The first two comics are the most controversial: Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, first serialized in 1929, is so transparent in its anti-communist propaganda that Hergé himself tried to suppress its publication in later years. His work on a wartime newspaper allied with the Nazis is well documented, as is the fact that some of his earliest Tintin books disseminated far-right ideas to children.
As I grew older, I learned more about Hergé, Tintin’s creator whose name adorned the top of every album (the name is a play on the inverted initials of his name, Georges Remi). With age, I could add one more thing: familiarity.
#The adventures of tintin series#
But what continues to appeal to me most about Tintin is what attracted me to the series in the first place, the common thread that runs through all the albums: friendship, loyalty, adventure, and, to use a word seldom used anymore, honor. The serialized books- Red Rackham's Treasure and Secret of the Unicorn, Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun, and Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon-are still appealing, more now for how different they are than for their narratives. Flight 714, a story I loved when I was younger, possibly because of the UFOs, hasn’t aged well for exactly that reason Castafiore Emerald, dull when I was a boy, is now among my favorites, precisely because it’s about nothing. Over the years, my favorites changed, as did the things I saw in them.
The yeti’s longing for permanent friendship mirrored my own Tintin’s friendship with Chang was the kind I wanted. My favorite in those days was Tintin in Tibet, a comic whose final frame still makes me emotional. And I counted the days until we visited an uncle who owned the entire collection and guarded it jealously in a locked cupboard, to be retrieved when I visited upon the condition it was treated carefully-a condition I’m happy to say I satisfied. Wheeler bookshop at Churchgate station for the princely sum of 18 rupees.
I read and reread the albums we had I beamed when my father, whose love for Tintin I inherited, bought a new album home from the A.H. We moved every year from one far-flung part of Bombay, as the city by the sea was known then, to another: moves forced by parental job changes and familial instability that meant new homes, new neighbors, new schools, and new friends. Few things in my life were permanent at that time.