Reproduced above is page 32 of Tintin au Congo published in the children's supplement of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, "Le petit vingtième", September 18, 1930. Tintin au Congo was serialized in "Le petit vingtième" from June 5, 1930 to June 11, 1931 (110 pages in toto). The album (or graphic novel if you will) was published in 1931. Tintin au Congo is Tintin's second adventure.
The page has five panels organized in what Benoît Peeters called (in his book Case, planche, récit - panel, page, narrative) "Utilization rhétorique" (rhetorical use): the panels shrink and enlarge according to the subject matter enclosed in them. The larger last panel shows nine characters. The second and fourth ones show three. In the second panel Hergé drew, on the left, just one foot of a character that's fleeing the scene. Doing that and adding speed lines the reader gets a strong feeling of speed. Unlike the hero, Tintin, and his sidekick, the dog Snowy (Milou), this character is not cool facing danger. An old automobile and an old train are the props. Hergé cleaned the background and reduced everything to what's essential for his storytelling. The tracks and the stones are there to tell us that the scene happens on a slope.
The train changes its direction dramatically from the first to the second panel. It enters the scene from left to right in the first panel and, in the second one, it comes from the opposite direction. I don't need to remind you that, since we read from left to right, when an object enters the scene coming from the right it's facing us, not travelling smoothly with us. The contrast is even bigger because the train operator is smiling in the first panel (it's a pleasant day, everything is fine, and it doesn't matter that the soot is falling on the passengers because they're black already). A big onomatopoeia follows in panel three and, to everybody's surprise, the car wrecks the train instead of the other way around. Tintin confronts the enraged group in the final panel.
This page is part of Hergé's humorous vein. By wrecking the train he surprised everybody, from Tintin and the train operator to the reader. Only Snowy isn't surprised (she has an exclamation mark in her thought balloon). Knowing nothing about physics she can only say: "what a wreck!" In the next page Tintin wants to make amends. His car will push the train, but, first, the train operator and the passengers need to put it back on track (sorry as he is he won't help though; he just gives orders). They don't want to because they're lazy. Tintin even scolds a gay person (see below).
Hergé's space tends to the foreground for the reasons explained above. André Bazin said that the composition in depth allowed more freedom to the spectator, but Hergé doesn't want that, does he? He has a story to tell and he does it well. If you look attentively to the first panel you can almost hear the train and see it move. The stones, the smoke, the steam, make it move in a way that's akin to Walt Disney's animation of the 1920s and early 1930s. It's obvious to me that the clear line was born in the simplification necessary to do animation during the first decades of the 20th century, not anywhere else.
Tintin's position shows him backtracking, not on the diegetic space, but on the space of the page. Tintin did wrong, but, in page 33, he advances again. The passengers, on the other hand, switch places with him. He ends up on the right of the page in the last two panels. The social order is restored because of our hero’s resourcefulness.
This page is pretty crammed by Hergé’s standards, but the white dominates. Black spots punctuate the page drawing an open “Z” that points to the next page. On page 33 these spots draw a self-contained semicircle that also indicates a return to order. Tintin even manages to conduct the gay man into the circle.
Light is allover the place. Hergé didn’t want to draw a naturalistic lighting because that would imply lots of shadows smearing his perfect world. Lines enclose everything in continuous surfaces. The metaphorical open lines either indicate speed or violence. Other open lines indicate small wrinkles on the slope.
Since we’re dealing with caricature the proportions are all wrong approaching those of a very small child (3,5, 4 heads in the last panel). Tintin isn’t a lot taller in the aforementioned panel with his 4,5 heads, but that half head of his speaks volumes...
Dear readers: please tell me what's wrong with this post?
Domingos Isabelinho
You got it Noah. I would be a complete imbecile not to notice when I was touching the racism in the page(s). This proves, once again, that form and content can’t be separated. However… I think that it is wrong and ambiguous not to say certain things more clearly. For instance: there’s a poor taste joke in the first panel and I didn’t say that it is a joke, that it is in poor taste and that it is one of the most racist images in the history of comics. Not to mention the homophobic stereotype and the stereotype that depicts all black people as lazy people.
I can’t pass the foot in panel 2: black people are also cowards. In another part of the book they’re depicted as stupid and childlike. In these pages they should have said to the powerful white man (boy?) something like: you’re to blame, do it yourself or pay someone to do it if you can’t do it alone. But no, the powerful white man starts giving orders left and right and the black people obey him. Why? Because he could call the army? That’s possible, but, then, isn’t the great white hero a tyrant?
This post could be twice the size. It should be twice the size. No critical work is done until the critic deals with the social implications of the work under scrutiny.
Oh, yes, and how do they look? As ridiculous pastiches of white people. They want to be like their oppressors, but they’re too stupid to understand anything. Plus: those lips, those lips!…
Oh, man! Am I glad that you asked! What a relief!
https://thecribsheet-isabelinho.blogspot.com/2018/10/monthly-stumblings-9-herge.html
The Hooded Utilitarian
Comments are closed
«Os comentários de Domingos Isabelinho são exagerados e enviesados pela sua opinião por Hergé e pela referida obra. Como pode dizer que uma das imagens é das mais racistas que existem? Como sabe que uma das personagens é homossexual? Há outras personagens vestidas de forma ridícula! O que interessa se Milou é macho ou fêmea? Para mim as personagens que se vestem como brancos representam apenas uma parte da população e não a totalidade. Tal como os que não querem trabalhar! Os lábios funcionam como o exagero das feições de uma pessoa para quem faz um cartoon. A obra deve ser analisada no contexto da época e não basta catalogar Hergé de racista! » (Jorge)
https://solrad.co/whose-comics-refining-defining-and-confining-with-domingos-isabelinhos-the-reading-gaze-by-hagai-palevsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq5eezCSCkE
Apart from these racist representations Hergé's world is Manichean and misogynous. In time he got fed up with these simplistic representations of the world and tried to be a gallery painter. Unfortunately for him, he also failed in the intent. He did not fail, however, in creating an industry and becoming a very wealthy man. That is the ultimate success story in our value free, anything goes to make a buck, Western World...
In spite of all this I have some fondness for his bourgeois play (theatre de boulevard), Les bijoux de la Castafiore (The Castafiore Emerald) and for some of his clever formal devices, but that's about it...
(DI)
"Aristophane was a better artist than Jack Kirby, obviously. Joost Swarte is better than Hergé." (DI)
https://thecribsheet-isabelinho.blogspot.com/search?q=herg%C3%A9
The Reading Gaze - Domingos Isabelinho (Chili Com Carne)
These essays were originally published, in a slightly different form, in the magazines Satélite Internacional (Oporto, 2005) and L’indispensable (Nîmes, 2011), Indy Magazine online site (USA, 2004) and on the blogs The Crib Sheet (Portugal, 2008-10, 2015) and The Hooded Utilitarian (USA, 2010-11, 2013). “It was February 24, 2004, 08:27 AM, on the Comics Journal Messboard.” This is the first phrase of my blog, The Crib Sheet. What happened at that particular day and particular hour was that I, fed up with the accusation of not liking comics, decided to write a list of my favorite ones. With that list my answer was: I like comics, I just don’t like the same comics you like. This is the genesis and explanation of this book’s subtitle, “My Comics.” On the other hand, if you insist that I don’t like comics because what’s in this book are not precisely cartoonists, don’t worry, I like them too, they’re just not here yet because I divided the comics corpus in two: The Extended Field and The Restrict Field. This book is, then, an anti-essentialist stance, a cry of freedom from India Ink on board, if you like... Domingos Isabelinho
(...)
Repare-se, porém, nos nomes citados pelos leigos na matéria: Asterix, Tintin, Corto Maltese, Calvin; tudo personagens sofríveis (Asterix é até bastante medíocre) tidas por geniais nos círculos críticos da especialidade. A situação é igual à de um comentador musical que aparecesse em público a proclamar os Beatles como o cume de toda a história da música ocidental. O gozo seria enorme e já teria sorte se não o metessem num manicómio.
Domingos Isabelinho, Nemo, Junho de 1996
