Les adventures de TINTIN
A Personal History
I grew up in Washington state just 50 miles (80 km) from the Canadian border. Which is not close enough to make me Canadian of course, but is close enough to pick up Canadian broadcast channels. In high school I mostly listened to Canadian radio stations (miss u CBC!), but the biggest zone of cultural diffusion was from ages 0-7, when my parents had a big rickety TV antenna on top of our house that was blocked from the Seattle airwaves by a recently built cell tower, so only picked up three channels out of Canada. This had ~some effects~ on their young daughters. Like some sort of tiny homegrown expats, my little sister and I could be brought into a state of despair simply by being reminded that we couldn’t have the Kinder Eggs we would see in commercials. To this day I still find US Olympics coverage kinda off somehow, because I imprinted on the Canadian broadcasts my family would watch in the early 90s. And, if my mom is to be believed, I could count to ten in French before I could in English, because baby me was watching francophone Sesame Street out of Quebec.
Unfortunately, I did not actually learn to speak French in this way. But I do remember watching the French-Canadian Tintin cartoon series as a toddler, which, when combined with two semesters of crappy French instruction at age 14-15, creates a me today who has no natural instinct for verb tenses but immediately gets a Milou/Mille loups pun.
For in fact!— encouraged by Tumblr pal @passingknightly, I have spent the last month or so augmenting my dip into my forensics teen days with a voyage to my most distant past: vague memories of Moulinsart’s roses and caramel-colored sand and blue sweaters. I’ve mostly been reading the original serialized Belgian comics drawn by Hergé in the 1930s-50s, due to being une âme solitaire in my desire to watch the 1990s Tintin cartoons with the French Canadian voice actors and English subtitles, instead of just the fully English language ones that were recorded concurrently. But the bandes dessinées actually have much to recommend them above the animated series imo, including extended plot lines, rampant alcoholism, and the spangly stars effect whenever someone gets conked on the head (these three are often linked). And there was also just something about reading a 1937 comic book in the third month of a global pandemic as a thunderstorm poured down outside and with an oddly midcentury siren sound an emergency alert rang out of my phone announcing a city-wide curfew beginning at 8pm, and by ‘something’ I mean a kind of wartime commiseration.
On that, I do want to note that The Adventures of Tintin are very much a product of their European era, if you’re considering diving in to them for the first time. Content warning for outdated terms & views and a number of downright classical white savior narratives, if those are especially not your thing. At the same time though, you will also not infrequently find some surprisingly socially progressive messaging shot though these very same stories. It’s a mix!
Why should anyone care at all though? Why do *I* care right now? Because Tintin stories are classically comforting adventure narratives. Because they have that simple pratfall logic of the Paddington movies. Because every spring I suddenly want to drink coffee by the window in the morning sun and look at Raoul Dufy paintings, and that’s how Tintin makes me feel.
And, because when we’re talking about historical curiosities of old publications, Tintin himself is a slight, constantly imperiled young reporter who lives in a big country house with a protective, bearded sea captain bachelor named Haddock, in an arrangement that is Never clarified in text.
My successive responses I jotted down at their initial meeting:
- Captain Haddock is drunkenly crying on Tintin within two minutes of meeting him, which was when he literally broke in through the porthole of his quarters. this is a blessing.
- this random strawberry blonde Poptart crashes into his room and tells him to stop drinking and Haddock’s like “Do It For Him”
- THIS SURPRISE PIP-TWINK IN A TRENCH COAT IS LIKE “LET’S RUN AWAY” AND HADDOCK’S LIKE “OKAY!”
- Haddock thought Tintin looked cold as he slept so he lit their rowboat on fire. this is absolutely incredible. it just does not cease. the antic adventures! the emotional insanity…!
Later in this same book:
- a Diogenes reference! I mean sure, we shouldn’t talk down to children
In closing, the Captain sometimes sees Tintin as a bottle of champagne, and now I sometimes see my bottle of French-ass rosé as Captain Haddock
It’s real Tintin hours over here