Why is Tintin's First Adventure so Controversial?

From January 1929 until June 1930, reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy travelled to the Soviet Union, in a new comic strip in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième, juvenile supplement to Le Vingtième Siècle, a conservative Roman Catholic magazine, with the adventure later printed as a book, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. From June 1930 until June 1931, Tintin and Snowy traveled through what was then the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), with the adventure reprinted as a book, Tintin in the Congo.

After these two adventures--written and illustrated by Hergé, the pen name of Georges Remi--Tintin and Snowy went on to have twenty-two other adventures and to earn a place in the hearts and cultures of the world, appearing in some seventy languages and in many countries. Tintin and Snowy may at last become celebrities in the United States with the announced filming of three of their adventures by Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg.

But the first two adventures, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, still stand as an embarrassment for Tintin fans, as they were for Tintin's creator, Hergé, who claimed they were the mistakes of a young man (he was only twenty-two when the first series began) and the products of the culture in which he grew up and was working.

Although for the rest of the Tintin and Snowy adventures, Hergé would redraw the series of weekly episodes in a standard sixty-two page format in color, he never prepared a color version of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. The producers of the superb Ellipse/Nelvana animated television series The Adventures of Tintin (debuted on HBO in 1991) left out both of the first two stories from the series.

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

Wikipedia article here | Tintinologist article here

In their first adventure, originally titled Les Aventures de Tintin, reporter du Petit "Vingtième", au pays des Soviets, Tintin and Snowy set out to cover what is going on in the Soviet Union, a dozen years after the Russian Revolution. What they find is not pretty.

Starving children must declare their allegiance to the communist party to be fed, the communists win an election with guns not votes, and English visitors see what appear to be functioning factories which are just puppet shows. In other words, Tintin, who is arrested and taken to a torture chamber, sees exactly what Hergé's editor, a Roman Catholic priest, wanted him to see in the land of the godless communists.

It may be difficult for Americans who grew up during the Cold War (as I did) to remember, but the ideological opposite of communism is not democracy but fascism. The leftist (but never officially communist) folksinger Woody Guthrie famously labelled his guitar, "This machine kills fascists."

The young idealists who, as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, left to fight Spanish fascism some years later, did so, not as proponents of democracy so much as communists, socialists, anarchists, and labor unionists (more), although they probably would have said, as human beings. Certainly, with the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, Europeans felt more threatened by fascism than by communism.

Looking backward, looking forward with Tintin and Snowy

So, Hergé's rather overstated propaganda was not the best possible beginning for a yet to be beloved character like Tintin. Although after seeing the Soviet Union fall and having new threats to deal with, we can look on Tintin in the Land of the Soviets as dated, the second adventure, Tintin in the Congo, still hits a painful nerve in readers today, so much so that there are calls to ban the book.

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