Tintin, Hergé and Chang
thewire.in
thewire.in
IMO here are the main differences between Franco-Belgian and American comics:
1. not a single comic (at least the ones written before the Marvel movies began dominating the culture) is about superheroes. Every protagonist is a normal person, though sometimes extremely competent. This results in much more variety in the industry. I'm not sure why they didn't even try to copy the American model if only for business reasons, but I'm thankful for it.
2. Each comic usually gets a single 50-page issue per year. (Seriously, there's a series I've been reading since I was 8, and you can marathon it in a few sittings.) I think this reduces the amount of "filler issues" or low quality churn, as the author has lots of time to get things right.
3. Most of the time the comics are written by the same author, usually the creator of the characters. They're not getting pimped out to every author out there for a run. It makes things more cohesive IMO.
My favorite series is Thorgal, by the author of XIII and Largo Winch. It's a fantasy series set at the time of the vikings, with light sci-fi and magical elements. Think of it like Conan but with a non-violent hero. Read issue 9, The Archers, for an standalone story that can give you an idea of what it's like before you commit. It's been running since the 80s, but once the author retired a decade or so ago, some younger guy took over the writing, and you can see the quality of the writing drop off, so I never kept up. But you got 30 years worth of good books, about 35 issues IIRC.
Or extremely incompetent! Gaston LaGaffe springs to mind, it's one of the most endearing and nice comics that I've had the pleasure to read.
And in a way Asterix is a superhero.
What strikes me about European comics from that era is that they are in general much more interesting culturally.
You must be kidding ! Readymix just doesnt cut it. My favourites are dubbelosix, squareonthehypothenus and dogmatix.
https://www.everythingasterix.com/news-and-views-content/201...
https://www.everythingasterix.com/news-and-views-content/201...
You will find Paul McCartney too. When I read them as a kid in India I missed many of these, not the Beatles or Dubbelosix.
I have read every one of the 'originals' (Goscinny and Uderzo ones) so many times, but even now when I re-read them in my late 40s I discover something that I had missed before. Usually something happening in the background -- mark of stellar writing and drawing.
If it's like in the French original (where Getafix is Assurancetourix, i.e. assurance tous-risques, full-coverage insurance), every single character name is a pun; so keep searching if you're missing some ;)
Panoramix*
Welp, here is my excuse to binge the whole serie once again.
http://asterix.openscroll.org/
There are annotations which explain all the name puns, Latin translations etc.
Eg, in Asterix and the Big Fight, the character Cassius Ceramix - Ceramics: baked clay, earthenware. Cassius is a Roman name. Also a play on Cassius Clay, which was Mohammed Ali's given name
In "Le Domaine des Dieux" (The Manions of the Gods) there is a character called "Oursenplus". This always registered to me as saying "And a bear" ("ours" is "bear" and "en plus" is like "one more" or "on top of that").
Then I asked my colleague: "I don't get this Oursenplus pun from Astérix, can you tell what it means?".
My colleague hadn't read the issue so he didn't immediately catch what I said, but he replied "Comment? Ours en peluche?"
Which, said quickly with a French accent sounds very much like "oursenplush" (with a "shh") and means ... "teddy bear" ("peluche" is "felt"; a plushy).
Half the names are like this. My favourites are Dogmatix, Vitalstatistix and Impedimenta.
For example, the original French name for Dogmatix is Idéfix, which conveys the same idea, but without the "dog" pun.
There are basically no European comics from the silver age period that wouldn't violate the CCA code in some way. American comics were samey precisely because the formulaic stories they told were basically the only ones that were allowed.
So is the little rabbit thing I forget the name of.
They are predominantly children’s books, of course.
Now… Rooi Oortjes isn’t known.
I would argue that Rork - one of my favorite Franco-Belgian comic characters - counts as one. He would not feel very out of place at DC's Vertigo as Constantine's colleague of sorts.
And then there are Asterix and his friend Obelix, who having access to powers unavailable to regular humans, go around solving problems by punching people particularly hard - just like a regular Marvel/DC character would. ;)
> It is a spoof of American super-hero comics that sends up French national attitudes.
I highly doubt that.
Superman/Batman: Metaphor on politics. Control vs freedom.
Spiderman: Corageous journalism can end crime.
New Titans: Family issues thru generations, mostly.
I remember Franco-Belgian comics being more popular around here - partly because those few American comics which you could see on store shelves usually contained a lot of gore, so they were appropriately labeled.
But Tintin and Asterix are very easily available. India has local language translations of Tintin and Asterix as well, example[1].
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tintin+bengali&t=fpas&iax=images&i...
Anecdotally the quality of the Asterix translations are pretty good, too, complete with the funny character names.
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The really big ones (Asterix, the Smurfs, Tintin) of course exist in English, but they're not all that popular, especially in the US. Niche US comic book publishers like Fantasy Flight periodically try to market some of the less-known but good looking F-B comics, but they rarely have the commercial success to have a whole series translated.
Franquin once made a joke about it, in one of the Marsupilami books there's a parodically evil American assassin who claims one if his victims was a Mr. Gagman who made the mistake of trying to introduce French comics to the US market.
I think that to many Americans, Franco-Belgian comics code as "children's comics" due to the drawing style. But most of them are directed at teens or older, just like US superhero comics.
For anyone in North America looking for European comics to read, I review them at PipelineComics.com - there's something in European comics for everyone, from humor to action to drama and everything else.
That's why I consider them more adult comics. I discover something new every time I re-read them.
All the treasure left behind when I moved to the United States.
- most if not all of those characters are french speaking
- lots of collaboration on those characters by French and Belgium author. For example Goscinny worked on Lucky Luke with Morris, the character of Spirou was created by Rob-Vel who is French, then worked on by Jijé and Franquin, etc
- though many were published in "Spirou", there were "Pilote", "Pig Gadget" and all which are French.
I think the whole concept is named "Bande dessinée Franco-belge" (at least here in France, maybe the point of view is different on your side of the frontier ^^)
I.e. the same way we all, wherever we're from, add extra words to define stuff that's not our default expectation ("a new neighbour moved in" if they're someone from the same place as us vs. "a new dutch neighbour" moved in if they're from that other country; or buying cheese in the shop vs. buying french cheese), just as a (subconscious often) time saving measure that there's no need to give the adjective when it fits the normal expectation.
Not that I'm an expert on the international nomenclature of bande dessinée comics - though anecdotally, as a Brit (England, not Brittany haha) who grew up reading Asterix and above all Tintin, I thought of them (and think my parents called them) separately as French and Belgian respectively.
Including some hilarious ones like the smurfstrijd/taalsmurf, a play on the Belgian issue of language.
> "One key problem," said Delporte, "was motive. The Americans might envision a Smurf inheriting money, which then filled the other Smurfs with envy. Or they would picture a Smurf finding some treasure and these riches causing problems in the village. Or… a Smurf would try and sell Papa Smurf's secret formula. Everything they proposed, every plot, revolved around money."
Peyo tried explaining that, for his characters, gain and greed were not even concepts. But these explanations were received as unthinkable. Says Delporte, "All they did was mutter behind Peyo's back. The view was 'This is all so sweet it's giving me cavities.'"
So much text, more like an illustrated book :)
Btw, did you know that Jacobs helped Hergé redrawing the backgrounds of some of the Tintin comics after the war? And Leloup (Yoko Tsuno) also worked for Hergé before starting his own series. There is an interview with him on youtube.
Speaking of walls of text, remember the explanation of the inner workings of an atomic reactor in Destination Moon? That's how 5 y.o. me discovered nuclear physics :]
Tintin is surprisingly portable across generations, cultures, and genres.
I feel like any graphic novel fan would eat up our classics like XIII
I'm not aware of such a culture around francophone comics.
And to the sibling comment: I'd say in the origin countries the same is true. In Japan, kids buy physical manga at the convenience store. In the US, we go to the comic book store and pick up a batch of new releases. Yet somehow both of those have large communities of people scanning/translating/occasionally licensing the works. I wonder why it's different with French ones!
The thing with the French/Belgian comics is that the stories weren't just short skits but real stories. Self-contained in the case of Asterix and Tintin.
As an adult I discovered manga and have never looked back. I've been reading one series for 20 years now (One Piece) and have finished countless others.
I read the Beano weekly which is my understanding of what a comic is, lots of two to three page skits as you say.
I never really got into American comics such as Marvel, I guess they fit somewhere in the middle in terms of being a periodical but with a substantial storyline?
I was at the Hergé exhibition at the Gulbenkian Foundation a few months back and there was a wall with Tintin album covers in every language. It was quite a big wall!
It always confuses me that such a small country is so prolific. If you tell me mthat the us or japan produce a large fraction of the world's comics, that's not surprising as they have large fraction of the first world's population. But Belgium, how do you explain that?
Idealistic guy, always standing up for righteousness, not afraid to be in difficult situations for people who are close to him. Many great moral lessons can be found in Tintin.
They're on YouTube so whenever I feel like watching the 'Uncharted before Uncharted was a thing', I put up Adventures of Tintin (1991).
This was the one Tintin my mum wouldn't let me have as a child - at the time I thought it grossly unfair, and argued that surely she could just point out the aspects that were offensively racist the way she'd point out problematic aspects of anything else she might read to me / introduce to me to read myself.
I don't remember the specifics, as it's the only Tintin story I've only read once rather than many times, but when I did read it in my early 20s I immediately told her that I no longer disagreed with her decision to keep it out of the hands of her children.
In an interview, he told his story wasn't racist on purpose ; he truly believed that was how black people were based on the very few informations he had at the time - he never traveled outside of Belgium.
When he made the next one with a chinese person, he contacted a student who was originally from China to educate himself on how Asia really was, the culture, the people, etc. And that's how he came up with one of the best books of this career.
>Hergé met Chang Chong-Ren for the first time in Brussels in 1934 at the urging of one Abbé Gosset. Gosset, the chaplain to a group of Chinese Catholic students at Louvain University, had been concerned about the racist stereotypes in Hergé’s first two hugely popular Tintin books, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, and urged him to ‘do a little research’ before embarking on his next book, The Blue Lotus, set in China.
I think adults can manage reading things they disagree with and consider inappropriate.
people literally watch horror movies.
The TV series was also pretty good. I still remember the dramatic intro with Tintin jumping from a train on a bridge into a river:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=APrxbp3zpBw
The more recent Tintin movie by Spielberg was also great. It had blockbuster vibes entirely comparable to Spielberg classics like Indiana Jones, but he kept it close enough to the source comic. Unfortunately Peter Jackson never made the second part.
The article mention Tintin in Congo, one of the earliest stories. It was later redrawn to tone down the “white mans burden”-vibe, but the redrawn version is still pretty racist by modern standards. And Tintin blows up a rhinocerus with dynamite.
In “The Black Gold”, Tintin travels to British Palestine and gets kidnapper by zionist terrorists. In the updated version, it is changed to a fictional Arab country, and there are no Jews involved.
The article suggest Chang cured Herge of racism, but this is simplistic. A later album, The Shooting Star, drawn during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, contains some strongly antisemitic stereotypes (obviously removed in the re-drawn version, which also changes the evil Americans into a fictional country).
Herge worked for a newspaper friendly to the Nazis, and this was close to destroying his career after the war.
Tintin is a brilliant series and I find it fascinating how the changing values and politics are reflected in it.
>Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
Btw the redrawing were much more than just toning down racism. Eg in The Black Island all backgrounds were redrawn based on careful research to be more realistic and detailed, and cars and trains redrawn to more contemporary models. This was part of Herges evolution from an initially more cartoonish style to the detailed “ligne claire”-style. (Fans debate which version is best)
The earlier stories were initially published as newspaper strips, but was later colorized and edited to fit in album format.
Note that all edits and redrawings were done by Herge, or by his assistants under his oversigt. After the death of Herge no modifications have been made. Herge didn’t want anyone to continue Tintin ater his death, and amazingly the estate have respected this.
“Zhang had been a street sweeper during the Cultural Revolution,[1] before becoming the head of the Fine Arts Academy in Shanghai during the 1970s.”
The Phantom is more male orientated. Asterix was kinda comical. Marvel and DC to be frank are garbage with no coherent story line. Disney have proven that.
Since Tintin was syndicated in newspapers that might be an entry point. But it's huge world wide, it had to be translated from French to English so the system to translate was already set-up. The Tintin store in Singapore is cool.
The full set, minus Tintin in the Congo which has to be bought separately, is on Amazon etc - https://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Paperback-Boxed-Set-titles/dp/...
Luckily the Franco-Belgian comics have been readily available in Finland and usually with good translations as well although not all jokes can be translated.
From what I've heard, Asterix is notorious on the French wordplays that cannot be translated.
There's so much more ideas and humanity in those compared to Marvel/DC stuff (which I happen to read occasionally as well but they are repeating the same stuff from decade to decade). The Franco-Belgian comics are the reason why I'm contemplating on learning French enough to be able read them in the original language.
And don't forget that the Metal Hurlant comics anthology affected quite a lot of English comics as well.
I don't know in what format people read them overseas but in France I was subscribed to two things :
"Le journal de Mickey" (Mickey's newspaper) Which was a weekly 30-35 pages book with two Disney comics and some articles.
"Mickey Parade Géant" (don't know a good translation sorry) which was a monthly ~200 pages pocket-sized Book aimed more at 15+ children, it had the best stories imo with reccuring ones.
Both of these contained a lot of translated comics from Italy, Spain, etc...
But Mickey Parade Géant always had a page before a story which indicated where it was from and a couple of facts about it's authors, sometimes even small interviews !
These stories remind me of all the multiverse stuff going on in movies nowadays, because each time it was the same characters (Mickey, Donald, Goofy...) With (often) the same personalities but in different roles and times !
I remember one where they were all superheroes (Ultra heroes I think), another where Mickey was a reporter in a big city, or one where he was a doctor ( and a bit unfriendly) in a parody of Dr House.
I should re-read them all in the correct order someday !
My wife is surprised by the fascination with donald and scrooge comics Europeans have.
When my family moved to the US when i was 10, i was shocked that no equivalent existed! And hugely disappointed by the US comic book culture because, although 10 year old me really liked the images, it felt impossible to know what was going on without access to all the volumes.
>.. with good translations as well although not all jokes can be translated.
Funnily enough I prefer reading the Barks and Rosa comics in german translations. One of the original translators put some wordplay and literary allusions into her translations – making them slightly different, but, I think, better:
There even were Latin editions.
Don Rosa is a worthy successor and by far the absolute best duck artist. All his stories are an absolute delight to read.
No wonder he is extremely popular in many countries in Europe (Sweden, Italy), and almost unknown in the US :_
On related note, anyone here familiar with the following Italian comic book series? I grew up reading these, esp. Zagor:
* Martin Mystère - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Mystère
* Mister No - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_No
"I don't understand why diversity in higher education admissions is important."
Imagine if Hergé had met a Congolese student before writing "Tintin in the Congo". The atrocities committed in the Congo Free State (which many credibly term a genocide) were in living memory at the time of publishing; the youngest survivors would have been in their twenties. This is an example of how universities often serve a public good for humanity as a whole, far and away from the notion that they exist simply to grab the highest-scoring domestic students possible and shove knowledge and elite connections down their throats. As TFA tells it, Sino-Western relations were altered for the better by Hergé and Chang's encounter and subsequent friendship.
Also on that note there were certainly plenty of Jews around when Hergé grew up and still he stereotyped them with the typical antisemitic stereotypes of the time. Just because he had a Chinese friend doesn't mean he was any less racist for it. That's a misconception, that's exactly what the US gets terribly wrong these days. Diversity is almost like a religion over there, yet some of the most racist things I've heard were from people that went to those kinds of universities.
Racist or not depends on the upbringing, the ideology one follows and generally if one subscribes to the pseudoscientific idea that there are separate human "races". What color people you know does not directly influence that. Else the world's racism could be cured by everyone knowing someone with a different skin color. South Africa is another sad example for how that doesn't work.
I assume that something about my comment has caused you discomfort, and in being unable to argue against its central holding, you've instead invoked several tangentially-related tropes as straw men. I invite you to instead introspect wrt what about my comment caused you such discomfort that you felt compelled to write your reactionary reply.
Are you claiming people who are pro-diversity (in adults) are also pro-child-segregation? Or just that they are indifferent to it? If it's the latter, isn't it analogous to asking "I see you're raising funds for a chemotherapy charity, but why aren't you raising awareness for frequent screening and early detection?"
Hah. I just reread Tintin in Tibet recently and that panel is genius. Everyone in the restaurant jumps out of their seat with the exception of Professor Calculus who is course too deaf to hear.