Thanks to a Hacker News comment, my kids, ages 7-13. Have been watching an episode of Tintin from the internet archive every week, and they love it. Link: https://archive.org/details/tintinseries43
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!