Tintin: pissing on the yellow?

[imomus]

I'm finally back in Berlin after my trip to New York, Boston, Denver, London, Paris, Brussels and Dusseldorf. I feel like I have a huge backlog of stuff to share with you, but for now I'll just post this glimpse of Brussels as "the town that channels Tintin". Here are some of the boy detective's many visual cameos in a town where his main rival is a little pissing mannequin:



The image of me as Tintin was posted here last year. It's by Staffan Millqvist. (The image next to it is a graduation ritual poster.)

These days, what with the recent debate over whether Hergé was a racist, it may not be so great to be tarred by association with the cowlicked brush-head. But he's still a great read.

At Yamato, a Japanese ramen bar Hisae and I were taken to by show setter-upper Patrick Thinsy, I found a copy of Le Lotus Bleu and photographed every page. Later, on the train to Dusseldorf (where we investigated Germany's biggest Japantown) I translated the book for her off my laptop screen, bubble by bubble.

There's certainly an anti-Japanese streak in "The Blue Lotus" -- the Japanese characters are militaristic propagandists, in league with opium gangs -- but it's made up for by Hergé's compassion for the Chinese and Siamese characters. And really it's prejudice against imperialism rather than Japaneseness per se. Tintin isn't pissing indiscriminately on the "yellow".

Comments

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Have you read Tintin in the land of the soviets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Soviets)? There the factories are made out of cardboard cut outs and a furnace standing behind to make it look like they have a production going on. Also very propagandaistic.

Oh, and the non-official cartoon film Tintin and the lake of sharks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_and_the_Lake_of_Sharks) shows many of the typical influences from eastern Europe that Hergé often included in Tintins adventure.

And then there is the syldavian language (http://www.zompist.com/syldavian.html).

[inuitmonster.livejournal.com]

Whereas what was actually happening in the USSR was substantially worse.