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Product Description
The Adventures of Tintin (Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of comic strips created by Belgian artist Herge the pen name of Georges Remi (1907 1983). The series first appeared in French in Le Petit Vingtieme, a children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle on 10 January 1929. Set in a painstakingly researched world closely mirroring our own, Herge's Tintin series continues to be a favorite of readers and critics alike 80 years later.
The hero of the series is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided in his adventures from the beginning by his faithful fox terrier dog Snowy (Milou in French). Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash, cynical and grumpy Captain Haddock, the bright but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (Professeur Tournesol) and other colorful supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (Dupond et Dupont). Herge himself features in several of the comics as a background character; as do his assistants in some instances.
The success of the series saw the serialized strips collected into a series of albums (24 in all), spun into a successful magazine and adapted for film and theatre. The series is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, with translations published in over 50 languages and more than 200 million copies of the books sold to date.
The comic strip series has long been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Herge's signature ligne claire style. Engaging, well-researched plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories within the Tintin series always feature slapstick humor, accompanied in later albums by sophisticated satire, and political and cultural commentary.
Amazon.com Review
In Tintin in the Congo, one of his earliest adventures, our intrepid reporter hunts down both criminals and wild game. The story was written in 1930 and first appeared in book form in 1931, and some of the parts are so dated that for years the book was unavailable in English. This edition reprints on black-and-white newsprint the original 1931 version. In one scene, Tintin tells a group of African children "Today, I'm going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!" When the story was updated and colorized (but not translated into English) in 1946, this became a simple lesson in addition. In addition to the colonial attitude, the Africans are portrayed as primitive, simple-minded folk ("He doesn't look very bright," Snowy opines about their guide), and Tintin reveals a brutal side by slaughtering half the wildlife on the continent (including blowing up a rhinoceros with dynamite!) and declaring while pursuing an enemy, "Sure as my name's Tintin, I'll get rid of him once and for all." Herge himself was embarrassed by much of Tintin in the Congo, and it's not a part of the regular canon, but fans who can accept it as a product of its time will enjoy seeing their hero in one more adventure, one that provides a jumping-off point for the much-better-known Tintin in America. --David Horiuchi
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