Tintin in America

Tintin in America (Tintin en Amérique) is one of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero.

Tintin in America is the third in the series. The first strip was published in "Le Petit Vingtième" on September 3, 1931.

It was published in a black and white album in 1932. The album was reworked and published in color in 1945; this version was shortened to a standard 62-page format. The first American edition was issued in 1973. For this occasion many of the black characters were re-drawn to make their race white or ambiguous.

It is the earliest Tintin album readily available in English translation; the two previous ones can be found, but not easily.

Tintin's best-known disguise in this book is when he wears a cowboy dress because he feels a bit out of place.

Storyline

Tintin is sent to Chicago, Illinois to clean up the city's criminals, after encountering Al Capone's gangsters in the last book, Tintin in the Congo. Tintin is captured by gangsters several times, and also meets Al Capone. Although Tintin temporarily captures Capone and some of his henchmen, the policeman he calls to help arrest the gangsters does not believe his story and arrests him. This failure to capture the notorious mobster came about mainly because Al Capone was an actual real world gangster at the time and had not yet been captured^[1]. After several attempts on his life, Tintin meets Capone's rival, the clever Bobby Smiles. Tintin spends much of the book trying to capture Smiles, and also travels to Redskin City, is captured by an Indian tribe (who were fooled by Smiles into thinking Tintin to be their enemy), and discovers oil (unintentionally causing the indians to be driven off the reservation). Finally, Tintin captures Smiles, and ships him back to Chicago in a crate. However, after Smiles is captured, an unnamed bald gangster kidnaps Tintin's dog, Snowy. Luckily, Tintin manages to save him and arrest most of the bald gangster's henchmen, although the gangster himself manages to escape. The next day the bald gangster orders a man named Maurice Oyle to invite Tintin to a cannery, where Tintin "falls" into the meat grinding machines when Maurice presses a button that causes the barrier around the meat grinder to fall away. However, because the workers at the cannery go on strike, the meat grinder is not on when Tintin falls in. Tintin later tricks and captures both Maurice and the bald gangster. After this escapade, Tintin is invited to a party, where one of the guests strongly resembles Rastopopulous, but our hero is kidnapped by the other Chicago gangsters before he can be sure. The gangsters tie Tintin and Snowy to a weight and throw them into Lake Michigan. However the bumbling gangsters' weight is no weight at all, but only a block of wood, and thus Tintin and Snowy are saved by what is ostensibly a police patrol boat. The crew of the boat turns out not to be policemen, but more gangsters, and they attempt to kill Tintin. However Tintin overpowers the gangsters, and later lead the police to the gangsters' headquarters. A grateful Chicago holds a ticker-tape parade for Tintin, after which he returns to Europe.

Notes

The book is rife with historical inaccuracy - particularly the depiction of the Wild West, complete with cowboys and Indians, despite the 1930s setting. At various points, American cars are depicted with right-hand steering columns; Hergé may have assumed that Americans drove on the left side of the road like other former Colonial subjects of the British. Discrepancies like these were common of Hergé's works before The Blue Lotus.

Hergé shows sympathy for the Indians: in the first black-and-white strip Tintin is shown photographing an Indian who was holding a begging bowl. Later in the story an Indian tribe is given twenty five dollars and driven off their land by armed soldiers so that the government may access the oil found there (while when it was assumed that it was Tintin's oil, he was offered upwards of $10,000 for it and would have retained rights to the land).

It is a matter of debate whether Tintin's arch-enemy Rastapopoulos makes his first appearance in this book (albeit simply in a one-off cameo). A man who looks like him can be seen sitting next to Tintin at the banquet from which the hero is then kidnapped. Next to that character is a young blonde-haired woman: in the 1932 black-and-white edition of the book this woman is referred to as "Mary Pikefort" - this name being a thin disguise for the appearance in this panel of the actress Mary Pickford - an appropriate companion for a movie mogul. This reference was dropped from the redrawn coloured edition, presumably because this would not be so obvious for a new generation of Tintin readers ^[2].

Al Capone appeared briefly in the book, marking the only notable appearance of a real person in a Tintin album.

In the 1970s, some panels were redrawn in order to remove some stereotyped portrayals of African Americans. These included the doorman at the bank being built on Indian land and the woman holding the screaming baby. It was done at the request of Tintin's American publishers who did not like the mixing of black and white characters [1].

References

1. ^ (Capone was finally convicted of income tax evasion in October 1931 and began his prison sentence in 1932.)
2. ^ Tintin: The Complete Companion by Michael Farr, John Murray publishers, 2001

External links

• Tintin in America at Tintinologist.org

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