Tintin

I was absolutely obsessed with Tintin as a kid. My dad started reading them to me when I was 5 or 6. I remember bring copies of Tintin to more than one 1st grade show and tell and insisting they weren't comic books. They were books with pictures!

Tintin and his friends went places that were both real and a fantasy to me (The Blue Lotus was in China and Japan, The Broken Ear was in South America, The Cigars of the Pharaoh was in Egypt, Prisoners of the Sun was in Peru, etc.).


The fact that Tintin was a roving boy reporter of indefinite age traveling the globe with his talking dog, snowy and his friend, the crusty, Captain Haddock, never seemed the least bit odd to me. His adventures were thrilling to me. My dad would read them to me at night before I went to bed. Then I would look at them over and over, memorizing the pictures long before I could read any of the words. I brought them with me everywhere and my copies showed their wear (remember finding a corn flake in on once from a hurried breakfast, reading at the table or in the car).

Like lots of things we love innocently as little kids, reading Tintin now is a lot more complicated. I had no idea that it had originally been published in French in 1929 or that it was translated into over 50 languages. All I knew was that my dad had read them as a kid. He liked that there were fast cars, realistic motorcycles and adventures at sea. I liked the colorful pictures, exotic locations and cute doggy side-kick. But reading them now I can't help but feel conflicted about the colonialist racism that pervades Tintin's travels (Tintin in the Congo is a particularly creepy example. I didn't actually have it when I was little, since its offensive depiction of the Congolese is so blatant that it wasn't widely available. But I tracked it down in High School and had no idea what to think).

But like a lot of things it can be understood as something out of its own time, while not excusing its flaws.

All this is why I'm cautiously optimistic about the up-coming Tintin movie. Jamie Bell from Billy Elliot will play Tintin; Daniel Craig will be playing the villain. The first and, theoretical, second films will be directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson. The first movie will be based on The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn.


It tells the story of how Tintin meets Captain Hadock for the first time. Hadock is a down on his luck, alcoholic, former ship captain. They end up discovering that an ancestor of the Captain left maps hidden in replicas of his ship, which lead to his hidden treasure. They don't end up setting off to get the treasure until the next book, making the sequal a resonable idea. The movie is due out in 2010 and is filming now. I am a geek for this stuff so I have high expectations. Everything about the movie seems very promising, but we will have to see how it turns out.