Celebrating the timeless allure of Tintin's aesthetics
collegetowns.substack.com
collegetowns.substack.com
Here they are:
1) https://archive.org/details/01TintinInTheLandOfTheSoviets/01...
2) https://readtintin.blogspot.com/
PS: Also Asterix comics - https://readasterix.blogspot.com/
Like, the parts of Tintin that capture the imagination, the world travel, the realistic depiction of different cultures, the great adventure stories, all of that starts with Blue Lotus.
When people criticize Tintin for being racist, what they're really criticizing are those early stories. In the later stories, the ones that everyone falls in love with, Hergé went to enormous trouble to depict cultures accurately, gathering huge amounts of references to depict everything accurately (you see that in this article, with the image from Blue Lotus). In these stories, almost without exception, Tintin is the champion of colonized and oppressed peoples, and the stories hold up extremely well.
Wikipedia as usual has the details - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin#Contr...
Note: The archive.org collection has some parodies and pastiches which are decidedly not meant for children - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin#Parod...
Practically every other character is a man.
The females rank even lower than the Tintin's dog, in heroic exploits.
Which is okay as a superhero story, but if one is terrified of their children being incapable of separating fact from fiction or inability to develop their own understanding of the time and environment these were created in, they may not be ideal.
There are a bunch of other problems too.
* I'm not big on everything having to be about equal representation all the time, but there is a glaring omission of women. Which I guess would be okay given the times, but the few that do show up are vain, narcissistic, selfish -- Castafiore and General Alcazar's American wife are two I can remember.
* Haddock can get a little racist when he's drunk. It does help that most of his more colorful insults are so old that they've fallen off the treadmill and kids wouldn't understand what they mean (or maybe they've been censored in recent editions?).
* Speaking of which, depictions of Haddock's alcoholism are for comedic value. Tintin often enables and exploits his addiction and gets him inebriated in order to consent to things he had refused. While his drinking usually ends in disaster, he generally comes out unscathed or even ahead and faces no real consequences.
* Non-whites / savages are often treated as simpletons, emotionally driven, gullible and superstitious. Quickly resorting to violence, being fooled by ventriloquism or other cheap tricks, terrified of spells and gods, etc.
I'm skeptical whether these kinds of things actually harm children. I read these as a young child and could recognize all these issues and understand they were based on stereotypes or opinions, but again if people don't think their children are capable, I would advise reading them first. Ones where he stays in Europe are generally pretty safe IIRC.
On a completely different note, it's funny in the English editions, they seemed to me to imply that he's living in Britain, but if you keep an eye out you can spot the inconsistencies. Cars drive on the right, he takes a ferry to get to Scotland, etc.
Just as a couple of examples, one from each, which I believe are fairly representative of the tone (and probably my favourite bits in each):
• Car breaks down, so pull the engine apart completely, then realise it was a flat tyre, so punch a guy, chase him till he’s out of breath, then stick the valve in his mouth so he reinflates your tyre; then toss all the bits of the engine back in, throw away the few bits that don’t fit, drive off, and remark about how reliable these cars are.
• When hunting a rhinoceros and bullets don’t work, drill a hole in its hide (somehow unnoticed), put in some dynamite, light the fuse, hide behind a tree, explosion, rhinoceros obliterated, and say (loose translation) “oops, guess I used too much dynamite”.
The latter incident was removed from the 1975 edition of Tintin in the Congo by Hergé (45 years after initial publication), and by then he said he regretted its big game hunting stuff (understandable; that and the race issues certainly haven’t aged well!). But really, it was never supposed to be taken seriously, it was a fun and gloriously unrealistic story. Instead of getting upset, I wish people would just enjoy its absurdity, as I think was originally intended.
But definitely don’t treat those two as containing the same Tintin as in later books. They feature his slapstick humour twin brother.
As this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42691442 points out even the later ones were biased but at least they are just tired old cliches and stereotypes without being overtly racist.
also books like the le petit nicolas series, little nicholas, by Sempe & Goscinny (who also did asterix) so funny and great for children!
If you liked Tintin and long for more comics of the same kind, I recommend you to try Blake and Mortimer. They're different (e.g. with a more serious and wordy style, hardly any comical gags, but also with more fantastic elements). But they are the closest I know, and in some aspects even better (I personally prefer them although I'm aware it's due to very subjective factors, most people would still rank Tintin higher overall and Blake and Mortimer don't have such a universal acclaim).
The only thing I dislike about the post is the gratuitous rant on AI at the end. It is great news that Tintin joins the public domain. Especially great because it's one of these cases where the owners have been especially abusive, chasing fan efforts done as a labor of love, lest they harm their sales of overpriced merchandising.
Why exactly should be worry about people generating AI images of Tintin? What is the harm done? We know what the original albums are, they will probably be preserved as long as there is human civilization (despite copyright, not thanks to it), and we can freely decide if we also want to read/watch/see derivative works (and which) or not. I just don't see the problem at all.
Oh, and evil AI! Right in the first album. Had totally forgotten about that.
There is no copyright in the character anymore, so there’s nothing to protect.
I really do not understand this perspective. Do people also wish to use legal force to prevent others from working with, for example, Gainsborough, or Moliere, or Julius Caesar, or Homer? Come on: at some point something has to enter the public domain and become part of the shared treasure of all mankind.
Well, yeah, it absolutely is easier to imagine civilization collapsing than to imagine it a world in which human being do not expect to benefit from their efforts. Noting, of course, that "capitalism" as you mean it doesn't really even exist in the first place, as it's just an analytical model used to describe patterns of behavior that emerge from the motivations people already have.
limit to last year
I get: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-civilizatio...
(The end of the world as we know it? Theorist warns humanity is .)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine...
(It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of ...)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/apocaly...
(A History of the End of the World - The Atlantic)
https://medium.com/write-a-catalyst/imaging-a-world-after-ca...
(Imaging a World After Capitalism - Medium)
https://orwellsociety.com/can-we-truly-rebel/
(Can We Truly Rebel? - The Orwell Society)
Yes I think that's known.
Astral Codex is about AI, so maybe we'll get the end of the world, and the end of capitalism, and huge quantities of AI slop Tintin!
"Capitalism" construed as some entity unto itself simply does not exist. There is no "end of capitalism" that isn't itself an element of a general collapse of social organization and economic exchange.
And the problem here is that the things you're arguing against aren't particular to that emergent pattern -- they're the lower-order motivations that inform the underlying behavior itself.
There is no "analysis of capitalism". Your either analyzing real-life human beings or you're analyzing imaginary phantoms in your own mind.
Both are equally impermanent ideas
If it falls, "we" won't get to reevaluate them, because neither of us will be allowed to express any opinion at all, let alone anything resembling political influence.
But my point stands: being against a law because it wouldn't make sense without capitalism is a silly reason to oppose something when we live under capitalism for the foreseeable future
You might think that. But the kind of people who show up to tear down a system from the inside aren't very democratically oriented, even if that's the rhetoric they espouse to rile up the crowds they need to tear it all down.
I would expect that most of those artists don't mind the journey into public domain. Rather, the are against large corporations hoovering up that treasure and regurgitating it with a profit motive.
the fact that you can’t enjoy a good image or not without wondering whether or not it’s an AI image is the problem here; not the AIIn the same way we defined "fair use" for those reviewing a movie for instance to be ok, but we don't find it acceptable to put 99% of the movie with a single comment.
If a work is in the public domain, that means that people are free to copy it, redistribute it, modify it, and create derivative works from it, using whatever tools suit them.
Fwiw, I think its a tragedy that our great works of culture can be appropriated to sell Coca-Cola and merchandise
I'm asking questions about what I could only interpret as a moral proposition.
> I honestly care about the end result.
You're applying normative criteria to evaluate something, whether it is the initial action or the consequences that proceed from it.
But before we event get to normative evaluations, I'm trying to understand what the substantive difference in the two things you're comparing are. It's seems bizarre to consider something to be the cultural inheritance of humanity as a whole, and then complain about certain humans adapting it to cultural activities that you for some reason don't like.
> And the end result seems to be going in the same direction as movies, as the range gets narrower in terms of what's produced, and everything is a sequel, remix, reshuffle of previous work.
The vast majority of all creative work has always been a remix or reshuffle of previous work. When we were younger, and were being exposed to things for the first time, everything seemed novel and original.
Maybe the first time you saw The Lion King, it didn't occur to you that it's essentially a rework of Hamlet, or you never counted how many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation were based on recycled plots from Homer. But this has always been going on. Sure, it's a little bit more explicit today when you are dealing with big Hollywood productions, since Hollywood has built up a large library of its own output to remix and reshuffle, and people do want to see new iterations of the specific things they grew up with.
Still, amidst all that, there's a lot of novel independent creative work being produced. By definition, though, that's all going to be found in niches and not in the mass market -- but it's always been that way.
We've also had a massive shift in the specific media people use to express creativity, thanks to the internet. Lots of small-scale independent work just gets self-published on YouTube these days, and doesn't filter through the mass-market studios and publishers anymore. Consider that the increased ability for independent creators to work outside the legacy media has the effect of also limiting the amount of novel work that the legacy media have access to.
> There are exceptions, but their percentage is far lower than in previous decades.
And vastly higher than in previous previous decades. Compare modern movies to the stuff that Hollywood was putting out during the era of the Hays code. After the collapse of those restrictions, there was an outpouring of pent-up creativity that lasted a few decades. Maybe modern movies aren't as distinct or creative as the ones from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but try comparing them to the average film from the '40s, '50s, or '60s.
> You're applying normative criteria to evaluate something
I'm explicitly not trying to be objective, purely trying to judge the end result, if I like or dislike it, and what I estimate the future products would look like if the trend continues. I want a world where humans want to create, where the creative process itself is rewarding, and where our common culture is filled with most of the best works. I have no arguments further than that is what I want.
> it's essentially a rework of Hamlet
When humans rework something, they impart a piece of themselves into the final product. The end result feels like it has soul. An amalgamation designed to maximize revenue no longer feels like it has soul.
> try comparing them to the average film from the '40s, '50s, or '60s
You're right, some periods were really worse. I don't want to emulate those. But there were miraculous decades in both music and film that I want to use as a benchmark, since we know what's possible at least.
Well, that's definitely a moral proposition. And it's also a good description of the world as it already is.
> When humans rework something, they impart a piece of themselves into the final product.
Personally, I've never encountered any human residue while watching a movie or reading a book. Only memes that propagate independently of their point of origin.
I've also never encountered any "soul", though I have often encountered enjoyable, enlightening, and relatable works irrespective of whether the creators intended to maximize their revenue.
> I don't want to emulate those. But there were miraculous decades in both music and film that I want to use as a benchmark, since we know what's possible at least.
If you use the absolute best of everything as the benchmark against which to measure everything else, and you oppose the very existence of anything that doesn't measure up, then you are fostering an environment that is exactly the opposite of the world you claim to want.
In that case, I think we're simply debating if we like vanilla or chocolate.
I find modern culture to be crap. Whatever arguments you have against this, the fact still remains that I not longer can find what I want, something I once had.
I don't care if it hurts the economy or makes the lives of some people worse, I want movies that I enjoy watching.
So did Socrates. Ironically, being jaded about contemporary culture is older than the hills.
My own personal feelings aren't that far off from yours -- a lot of aspects of life seem to have been much better in the past, especially in the '90s -- than today. But I'm only in my mid-40s and understand that my particular perceptions are likely informed by the bulk of my life experience taking place during a particular time slice of what very well may be a recurring cultural cycle.
Looking at how the overall cultural mood of American society has developed over time, I think I would have liked living between the 1920s and 1970s far less than today, but agree that things seem to have been getting particularly bad over the past ten years or so.
Well, Socrates did have some good points. Even in the Golden Age of Pericles, there was some breakdown of trust between citizens, and professional litigators started making money by simply bringing random people to court.
Even when there's growth, you can still have decline in many areas.
My point is that even though decline is inevitable, the rate and magnitude of that decline can be somewhat controlled, but the discussion has to start from acknowledging the situation and what can be done.
While Coke commercials didn't create the image of americanized Santa as is often claimed they helped shape it. Wily Wonka and the chocolate factory is widely viewed as a classic despite it being a giant Candy ad
> Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers and they each often try to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other's factory. Because of this, both companies became highly protective of their chocolate-making processes. It was a combination of this secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic, machines in the factory that inspired Dahl to write the story.
https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_...
> Wonka Bars were created by Quaker Oats (in conjunction with the producers of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory). The movie was funded largely by Quaker Oats for the intention of promoting the soon to be released Wonka Bars. However, Quaker Oats chose not to market the bars, instead selling the brand to their manufacturer Sunline.
> Other varieties of Wonka Bars were subsequently manufactured and sold in the real world, formerly by the Willy Wonka Candy Company, a division of Nestlé. These bars were discontinued in January 2010 due to poor sales.
I'm not sure if a style is something that can be destroyed, but I don't think AI has done that yet.
That the old movies exist* does not redeem the current franchise for me.
*: albeit in reality the original films are being preserved by fans and not by the official rights holder.
It's not unreasonable for an author to want their creation to be enjoyed as it was designed to be, but not torn apart to be reassembled in different ways.
/s
Seriously, you can't and should not want to stop others from creating derivative works of works that are in the public domain. Sure, some such will be horrible, so you ignore them and hope others do too. But some will be creative in ways you could not have imagined before seeing/hearing/experiencing them.
If you are proposing some creating some new framework distinct from copyright for restricting the way people may adapt ideas originated by others to their own use cases, that calls for a great deal more explanation and argumentation than you've yet offered.
You're also failing to understand that I am not even making a claim that there should be a difference, I'm merely pointing out that your dismissal of the artists that wish to prevent Tin-Tin from being gentrified is shallow and essentially amounts to 'that's the way things are'.
When people ask 'why is x wrong' the answer isn't usually 'because it's against the law'. This is a boring statement and sheds no real light.
The problem with that perspective is that the concept of copyright originates from and only exists within that system. Copyright itself is a legal contrivance. If you want to propose some other way of doing things, you need to argue from first principles and articulate the normative assumptions that you are starting from.
> I'm merely pointing out that your dismissal of the artists that wish to prevent Tin-Tin from being gentrified is shallow and essentially amounts to 'that's the way things are'.
And I'd like to merely point out that entire concept of a cartoon being 'gentrified' is something that you and/or the people you're attributing these opinions to have just made up out of thin air, and what you're actually implicitly arguing for is creating a new type of copyright that restricts what other people are allowed to do, without offering any justification for that additional system of restrictions in any meaningful way.
Copyright, at least in the US, stems from a pragmatic desire to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", and not out of some normative notion that ideas ought to be treated like rivalrous property simply because some people have emotional attachments to them. If that latter proposition is what you're bringing into the discussion, you need to explicitly argue your case for it, and not just sneak it in like it's something everyone already understands and accepts.
The original intent of the copyright law is now of little interest and little use in the onslaught of A.I.. A.I. Cannot survive without a relaxing of the copyright laws:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-...
Copyright law may have been created early on to promote progress, through profits, but now, in the wake of both the SCO Group lawsuits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Novell,_Inc.
I would disagree with your use of the term "Gentrification." As gentrification implies "Gentrification is a process that occurs when a community's values and profits are raised, often displacing long-time residents. The term was coined in 1964 by British sociologist Ruth Glass." raising the values... where as A.I. may just result in the perversion of the values and destroy the profits.
That's great, I'll keep that in mind next time I'm building a legal case for the artists in the attached article. Until then, I'll keep an open mind and not dismiss opinions about what should be the case on the basis of 'that's not the law'
I will say that the idea that certain works that have artistic and cultural significance shouldn't be plundered and watered down for corporate gain isn't overly complicated and fits entirely within the framework of "promoting the progress of science and useful arts". Preservation of existing successful ideas and mythology is important, and existing ideas and mythology can absolutely be ruined by new works produced by uncaring entities
Should this actually be the law? Maybe its implementation would be impossible/too messy/hurt more than it helps. I don't know. Is it good that people have opinions that go against the status quo, and should we dismiss those opinions by saying 'that's not the status quo'! Yes and absolutely not
"One of the guys had brought a comic book porn magazine of the ******."
The current system protects the rights of the owner for a while, and the opportunity for nefarious use by trolls, while it prevents the innovation for other beneficial uses like the association with benevolent organizations.
This is not a hard problem, its a very hard problem, for which the current frameworks used to be merely inadequate, are not woefully inadequate, to the point of being very damaging to the intent of the artist, and to the artistic process.
Pornography might be a problem, specifically as to this case or even generally -- many think reasonably think it is. Pornography does generally get less protection than other contents/speech, so you could limit the sorts of pornographic contents that are ok, and you could ban pornographic parodies of historical persons and characters that have entered the public domain. You could even see an outright ban on all pornography, which would completely solve that part of the "problem" that you see. But distasteful use of works that have entered the public domain is absolutely not a problem in and of itself because we have long ago decided that all works eventually entering the public domain is a very desirable outcome.
And exactly how similar must the new production be? Can there be any deviation from the exact words written by Doyle? It seems your rule would certainly ban the excellent BBC production of Sherlock [0]
What about Shakespeare? It seems this would ban the entire writing and production of West Side Story (of course a 1950's riff on Romeo and Juilet) [1,2].
That sounds like a permanent extension of copyright, with a limited media exception.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018ttws
[1] https://www.westsidestory.com/
[2] https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/west-sid...
Derivatives have to be allowed to differ markedly from the original, even offensively. As you point out, the definitions problems that arise in trying to control derivatives are intractable / inherently political rather than legalistic.
There is plenty of old art that I deeply appreciate, and see most new copy and riffing attempts as lame at best, but some are just brilliant. I don't think even the idea of shutting it down after the copyright period makes sense, even beyond the utter impossibility of drawing sensible boundaries that would not be endlessly argued...
Both are good but I guess they come from a different background and tradition. You have Joachim Phoenix playing a joker without Batman, but people would never understand why a new Tintin would have a different art style than the old one. It would be very confusing even to me.
And the rightsholders (Tintinimaginatio, previously Moulinsart) are very aggressive about it, even more so than Disney. They don't have the lobbying power of Disney, but they are going to do everything in their power to protect and possibly overstep their rights. It includes using trademark laws and publishing new Tintin adventures against the will of the original author as an attempt to renew their copyright.
( in Dutch )
https://www.livreshebdo.fr/sites/default/files/assets/docume...
EU (which is not the whole of Europe) has regulation that allows a copyright owner to opt out of data mining for AI training. But the framework is incomplete: there does not exist a generally agree-upon method to actually opt out. There are a few protocols and file formats from a couple of organisation but none which has been given any official status. While a publisher may use one, a web scraper might support only another.
Japan has traditionally been quite strict on copyright law. I would not be surprised if the law would get tightened to explicitly disallow AI training on copyrighted works.
I vividly remember my disappointment that some of the richer kids just got their own 'subscription' to the Tintin/Asterix comics at home, and therefore often spoiled the stories for those of us dependent on the school library.
Was very non-Tintin like behaviour, I have to say .. which I eventually trumped by bringing to school a well-worn Lucky Luke collection that had been gifted to me, in order to share with the oik kids, exclusively ..
The rocket design in that one is SO iconic.
Looks like the whole thing is on YouTube [2].
The Dalai Lama himself bestowed an award on the Herge Foundation for this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin#Award...
Can't find it, this is going back 19 years ago now. I grew up in Hartlepool and went to college there.
I sometimes think it's the artsy design which feels so warm. As an 11-year-old, I was mesmerised by them. I didn't understand a ton of things Captain Haddock said with English being the 2nd language.
The adventures were sooo good. I saw the movie when it came out more than a decade ago and it brought back so many memories.
Even today, I love it's aesthetic design a lot. I discovered Asterix and Obelix when I was 17 and they had similar vibes and energy with their designs in them too.
Popular Indian comics at the time (Chacha Choudhary and others) were great too but the design aesthetic were worlds apart.
But most of Herge's Tintin stories remain out of the public domain and still protected by copyright. Correct?
The first story (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, a real stinker, this is before Tintin became Tintin) was published in 1930, in Le Petit Vingtième which was the children's edition of the newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. The newspaper presumably had copyright to the character, but it was shut down in 1940 by the Nazis. After that, Tintin was published in Le Soir (still exists), but I have no idea how the rights transferred. From 1950 onwards, it was published by Hergé's own company.
But Tintin will run out in 2053 in Europe because Herge is European.
In U.S however Tintin is public domain. You can use Tintin for things in U.S just don't try to go to Europe with it.
on edit: this applies of course to Tintin in the land of the Soviets.
Also copyright is not the same as a trademark, and I expect "Tintin", and perhaps the visual image of Tintin, are trademarked.
Hergé's depiction of black people was pretty awful, sadly. I know that many folks don't like to admit that Tintin in the Congo[1] exists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Sovi...
It's unfortunate, but a lot of literature of the time needs to be read with the general ambient racism that was sloshing around in mind.
There's no way those cartoons would be released, today.
[0] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/asterix/images/b/ba/The_ma...
I have since, almost entirely forgotten the language :(
My favorite Tintin fan art: https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3270528/random-cool-tinti...
I moved to France in 2007, married a French girl in 2011. I obtained French nationality beginning last year. During my first years in France it was tough, but those 4 years did come back.
A couple of years ago I also amortized 4 years of German when I had to translate our ontology into German.
My conclusion : the ROI on learning a language is better than you think. And your investment will come back to you.
If you want to top up your French, try watching Netflix in French audio, or with French subtitles (or both!). Or even better, watch some of the French shows that they now offer : Call My Agent, Lupin, etc)
Perhaps try slowing down the video?
Also, there is a French / German public broadcaster called Arte. They have amazing content (documentaries, concerts, etc). Generally things where the Words Per Minute rate is a lot lower.
One of my favorite shows is Karambolage. 20 minute items about French and German culture, spoken in perfect French at a leisurely speed.
Then, in his late 20s, he was travelling the world and ended up in the French island of La Reunion (kind of like Hawaii with French food and social programs).
He married and has two children and is only now, after more than 30 years and acquiring French citizenship, is he talking about moving back to Canada.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel that old comics focus on exploration and discovery. I grew up with the aspiration to visit those places, and I hope to pass that feeling on to my kids.
Are women not expected to explore, discover the world, enjoy adventures, solve mysteries?
(I don't want to complain; it's just an observation.)
But, you're in luck, there's Yoko Tsuno [1], also by a Belgian, I believe, but started 40 years later.