art andthe no less biographical denigration of it in the authors comments onhis own work may have been useful during the first decades of psycho-analytic aesthetics, but they are no longer accepted today.

(Baetens 2001: 151)

Baetens, however, is speaking specifically about Tisserons claims regardingthe alleged psychological basis of Hergs juxtaposition of sharp and curved(drawn) lines. While this is indeed a shaky contention, it does nothing to obvi-ate psychoanalytical readings of the text per se.Norshould it bar discussionof metafictional elements such as the Chang/Tintin relationship that Herg

plants in the text both as a dramatized analogue of his real life friendship andfor his own purposes, as he works ceaselessly to reposition the Adventureswithin the liberal, post-war world.

Apostolids (2007, 2010a, 2010b), McCarthy (2006), Farr (2001, 2007) andother critics have discerned a decisive shift to the left across the series as a

whole to the point that Haddock in The Castafiore Emerald (196162) welcomesgypsies onto his ancestral estate out of pity for their squalid social conditions, andthese proverbial outcasts are depicted in almost bucolic terms (see for instance196162; Herg 1963: 40 f810). The flared-trouser wearing eponymous hero ofthe last completed album, Tintin and the Picaros, goes so far as to sport a peacenikCND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) symbol on his motorcycle helmet

(197576; Herg 1976: 1 f4). It is a remarkable transformation from the colo-nialist [] zoophile Tintin of the first two albums a boy-hero with roots inthe quasi-militaristic Boy Scouts who is disturbingly reminiscent of the super-child ideal (Apostolids 2007) promoted by fascist youth movements in the late1920s and 1930s. Tintin may hardly have aged in terms of physical years, butHerg certainly evolved him to fit the times. Arguably of course Tintin remainedthe white-skinned hero more or less fted in the end, at least by adoringcrowds of various ethnic hues, a Eurocentric hero myth redolent with chauvin-istic assumptions. But all cultures have hero myths, even if anti-heroes are morethe current flavour of popular culture and graphic narratives in particular. AfterThe Blue Lotus, theAdventures never descend to the level of caricature, of sheer

crudity, of the early works, and nor do they reproduce the reactionary narrativecodas that accompanied them. Perhaps the most damning take, however, on this


15/18


47

apparently progressive evolution in Hergs ideology is that the shift was lessa sea-change than a calculated set of tacks made according to which way the

wind was blowing. In this analysis, Herg always follows the convenient path(McCarthy 2006: 46) and only remakes himself in order to obfuscate his war-time duplicity, subtly erasing sources of opprobrium through a constant revision-ing of his earlier work to create acceptable fare in the post-war period.

However, for all that The Blue Lotus and subsequent volumes cannot escapethe clutches of Orientalism and thus continue to fall into the trap of caricature,the work itself was an act of moral and political courage for its time and showedHerg capable of radically transforming his perspective. Other/ed countries andcultures would no longer serve solely to reinforce conservative, rightist world views.Had that not been the case had Herg further cemented his early reactionaryleanings within the wider context of the march of Fascism across the Europeansubcontinent he might have accepted the offer to work as official illustrator forDagrelles Rexists (Farr 2001: 91) and been remembered today solely as a propa-gandist, a kind of Belgian Leni Riefenstahl of pre-mid-century sequential art. This,however, is far from the case. Critics are right to interrogate the less than savoury

subtexts embedded in the early volumes and never perhaps entirely vanquishedfrom view; the unnamed critic quoted by Apostolids who terms Tintin a despi-cable character and accuses him of right-wing tendencies and latent homosexu-ality in the same breath, however, demonstrates the dangers of being tone deafto the complex ideological rifts in the series. Taken as a whole, Hergs universe istoo multivalent and ambiguous, too riddled with puns and ellipses, to be framedin such crude terms. The oeuvre, indeed, has proved surprisingly open to multi-ple interpretations to being read in complex ways, to paraphrase Apostolids.The extent to which The Blue Lotus and the metonym of Tintins friendship withChang, in particular, constitutes a turning point in the series from Ecos closedtext to an open text, from Barthes readerly to a writerly one, is likely to remain a

topic of debate in its critical reception. Questions remain with regards to Hergstreatment of various Others that appear throughout theAdventures, but there islittle doubt that the album is a fulcrum between the rampant chauvinism of theearly offerings and the more liberal sensibility expressed in later ones. The BlueLotus remains a pivotal, if flawed, classic of Orientalism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of Shanghai NormalUniversitys Foreign Affairs department for supporting me as a visiting scholarthere during September and October of 2009 as I pursued research for this

article and other projects.

REFERENCES

AFP (2010), Belgium anti-racism group urges Tintin in the Congo ban,23 November, http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gh-ViqxSx9i6SH1vj7IDxLkR-sNw?docId=CNG.f69720995ef9c81316d8484442fd9eca.1f1. Accessed 1 December 2010.

Althusser, L. (1968),ReadingCapital, Paris: tienne Balibar. Apostolids, Jean Marie (2007), Herg and myth of the superchild, Yale

French Studies, 111, pp. 4557.

Apostolids, Jean Marie (2010a), The Metamorphosis of Tintin: or Tintin forAdults (trans. Jocelyn Hoy), Stanford: Stanford University Press.


16/18

Paul Mountfort

48

Apostolids, Jean Marie (2010b), Keplers Launch ofThe Metamorphosis ofTintin: or Tintin for Adults, US: FOTA.tv.

Bate, P. (2003), Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, London: BBC.Baetens, Jan (2001), Revealing traces: a new theory of graphic nnunciation,

in R. Varnum and C. Gibbons (eds.), The Language of Comics: Words andImage, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

The Blue Lotus (2010), Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Lotus. Accessed 1 December 2010.

Farr, Michael (2001), Tintin: The Complete Companion, London: John Murray.Farr, Michael (2007), Tintin & Co, London: Egmont.Fleming, K. E. (2000), Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan historiography,

The American Historical Review, 105: 4, pp. 121833.Frahm, Ole (2010), Die Sprache des Comics/The Language of Comics, Hamburg:

Philo Fine Arts, 2010.Gewald, J. B. (2006), More than red rubber and figures alone: a critical

appraisal of the memory of the Congo Exhibition at the Royal Museumfor Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium, The International Journal of African

Historical Studies, 39: 3, pp. 47183.Herg (1983), The Blue Lotus, London: Methuen. (1975), The Broken Ear, London: Methuen. (1960a), The Calculus Affair, London: Methuen. (1963), The Castafiore Emerald, London: Methuen. (1971a), The Cigars of the Pharaoh, London: Methuen. (1971b), The Crab with the Golden Claws, London: Methuen. (1959a), Destination Moon, London: Methuen. (1959b), Explorers on the Moon, London: Methuen. (1958),King Ottokars Sceptre, London: Methuen. (1972), The Land of Black Gold, London: Methuen.

(1962a),Prisoners of the Sun, London: Methuen. (1959c),Red Rackhams Treasure, London: Methuen. (1960b), The Red Sea Sharks, London: Methuen. (1959d), The Secret of the Unicorn, London: Methuen. (1962b), The Seven Crystal Balls, London: Methuen. (1961), The Shooting Star, London: Methuen. (1976), Tintin and the Picaros, London: Methuen. (1978), Tintin in America, London: Methuen. (1991), Tintin in the Congo, Tournai: Casterman. (1989), Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tournai: Casterman. (1962c), Tintin in Tibet, London: Methuen.

Horrocks, Dylan (2004), The perfect planet: comics, games and world-building,in M. Williams (ed.), Writing at the Edge ofthe Universe: Essays Arising fromthe Creative Writing in New Zealand conference , Christchurch: Universityof Canterbury Press, pp. 197223.

Lacassin, F. (1972), The comic strip and film language, Film Quarterly, 26: 1,pp. 1123.

Lasar-Robinson, A. (n.d.), An Analysis of Hergs Portrayal of Various RacialGroups in The Adventures of Tintin, http://www.tintinologist.org/articles/analysis-bluelotus.pdf. Accessed 1 December 2010.

Lichfield, J. (2006), Tintins Big Art Adventure, The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/tintins-big-art-adventure-429869.

html. Accessed 1 December 2010.


17/18


49

Madondo, B. (2008), Vanity farce: the African issue, Transition , 98,pp. 17079.

Meikle, J. L. (2003), Stranger in a strange land: a history of transatlanticexchange,American Quarterly, 55: 1, pp. 11320.

Mullaney, D. (ed.) (2007), The Library of American comics: Terry and the Pirates,vol. 1, NY: IDW Publishing.

McCarthy, Tom (2006), Tintin and the Secret of Literature, London: Granta.Royal, Derek P. (2007), Introduction: colouring America: multi-ethnic enga-

gements with graphic narrative,MELUS, 32: 3, pp. 722.Strmberg, F. (2010), Comic Art Propaganda, London: St. Martins Griffin.Tintinologist (2010), Guides/books/the blue lotus, http://www.tintinologist.

org/guides/books/05bluelotus.html. Accessed 1 December 2010.Tisseron, Serge (1994), All writing is drawing: the spatial development of the

manuscript, Yale French Studies, 84, pp. 2942.Tisseron, Serge and Harshav, Barbara (2002), Family secrets and social

memory in Les Adventures de Tintin, Yale French Studies, 102,pp. 14559.

van den Braembussche, A. (2002), The silence of Belgium: taboo and traumain Belgian memory, Yale French Studies, 102, pp. 3552.

Varnum, R. and Gibbons, C. T. (eds.) (2001), The Language of Comics: Wordand Image, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Wasserstrom, J. N. (2001), New approaches to old Shanghai: review ofBeyondNeon Lights: Everyday Life in Early 20th Century Shanghai by Lu Hanchao,Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32: 2, pp. 26379.

Wallace, Dickie (2008), Hyperealizing Borat with the map of EuropeanOther, Slavic Review, 67: 1, pp. 3549.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Mountfort, P. (2012), Yellow skin, black hair Careful, Tintin: Herg andOrientalism, Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 1: 1, pp. 3349, doi:10.1386/ajpc.1.1.33_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Paul Mountfort is Chair of the Centre for Creative Writing, Auckland Universityof Technology, where he teaches in the area of popular genres and transmediastorytelling. His primary research interests are in the performance of mixedmedia texts in relation to narrativity and world-building. He has spoken at(American) Popular Culture conferences in San Diego, Atlanta, San Francisco

and New Orleans. He Chairs the Comics and Graphic Novels area for thePopular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (popcaanz). Hisstudies of popular oracle-texts texts used by VUPs (Viewer/User/Players) incontemporary divination Ogam: the Celtic Oracle (London: Random House,2001) andNordic Runes (Rochester: Destiny Books, 2003) have been publishedin the United Kingdom and United States, and translated into two Europeanlanguages. In 2009 he was a visiting scholar at Shanghai Normal Universityand Tianjin University of Commerce.

Contact: Department of English and Applied Linguistics, School of Languages,AUT University, Private Bag 92006, Auckland 1142.E-mail: [email protected]


18/18

Studies in ComicsISSN 2040-3232 (2 issues | Volume 1, 2010)

Aims and Scope

Call for Papers

Editors

Tintin and Oriental Ism

Documents

Transcript of Tintin and Oriental Ism