This week on Totally Tintin, the final episode of the series: Ian and Dave answer your questions, give us their final thoughts and give out some well-earned thanks. And let us just say here: thanks to all of you who have listened to the show and who have added their thoughts and comments (here and on Facebook) throughout the run. Ian and Dave have really appreciated all your help and enthusiasm for this great comics series.
So, thank you for listening and keep a little bit of Tintin in your hearts – but also a little bit of Haddock. Blue blistering barnacles, we thank you all!
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We didn’t have the time to do them but here’s a video game review of…
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Not a review but some gameplay of Tintin on the Moon
Some gameplay from Tintin in Tibet
From Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun
And Tintin: Destination Adventure
Thanks for all the time and effort you put into these podcasts!
One last question… were Tintin albums easier to find in Canada than the United States from an earlier date? That’s my impression but I could be wrong. Perhaps that limited Herge’s influence in America?
Hi Colin– Yes. As somebody who grew up in various places in North America in the late 1970s, and 1980s, I can say that the Tintin books were very uncommon in the western USA during this period, while more accessible all over Canada. I think the animated TV series helped boost their popularity, along with the earlier success of fellow Franco-Belgian cartoon superstars, The Smurfs.
And Thanks Ian and Dave for a very enjoyable series of podcasts. I’m a lifelong fan of Hergé and the world of Tintin and you guys managed to find some interesting insights into the series that I’d never encountered before.
How come there’s no Totally Tintin shirts?
Lawyers.
Good reason.
I think i said this before but The Black Island isnt just England there is a whole load of Scotland in there as well.
I try to be inclusive and say Great Britain or Britain, but then I fall back into bad habits and say England. I am not discounting Scotland, which I have visited several times and love very much.
Just catching up on the last couple episodes after spending the last few weeks getting married and traveling a bit– thanks for mentioning my comic!
You can read it at jonnycrossbones.com if anyone here is interested. I’m in the middle of doing some edits and hope to be updating again soon (it’s been about a five year hiatus…)
Congratulations, Les! I also enjoyed your tutorials on the site as well. Love process posts!
Ooops, arrived too late to this party to ask my questions, but here we go anyway:
What do you guys consider the closest thing to Tintin North American comics? (I would say Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy, but even then that’s a stretch).
Hergé appreciated the work of younger European cartoonists who followed in his footsteps, Moebius and Franquin in particular. Was he aware of Kirby, Eisner and Tezuka, and do we know what he thought of them?
Hi
Just found your podcast and have listed to the first few. Thank you for taking the time to make these. I am fairly new to Tintin and so far have just read the first four books. I’m now planning on reading them all and listening to the podcast that goes with each one.
The background information you give in each podcast is great.
Do you have any plans to make a similar podcast for the Asterix books?
Alex
Thanks Ian and David, loving the podcast and about half way through them now. Forgive me if this question has been asked and answered before, but what is the intro/outro music?
Hi Simon,
The show’s theme was the main theme for the video game Tintin on the Moon.
Thanks for listening!
I found the discussion on racist depiction of black people to be quite patronising: equating stereotypes of black people with stereotypes of fishermen and opera singers shows a deep lack of understanding of racism. the racist depiction should be condemned, not excused. Then we find out that Herge collaborated with the Nazis: other people fought against the Nazis but he chose to preserve his own class position and collaborate. Wasn’t there also one Tintin called in Bongo Bongo Land? So he was a racist, his artistic ‘talent’ aside.
Thanks Ian end David for this wonderfull podcast.
PS; Cowboy Henk was drawn by Herr Seele, not Joost Swarte.
I think you’re confusing Cowboy Henk with Jopo De Pojo 😉
Thank you for the correction, Xavier. Who knows what I was thinking about!!!
And thank you for listening to the podcast. 🙂
I know this is very late to the party, but I just finished the podcast series and wanted to say how much I enjoyed “hanging out” with you guys and talking about Tintin. Much like David, I’m a long time Canadian Tintin fan who first discovered his adventures in French in my school library in the early 1980s. Even though I’ve read all the same books that David said he used for his research, I really appreciated how you distilled them into a unified “voice”.
I don’t have a podcast, but my outlet for Tintin is through building scale models based on his various adventures. I thought I’d share my blog for anyone interested – https://strobez.ca/wp/index.php/tintin/tintin-1-72-scale-projects/
Besides Hergé, I’m also a huge fan of the “godfather” of Japanese manga, Osamu Tezuka. It really struck me how many similarities there are between these two artists, who were more or less contemporaries. I also run a Tezuka-dedicated website – http://tezukainenglish.com/wp/ and was imagining how interesting it would be to go on a similar comic book literature adventure. A “Totally Tezuka” podcast, taking a North American comic book writer and a Franco-Belgian BD expert (who don’t particularly strike me as Manga fans) on a journey through a selection of Osamu Tezuka’s works showing the progression of his writing and art style alongside his own very interesting life story would be an amazing journey. 🙂
Thanks again!
Greg
Also pretty late but happy that the podcast is still available.
I haven’t listened to all of the episodes but felt the need to appreciate your effort in doing this!
I’ve been reading Tintin or “Tim und Struppi” as they’re called in German (I don’t actually know how many other languages changed the protagonist’s name) my while life. You guys stupendously and quite enjoyably put to words my impressions as I read the stories when I was young. (E.g. why does the black island feel so immersive and cosy, why do the Picaros feel so off and why is Tibet so serious?) So thanks for that. The quality of both information and entertainment is really something.
My two cents on the racism topic: I think it is necessary to acknowledge that things can be and very often are racist even though they somehow weren’t meant to be racist.
Tintin in Congo is racist as f***, there is no question about it. Which is why in my opinion, publishers must put some sort of declaration in that book, because you just can’t have this story read by kids without any comment or context on it.
What Herge thought while writing that story and how the times were and so on is a different story. The book is still the book and it’s racist.
What I find fascinating still about Herge is his development over the decades and his journey to writing things he really cared about, which at some points had quite the opposite perspective and values. And of course, the art.
Cheers!