Comics Tourism: Destination Brussels

Posted on June 4, 2013 by RM Rhodes

If you are at all serious about the comics medium and you have not visited and/or thought about visiting Brussels, you should really start to reconsider your thinking. It’s one thing to read that Belgians regard Bande dessinée (BD) as an important artform and it’s another thing entirely to actually experience a mature, mainstream comics culture firsthand in a European setting that’s more alike than alien to an American visitor.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t speak French and it’s probable that you don’t speak Flemish, either. But because the country is bilingual, most signage is printed in English (and often in German as well) on the theory that it’s just as easy to print things in three or four languages as it is to print in two. English is prevalent because of the sheer variety of international visitors – Brussels is the capital of the EU, the headquarters of NATO and is a major international banking, business and convention center. Still, learning another language because you want to has the net effect of making you look less jingoistic and xenophobic than your peers and it opens up an entire world of comics you probably know less about than you think.

Brussels bills itself as the capital of the ninth art, but it was also the epicenter of the Art Nouveau movement. Several prominent Art Nouveau architects designed buildings in and around the city center that still stand. One of the more famous architects was Victor Horta, who designed a wholesale fabric store that now houses the Belgian Comic Strip Center. Lovingly restored in the 80s and beautifully maintained, the building is a work of art in and of itself.

The museum features a permanent exhibition about Herge and Tintin, along with exhibits on other prominent Belgian creators, most notably Peyo and EP Jacobs. The top floor is dedicated space for rotating exhibitions – it’s currently dedicated to a retrospective of Willy Vandersteen and a celebration of the 75^th anniversary of Spirou. The reading room contains over 3,000 albums and is open to anyone who has purchased admission to the museum. The museum bookstore is fantastic and has token English, German and Spanish sections. If you only have time to visit one thing in Brussels, this should be it.

Scattered throughout the city center are a variety of BD-related murals that have been commissioned by the local government, private businesses and associations. These murals are indicated on maps that are handed out by the Brussels tourism board and they are considered to be a major tourist attraction. The city center looks huge on the map, but the blocks are not very big and are very walkable; wandering around looking for murals is a great way to see a large part of it.

Many of the major characters created by Belgian artists are featured in these murals, but Tintin shows up more often than most. Herge is the favorite son of Brussels and is easily one of the city’s biggest claims to fame. There is an entire Herge museum found just outside Brussels, not far from Herge’s house. If you are a Tintin fan, it is very easy to gorge yourself on the character – the Tintin Boutique is just around the corner from the Grand Place de Bruxelles and features every Tintin related piece of merchandise you could ever want, including (but not limited to) towels, dress shirts, figurines, framed prints, stuffed animals, keychains and playsets.

My favorite part of the BD culture in Brussels is the sheer number and variety of stores. From the random boutique book store in the St Hubert Gallery that had Jordan Crane, Alec Longstreth and a translation of Duncan the Wonder Dog to the big stores on the main drag, BD seems to be everywhere. The local FNAC store (sort of like Best Buy, with much less emphasis on household appliances) had more space dedicated to BD than it did to either DVDs or CDs.

The real destination stores, however, are Brüsel and Multi BD. They are obviously aimed at different demographics and approach the sale of BD in completely different ways. Brüsel has a gallery in the basement and top floor and seems to have a much more curatorial approach to what they sell – they don’t try to have everything in stock, just those things that they think are worthwhile to carry. They also have comics in English, Spanish and German as well as the obligatory Flemish.

Multi BD is a lot more comprehensive and is your go-to destination if you are looking for book three of that fantasy series from Dargaud that you cannot seem to find anywhere else. Interestingly, Multi BD seems to have a better selection of alternative/small press comics in both English and French than Brüsel does – and places this material right in the front of the shop as the first thing that a customer encounters when they walk in the door.

Neither of these is in the kind of space where you’d find the local Games Workshop franchise – both occupy two fairly large storefront spaces on a major thoroughfare and are within easy walking distance of each other. And neither seems to be hurting for business. More importantly, their primary demographic is not children, but adults of all genders with money. The market is centered around 48 page hardbound albums (although there is a greater flexibility in formats than there used to be) which tend to run about 12 Euros apiece and go up in price relative to the page count.

Another shopping destination is the Comics Village on the Grand Sablon, which features a store downstairs and a pretty good restaurant upstairs. If you go here, make sure you buy your books after you eat, to take advantage of the discount. The book selection here overlaps what you can find at Brüsel or Multi BD, but is much less robust and aimed at a much more general audience, as you would expect from a venue that markets itself as a theme restaurant and sidewalk café that happens to have a store. They also have copies of Tintin lying around in the restaurant so that kids have something to read while they are eating lunch.

What I found most interesting about all of these stores is that it’s easier to find manga than it is to find American superhero comics and there is usually a better selection of the former. Manga often gets its own prominent corner while American superheroes generally get an out-of-the way shelf. Other English-language comics are found in translation more prominently – Strangers in Paradise, Prophet, Whiteout and Making Comics – to name only a few titles. It is almost as if these stores considered superheroes to be just another genre instead of the foundation of the market and stocked them accordingly. Also of note: American floppies are almost completely absent, probably because graphic novels fit the local buying patterns better.

The other place to look for BD in Brussels is among the used bookstores along the Rue du Midi – only a few blocks from Multi BD and Brüsel. Most second hand bookstores have a large selection of used BD albums which are worth flipping through, if only to see the sheer volume and variety of material that you have never heard of (often for good reason). Along the same street is Le Dépôt, a used bookstore that is entirely dedicated to BD. Here, more than anywhere else, I got a real sense of the depth of the French BD market and how much of it was completely unknown to me. As with the best stores of this kind, it is entirely possible to spend hours lost in the stacks, constantly surprised by things you had no idea could be considered commercial.

Once you have exhausted all of the obvious options, one of the more off the beaten path attractions is a house that was also designed by Victor Horta called Maison Autrique. This townhouse is now a museum that has hosted a variety of small, comics-related exhibits. The whole endeavor of restoration and curatorship of the townhouse is obviously a labor of love and among those lovers are local creators François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Albums from their Obscure Cities BD series is available in the museum’s blink-and-you’’ll-miss-it bookstore and there is a major callout to one of the characters in that series hiding in the attic of the house. Schuiten’s artwork is heavily influenced by Art Nouveau and he has also authored a book with Lonely Planet that suggests possible walking tours of the city’s architecture. It is possible to get a greater appreciation of their work just by wandering around the more beautiful buildings of the city – including this one.

François Schuiten, from the Belgian Comic Strip Center

More than anything else, what Brussels offers a world-class city that features comics as a foundation of their tourism and local identity year-round and not just for a week a year. What other city does that? Besides, they sell fresh waffles in the streets and have good beer. And make sure you try the mussels.

Phantom Music

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Kailyn Kent

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Forgive me– as if to make this piece as dilettantish as possible, I am going to bring film into a discussion of comics and music.

The first pages of New Treasure Island by Sakai Shichima and Tezuka Osamu, much praised for its cinematic quality

It’s seems to me that when a comic’s flow of panels and pages works ‘musically,’ it also behaves cinematically. The artist’s shifting of perspective and the rhythm of the ‘cuts’ echo filmic sequences that are usually accompanied by a score. Sometimes, when I come across these sequences, it feels like phantom music– like a phantom limb– underscores the comic. It’s a struggle to read along to, or to figure out how the melody goes. Going back to re-read or dwelling on an image too long disrupts the phantom score irrevocably, and forfeits some of the emotional impact of reading the comic. As a teenager, I tried unsuccessfully to hum along or deejay background music while I read comics, hoping to discover total emotional absorption.

Today I better appreciate comic’s more complicated relationship with time and space. I believe I was stupidly hoping to watch– or listen– to comics as opposed to reading them. I wanted to be passively taken in, when I had to stake my own way through a comic book. If watching a film is like having a dream, reading comics is like lucidly dreaming– there’s an exchange of vibrancy and intensity for control and self-awareness.

Cinematic pacing still confuses me. It’s found a natural home in many comics, yet it is a very anti-Greenbergian hold-over from another medium. Cinematic pacing does not accentuate the qualities that are most fundamental to comics, and instead channels comics’ unique handling of time, space and design into straightforward, uncomplicated narrativity. That’s not to say some overlap hasn’t occurred– cartoonists often work as storyboard artists. I don’t think cinematic pacing should be avoided, or that it poses a threat to ‘native’ comic pacing. But I do feel that the relationship of comics and film is worth examining, especially as the value of comics is increasingly understood in terms of their adaptation into film– where the story is finally told with real-life music.

I’ll clarify what I mean by cinematic comics. Comics are cinematic when they follow established film and cinematographic formulas of conveying time and space in a dramatic, rhythmic, and unambiguously linear fashion. I am also tempted to add ‘decompressed,’ yet some film conventions are highly compressed, (montages without establishing shots, for example.)

Not all films follow the same cinematographic formulas, and the great ones complicate or invent them. Some formulas are grammatical, like how a bird’s eye view/pan/combination is used to introduce a story, as in American Beauty or Blade Runner. An easily identifiable variation, like Citizen Kane’s No Trespassing sign, is copied intentionally through homages and parodies, and if it becomes prevalent enough, it’s recycled unintentionally. Another example are the fantasy battleground scenes that flooded theaters after the run of Lord of the Rings. These formulas are most often accompanied by music to heighten the emotional effect, and the style of the music is included in the formula.

There are many stirring music-less film sequences, yet the connection between music and emotion in narrative is pretty well established, (and necessarily predates the term melo-drama.) To keep things as simply and as overly-generalized as possible, I will vaguely refer to commercial moviemaking scores from the last fifty or so years– think John Williams, Thoman Newman, Elmer Burnstein, Joe Hisaishi and Howard Shore.

Cinematic comics isn’t a discreet category as much as a collection of traits. Very cinematic comics will more frequently carry more of these traits. Panel proportions offer one example. A panel’s size usually determines the time a reader will stare at it. In cinematic sequences, the panel size will echo the legnth of a cut. Smaller panels dispaly a smaller fraction of time, which is not always the case in comics where the page’s design, or other criteria, are more important than the linearity or pacing of the reading. Small-size, low-content panels allow the eye to ‘bounce’ across the gutter, like a script’s ‘beat,’ without twisting the amount of time the panel naturally represents.

Non Cinematic– Panel size determined by design, not by the length of the time it represents. From Adam Hine’s Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One

Non Cinematic– The third panel is small, but designed to be dwelled upon for some time. From Invisible Hinge by Jim Woodring

Cinematic — Panels represent one cut, and small wordless panels work like ‘beats’
From Bodyworld, by Dash Shaw

Cinematic — Panels represent one cut, the size suggests the length of time represented, and small wordless panels work like ‘beats’ From Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together by Bryan Lee O’Malley

In a cinematic comic, a panel’s text to image ratio is usually small, and corresponds to how much dialogue belongs inside one ‘cut,’ or between moments of physical acting. Reading the panel aloud, this is often under thirty seconds. A preponderance of textless panels showcase ‘beats’ of the character’s wordless performances, and occasionally more panographic panels and splash pages demonstrate setting or spectacle. These are sometimes an exception to the rule: splash panels and pages can be three to twelve times larger than an average panel, yet unless there is text they don’t necessarily take that much longer to read. Nevertheless, the moment depicted is mentally understood to last longer, and that it eludes to a build-up and follow-through that wasn’t drawn. Larger, more detailed panels with multiple speech bubbles work like a ‘pan,’ where the camera scrolls across a larger field of vision.

The cartoonist’s perspective choices share commercial filmmaking’s desire for clear communication. If the character is about to step on a rake, a successful cartoonist will most often show the ‘build-up’ and ‘event’(approaching and stepping on the rake,) within the larger environment, and only afterwards show a close-up of the character’s reaction, etc.

The cinematic comic’s cuts are determined largely by dialogue, and by fight-scene and slapstick choreography, and when there is neither, by the comic’s internal rhythm. In film, this rhythm is determined by the score, which needs to match, the pacing of the talking/fighting/comedy scenes as well. As long as the cartoonist obeys cinematic conventions, the more rigorously rhythmic the pacing, the more strongly a phantom score can adhere to it.

Certain comics rhythms/formulas recall certain filmic rhythms/formulas, and by association, inadvertently acquire phantom film scores. Cartoonists are a little helpless– while a filmmaker could pick an iconic or untraditional song to accompany a sequence, a cinematic comic only triggers a super-conventional-hodgepodge-memory of what song ‘should’ go there. Friends hanging out on a summer afternoon demands calls for a low-key, chirpy groove. A troop’s noble suicide mission demands the Lord of the Rings bombast. A sad remembrance cues violins. And if the comic’s pacing is cinematic enough to strongly suggest a score, its absence is distracting. The tingling of a phantom limb is most often painful.

In conclusion, a meandering examination of some cinematic comics:

Scott Pilgrim!

Music plays an even larger role in videogames than it does in film. And when I think of a ‘cinematically paced’ comic, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s videogame-infused Scott Pilgrim series immediately comes to mind. Coincidentally, the characters play, discuss and listen to a lot of music. What does Sex Bob-omb sound like?

The books toggle with several cinematic genres and conventions. O’Malley showcases a playful mastery of anime and martial-arts cinematoraphic formulas. At two points the comic frames itself with a few vox pops, but I guess that could be as much of a homage to Dan Clowe’s Deathray as Boondock Saints or Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Most impressively, Scott Pilgrim uses hyper-condensed styles of cinematic storytelling, as when a whole relationship is traced over a series of pages. As long as filmmakers establish iconic characters and settings, audiences can easily follow a scattered montage. In comics, the specificity of the background often sacrifices the clarity of the characters, and a drawn interpretations of places are often unfamiliar and stylized. It’s a testament to O’Malley’s craft that this scene (below) is so effortless to follow. O’Malley uses this technique at several points in the series– pointedly never for athletic training ala Rocky, but always for relationships.

From Scott Pilgrim Versus The Infinite Sadness

Reading comics, I’ve often felt that manga reads more cinematically than American comics, because of the smaller text to panel ratio. I don’t have any hard evidence for this, but manga is thought to be a major influence on the development of decompressed and widescreen comics.

Read Right to Left:

From Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2: Volume 3

From Daisuke Igarashi’s Children of the Sea #8

Akira, (the quintessential decompressed comic,) and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind are slightly higher brow (and arguably Westernized) examples, and coincidentally are better known for their film adaptations. As comics, both read like gorgeously realized, meticulous storyboards. Reading Nausicaa, I found myself mentally humming pieces of classic Hollywood war and western scores, and occasionally, (appropriately,) a little Hisashi. Yet I’ve never seen the film adaptation with his score.

Read Right to Left:

From Nausicaa of The Valley of the Wind, Book 3

I’ve written a bit about the cinematic quality of Jason Lute’s Berlin: City of Stones here. Lutes comes as close as Miyazaki to making a ‘movie in a book.’ He doesn’t push the boundaries of comics narrativity, and focuses on virtuosically recreating the mis en scene, pacing, and character management of films like Wings of Desire. I’ve complained that Berlin’s ironies alienate readers from the characters, and perhaps a little background music could have sweetened the deal.

Skim by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki is an intersting example. While sometimes (unintentionally) dismissed as a teen comic, it is temperamentally aligned with the quieter side of Hollywood epics- adult coming-of-age dramas like American Beauty, The Shawshank Redemption, A River Runs Through It, and The Cider House Rules, (which are often literary adaptations.) The wikipedia page for The Shawshank Redepemtion contains a great note on Thomas Newman’s score:

…the main theme (“End Titles” on the soundtrack album) is perhaps best known to modern audiences as the inspirational sounding music from many movie trailers dealing with inspirational, dramatic, or romantic films in much the same way that James Horner’s driving music from the end of Aliens is used in many movie trailers for action films.

“End Titles” is probably a good candidate for Skim’s phantom score. Unfortunately, this makes Skim sound heavy-handed, and I’m relieved that “End Titles” doesn’t accompany the book’s heartbreaking, graceful layering of voice and images. Not to say that they don’t sometimes suggest it.

The following pages are in sequence:

Comics like Tintin are a little more complicated. Herge’s ligne clair extends to the pacing of the comic, and complicated action sequences are detailed moment by moment, like key frames in a storyboard. Yet Herge is so ungratuitous that when he get’s the chance to skip a few key frames, he does.

From TinTin: The Black Island

The phantom score between the last two panels experiences skips like a warped record. Otherwise, I’m not sure why I don’t find Tintin very cinematic– I guess I want to blame the page size. You can pack a lot of panels and text onto an album page, as opposed to the small leaves of most manga books. By the virtue of their size, manga pages automatically resemble dramatic splash pages, and the act of constantly turning pages creates a breathless momentum that exaggerates the cinematic pacing. Tintin is literally less of a page turner.

from Morrison, Truog, Hazelwood, Costanza and Wood’s Animal Man #5

My piece is sorely missing examples from mainstream superhero comics. I’ve spent hundreds of hours scanning, assembling and digitally correcting them at Marvel, and have read a decent amount of them myself… but I don’t own any, and I don’t consider myself well-read in them. I’ve enjoyed Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s work, but I get the feeling that they encourage cinematic pacing more often than other writers. I remember putting pages together on a stunning Hulk comic– it was printed sometime in the fall of 2009, and it opened with panel after panel of the Hulk charging at the viewer in darkness. When I saw the finished book, the whole thing had been slathered with first person captions. I couldn’t bear to keep it. Perhaps I’m being unfair; heavy-handed voice-over is also cinematic in its own special way.

Timpa

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Aishwarya Subramanian

I think there was a distinct period in my childhood when I believed that the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician were Indian comic book characters. Indrajal Comics had been publishing these (and other King Features characters) in India since the 1960s and on visits to the country I’d occasionally read old issues. But these visits were few and far apart, and by the time I moved to India in the 1990s Indrajal had folded. So I’d never read the Timpa stories that Indrajal serialised as backup features in the late 80s until recently, when Pop Culture Publishing brought out four full-length adventures.

It’s obvious from the style of the art (and from the fact that creator Jhangir Kerawala freely admits to it) that the Timpa stories are heavily inspired by Hergé’s Tintin comics. Timpa is a boy detective as well, though in somewhat more realistic circumstances; he’s an actual child for one thing, and is only taken seriously by anyone because his (alarmingly indulgent) father is a police inspector. Timpa’s Calcutta is one where market shopkeepers sleep half the afternoon, where policemen occasionally take bribes, and where middle-class Calcuttans will always argue with rickshaw or taxi drivers about fares—this is a world I recognise. Tintin flies all over the world (and occasionally into space); Timpa takes trains and buses and doesn’t get further than the Andaman islands. His dog, “Rexy”, is always portrayed as a dog. He may chase the occasional cat but we never know what’s going on inside his head, as we do with Snowy.

Like Tintin, Timpa himself is fundamentally dull. There’s not much to him, other than an earnest need to help, and he stumbles onto things through sheer coincidence more than by any exciting process of deduction. Like Tintin he has a cringingly grateful faithful companion—Kalia, who is of a distinctly lower class, is tellingly dark-skinned, and is apparently incapable of defending himself against children without Timpa’s help.

But the really important character here is the grandfather who joins Timpa on his adventures. Grandpa has Captain Haddock’s belligerence combined with some of Professor Calculus’ talent for misinterpreting a situation. He’s grumpy, convinced of his own misunderstood brilliance, and often imagines himself as a superhero, or at least super-muscled. He’s also convinced that he’s the brains of this operation, though in this he is sadly misguided.

Grandpa gets all the best lines because in addition to being the comic relief he’s also the background voice snarking at (and therefore somewhat deflating for the reader) Timpa’s heroic plans. At one point Timpa drags him into a grand attempt to break out of prison a friend who has been sentenced to death. Grandpa is seen muttering darkly in the background about the whole thing possibly inspiring real murderers like Charles Sobhraj.

As I write this I realise that in a sense Grandpa is this series’ Snowy as much as he is its Haddock. A wry commenter placed partly outside the text by a refusal to entirely play by its rules: Grandpa rarely accepts the obvious realities of the plot.

Pop Culture appear to have faithfully reproduced the original comics, flaws and all. Sarbajit Sen, the artist for the first two books (The Red-Hooded Gang and Operation Rescue) appears to me to be a far superior artist to Avijit Chatterjee who did Runners of The Golden Horn and Legacy of the Gods. We’re given no clues as to who was responsible for the mystifying decision to have all the text in Operation Rescue be in cursive. And Kerawala’s grasp of the English language isn’t always all it could be. (He has now written a Timpa novel, The Soothsayer of Sealdah. I do not recommend it.)

And yet. Kerawala’s Calcutta feels just right, Timpa’s father and Grandpa are fantastic (his mother, who is usually the sole female character, sort of hangs around in the background weeping about her son’s safety). I complain about the less than perfect use of English, but Kerawala clearly has enough command over the language to make wordplay something that his characters indulge in almost instinctively. Timpa may be a lukewarm Tintin ripoff, but his setting and the people around him feel a lot more real than the people in Tintin’s world. If not necessarily realistic.

Which brings me to the real reason to read these comics – the fourth one, Legacy of the Gods.

Rereading Hergé’s Flight 714 last year I realised that it had first been published in 1968, the same year as Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? Von Däniken’s theory in this book (popular with teenagers around the world, or at least it was in my day) is that in Earth’s far-distant past it was visited by various extra-terrestrials whose far superior technology made them appear as gods or angels to our primitive ancestors. Flight 714 has Tintin and his companions taken aboard a hijacked plane to an island that, the natives claim, was once visited by gods in “fire-lorries”. There are statues that look suspiciously astronaut-like, and a strange man who can communicate telepathically, but aliens wipe the characters’ memories of these events before anyone else can be told.

I’m not sure if it was coincidence or a deliberate continuation of the Tintin theme that prompted Kerawala to do a Chariots of the Gods?-themed Timpa story. Legacy of the Gods opens with a direct reference to the book when we see Timpa’s father reading Von Däniken.

Soon after, Timpa visits an uncle in Murshidabad, stumbles upon a secret underground chamber and finds ancient scrolls written in an unknown script.

As Timpa suffers from a raging fever caused by snakebite he dreams of a strange man (we will learn that he is an alien) who warns him that the knowledge in these 14,000 year old scrolls is dangerous to humans. The alien’s name is … Vladimir. I cannot explain this. I also cannot explain why Vladimir has sparser chest hair and better skin on the cover of the book.

The scrolls, it turns out, are in an old form of Pali. Naturally the Indian government fails to listen to young Timpa’s insistence on the importance of these scrolls. Naturally the Americans and the Russians (this is set in the 1980s) are interested. A series of kidnappings and interchangeable villains follow.

Naturally the Americans almost get away with it. Until the Russians blow up their helicopter.

And so once more, great (or terrible?) knowledge is lost to the world.

Kim Thompson on Tintin in the Congo

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Domingos Isabelinho’s post on the Belgian courts and Tintin in the Congo provoked an interesting discussion in comments. I thought in particular I’d highlight Kim Thompson’s comment:

(1) At this date I think it’s irresponsible to publish TINTIN IN THE CONGO in kid-friendly formats without a warning or contextual introduction of sorts. (I specify “kid-friendly formats” because I don’t really have a problem with the expensive, black-and-white facsimile ARCHIVES format version, either the French one or the now-out-of-print Last Gasp English language version.)

(2) That said, I’m very, very, uncomfortable with the idea of legally enforcing the addition of this material under threat of a ban (and I have the American free-speech-libertarian’s extreme discomfort at European and Canadian “hate-speech” bans).

(3) That said, I can well see why someone who was sensitive to the material becoming so frustrated with the adamant refusal of those who control it to concede to this very reasonable request that they take legal action.

(4) And it’s somewhat unfair to accuse Mondondo of wanting to flat-out ban the book when it seems pretty explicit that he’s looking for the contextual warning and the ban is more of an if-they-can’t-agree-to-that threat that is part of the lawsuit.

(5) TINTIN THE CONGO is clearly not harmless, and I suspect those who minimize its toxicity, whether journalists or judges, do so to justify their own squeamishness on point 2.

(6) My guess is that if Hergé was still alive he’d either ask that the book be withdrawn (as it was at certain times) or insist on that kind of contextual material himself.

(7) It’s nice that later in life he was publicly and vocally mortified at the content of TINTIN IN THE CONGO himself, although maybe a little creepy that he seemed more genuinely distressed at Tintin’s bloodthirsty hunting rampage.

(8) I love TINTIN IN THE CONGO.

(9) I recognize TINTIN IN THE CONGO is evil.

(10) But I think in creating it Hergé was at worst misguided and naïve.

J’Accuse

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Domingos Isabelinho

In July 2007 David Enright was at a Borders bookshop in the UK with his wife and two children when he stumbled upon a copy of Tintin in the Congo by Belgian comics artist George Remi (aka Hergé). The couple couldn’t believe their eyes: was this filth at children’s reach? Worst: was it addressed to them? Here’s what he said:

“So you are married to a monkey and have two little yard apes. Good job. Got bananas?” This is one of the letters and emails that my Ghanaian wife and I received, when we asked that the Hergé book Tintin in the Congo be removed from the children’s sections of bookshops back in 2007.

According to The Telegraph (July 12, 2007), after being contacted by Enright a spokesman for the CRE (Commission for Racial Equality), said:

This book contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the ‘savage natives’ look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.

It beggars belief that in this day and age Borders would think it acceptable to sell and display Tintin In The Congo. High street shops, and indeed any shops, ought to think very carefully about whether they ought to be selling and displaying it.

That same month, on July 27, 2007, a Congolese citizen living in Belgium (see above), Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, read an Enright related article in a newspaper and decided to act filing suit in a Belgian court against Tintin’s copyright holder, Moulinsart Foundation. After patiently waiting for three years Mondondo, now supported by a French anti-racist organization (CRAN: Conseil représentatif des associations noires – representative council of black associations), extended his suit against Tintin in the Congo‘s publisher, Casterman. The suit was also filed in France.

Mondondo and the CRAN wanted Moulinsart and Casterman to ban the book or, as an alternative, if the first plaint failed, they wanted a warning to be put on the cover of future editions as well as a foreword inside explaining the colonial context in which the book was created (basically they wanted the French-Belgian editions to follow the British Egmont edition). On February 10, 2012, the Brussels Court of First Instance rejected the applicants’ claims. The same thing happened at the Brussels Appellate Court last December 5.

Here are some of the court’s allegations, according to this site:

If we were to follow the appellants, for whom it would suffice to take into account the simple intent of publishing a book, that would require banning today, for instance, the publication of some of the works of Voltaire, whose racism, notably toward Blacks and Jews, was inherent to his thought, as well as whole segments of literature, which cannot be accepted [as] the passage of time must be taken into account. Hergé limited himself to producing a work of fiction with the sole objective of entertaining his readers. He carries out therein candid and gentle humor.

It is above all a testament to the common history of Belgium and the Congo at a given epoch[.]

The Telegraph, again (February 13, 2012) also translated the following court statement:

It is clear that neither the story, nor the fact that it has been put on sale, has a goal to… create an intimidating, hostile, degrading or humiliating environment[.]

Read here the whole document in French.

I’m not a lawyer or, more specifically, I’m not a Belgian lawyer, but come on! “candid and gentle humor”? How can a book that dehumanizes the Congolese people depicting them as childish and lazy and in need of white peoples’ guidance contain “candid and gentle humor”? Are racist jokes “candid and gentle humor”? And how does the entertainment purpose excuse anything? Plus: how can the environment depicted in this blatantly racist book not be “hostile, degrading [and] humiliating”? The known argument that the book reflects its times’ prejudice doesn’t hold water either as I’ve shown, here. Hergé could not invoke an insanity defense. He was responsible for creating racist imagery and racist writing. Others, like Alan Dunn, for instance, at roughly the same time, didn’t do so.

There’s another reason why Hergé couldn’t invoke the insanity defence mentioned above: he’s dead since 1983. Again, I’m no lawyer, but how can a court judge a dead man (guessing his intentions!) is completely beyond me. I know that the “goal” part above is what matters to the court, but in the dubious case that they are psychic isn’t there something called criminal negligence in the Belgian law? What they should be judging is how can today’s copyright owners ignore the racism in one of their books refusing to do anything about it. I can understand why did the Brussels court mention the banning of a book by Voltaire, but Mondondo and the CRAN didn’t want to ban Tintin in the Congo in their secondary plaint, they just wanted to add some heads up and some informative paratext? Here’s what the court had to say about that:

As for the subsidiary inclusion of a warning it is not only an interference with the exercise of the freedom of expression it also hampers the moral right to the integrity of the work which can’t be contested because the defendants don’t own it [Fanny Rodwell owns the moral rights to Hergé’s oeuvre, not Moulinsart and Casterman].

From now on we’re informed that a foreword constitutes a violation of a “work’s integrity.” I can understand the reasoning behind the idea that such a foreword would be a violation of Moulinsart’s and Casterman’s freedom of expression (as well as Fanny Rodwell’s moral rights) though. Said foreword would be forced on them by the court. You’re wrong if you think that I’m on Mondondo’s side on this. I agree with him only when he says that the court suit was a means to force Moulinsart to seat at the conversation table. I understand the strategy, but it was doomed from the beginning: big corporations don’t deal with the little guy. When I repeatedly say on this post that I’m not a lawyer what I really mean is that I don’t want to discuss matters I know little about. (What I do know, however, is that they are lousy comics critics at the Brussels court.) What’s unfortunate is that the publishers themselves don’t comply with Mondondo’s wish for a foreword of their own free will as they should. It shows that Continental Europe is still way behind America and the UK when these matters surface in the public sphere.

Another quote in the court’s decision (written by De Theux de Meylandt, according to this site), states:

We see in particular that Tintin in the Congo does not put Tintin in a situation where there is competition or confrontation between the young reporter and any black or group of blacks, but puts Tintin against a group of gangsters… who are white[.]

I’ll let a Portuguese anthropologist living in Maputo, Mozambique, José Flávio Teixeira, answer to the above for me (in a review of Deogratias, a book about the Rwandan Genocide by Belgian comics artist Jean-Phillipe Stassen):

Beyond a self-centered gaze (ethnocentric: what interests him, above all, is how “his people” behave themselves elsewhere and how they get astray from the recommended “good behavior”) what the book states (distractedly) are two fundamental points: the perennial (the need for?) European leadership; the inferior malevolent capability of the Rwandan people (the African people). Thus crystallizing the racism, affirming white superiority: “people” (race, because, in the end, the book is about race) who are more in the lead, who are more corrupt, meaner. More human, right?

Going back to the UK, Ann Widdecombe, a Conservative politician, criticized the CRE (see above) for their support of Enright’s views (she said that their claim was ludicrous):

It brings the CRE into disrepute – there are many more serious things for them to worry about.

I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story or not (it probably is), but this reminds me of that officer of justice, after Belgium’s liberation, who refused to accuse Hergé of collaboration with the Nazis under the excuse that he didn’t want to cover himself in ridicule. It’s a well known fact: comics are less powerful, less corrupt, less mean. Less of an art form, right?

Can The Subaltern Draw?: The Case of the Arab Henchman

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Nadim Damluji

While I haven’t yet met anybody whose favorite Tintin adventure is The Crab with the Golden Claws (Crab), it is certainly an important text in the scale of Hergé’s overall story about the boy reporter.* For one, Crab is the album in which Tintin meets, is repeatedly almost killed by, and ultimately befriends the perpetually drunk Captain Haddock. As such the album will presumably serve as the first act of Steven Spielberg’s 3-D monster The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Anglophiles. Penned in 1941, Crab is also notable for being the first story Hergé published during Belgium’s occupation by Nazi Germany in the newspaper Le Soir. But what I find most intriguing about Crab (besides its relatively recent Simpsons cameo) is its long and curious history of edits, some of which I will explore today.

Deckhand “Jumbo” becomes markedly whiter.

Soon after World Word II, under the request of new publisher Casterman Hergé was asked to color Crab and the other completed black-and-white Tintins in hopes of marketing the comics to a larger global audience. During that process of colorization and reformatting (where Hergé took the liberty to self-edit), the only thing that changed about Crab content-wise was the language in the speech bubbles. However in 1959, Hergé was asked to make revisions to the nearly twenty year old panels at the behest of American publisher Golden Press, who were looking to make The Adventures of Tintin available in the United States. Chris Owens has written an account of Tintin’s move to (and ultimate failure in) the American market in the 1960s on Tintinologist.com in a piece titled, “Tintin Crosses The Atlantic: The Golden Press Affair.” He does a thorough job at highlighting the specifics of the move, so instead of going into all the adjustments (“Snowy” to “Buddy,” no drinking Whiskey from the bottle, etc.) I want to focus particularly on how Hergé adjusted the race of his more problematic characters. As Owens puts it:

Before the translations [into American English] began in earnest, Hergé agreed to redraw several panels for The Crab with the Golden Claws depicting black characters. The US censors didn’t approve of mixing races in children’s books, so the artist created new frames, replacing black deckhand Jumbo with another character, possibly of Puerto-Rican origin. Elsewhere, a black character shown whipping Captain Haddock was replaced by someone of North African appearance.

Put simply, Hergé replaced his black characters with a possible “Puerto-Rican” in one instance (illustrated above) and an Arab in the other. In his wonderful series Tintin in Otherland, Alex Buchet has addressed Hergé’s overall problem with representing “others” and touches on the creators often sardonic response to charges of racism. A typical defense from Hergé in his latter days reads like this quote from a 1975 interview: “In a nutshell, Soviets and Congo were ‘sins of my youth.’ That’s not to say that I disown them, but in the end, if I had to do them again, I would do everything differently for sure, and then all my sins would be forgiven!” (Hergé in His Own Words, 25).

Indeed, in response to these very edits that Golden Press requested him to make for American editions of Crab, Hergé sarcastically stated: “Everyone knows that there are no blacks in America” (Source). While I can spend (and others already have spent) hours parsing Hergé’s half-hearted verbal defense of his “sins of youth,” I rather call to question specifically why he changed the mysterious and speechless henchman featured heavily in the latter pages of Crab from African to Arab.

(Click to Enlarge)

Privately, I’ve come to refer to this textual change as “The Case of the Arab Henchman” and it is a case I often refer to while trying to locate Hergé’s view on non-white people. Considering Tintin was Hergé’s job for the majority of his life, often the best point of entry into the man’s personal beliefs are scattered throughout the pages of the comics themselves. Not to overstate this, but having read both versions of Crab — one with the African Henchman and one with Arab Henchman — it is remarkable how similarly they flow. Put differently, even though he changes the race of a character featured in upwards of 12 panels, nothing feels different narrative-wise. Which forces me to ask why?

(Click to Enlarge)

The question Hergé had to answer (probably implicitly) when requested to edit out the nameless black henchman he drew in 1921 for someone new in 1959 was “who can I change this with so that the narrative will maintain its plausibility, but without offending anyone’s sensibilities?” The answer came in the new acceptable stereotype of Arab lackey, which is precisely harmful as most stereotypes are because of its vagueness and interchangeability. To be clear, I’m not saying that this new henchman was a worse stereotype than the old one, or that the original crude depiction shouldn’t have been changed, but I am questioning how this new stereotype was acceptable in a way that the old one was no longer. And while I’m not pointing out anything you can’t find worded better in Said’s Orientalism, I still find the need to point it out pressing, especially considering the Arab henchman was re-presented without question to an Arab audience upon Tintin’s translation into Arabic:

In the 1970s, Tintin was translated (legally) into Arabic by long-running Egyptian publisher Daar el Maaref and thereafter made available in the standard album format for a receptive Arab audience.** During the translation/transition into Arabic, it is important to note a few things were adjusted to fit better culturally among the new readership. However, while the censors of Golden Press were enough to make Hergé change a henchman from African to Arab, there clearly wasn’t enough sensibilities being upset to make the henchman change yet again. The Arab Henchman was accepted, and future generations of Arab children would internalize the mustachioed man whipping their beloved Captain Haddock, hoping for Tintin to interrupt with his gun in the name of justice. Equally intriguing as I’ve reread Crab is what did get changed as Tintin learned to speak Arabic:

I’ll give you a second to re-read the dialogue from the top panels. As it is available on bookshelves today (English readers, check your collection), Captain Haddock calls the Arab Henchman a “Negro.” I was curious to see how this bad bit of editing was translated into Arabic, only to find that it wasn’t translated at all. As you can see (from right to left because that’s how Arabic works), Haddock tells the police to arrest the “man,” not the “Negro.” Therefore it appears the translator/s were aware there was a weird edit in the pages, and their solution (with Hergé’s old age no doubt a factor) was to accept the art and change the words. Elsewhere, the Arabic version of Crab contains another bit of tidy work:

(Click to Enlarge)

Above in the desert shoot off between Haddock and another unnamed Arab, two distinctive edits are made in the Arabic translation. First, instead of saying “By the beard of the Prophet!” as Hergé supposedly imagined an Arab in combat might, the reference to Prophet Mohamed is replaced with “You won’t escape.” Second, instead of keeping the nonsensical squiggly lines that Hergé used to represent a phrase in Arabic, the translator put actual Arabic text (“This will be the last shot!”). I find these two subtle edits to be a positive element of the Arabic editions of Crab. Instead of accepting Hergé’s stereotyped language decisions for an Arab character (prophet-referencing, fury squiggles) the translator took it upon herself to create language based slightly closer on reality. While these edits don’t produce the same (arguably) culturally-balanced product as Hergé’s famous collaboration with Zhang Chongren in The Blue Lotus, they do help the work take a small step away from being based solely on Hergé’s mind-forged manacles. The translators clearly made a conscious effort in the small wiggle room they had access to, but when faced with a speechless character like “The Arab Henchman,” it seems an eraser is the only way to effectively curb a misguided stereotype.

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*To put this in context, I even met someone who named Soviets as their favorite album.

** I should note that Tintin adventures have been available in colloquial Arabic for consumers as far back as 1956 in the pages of Cairo-based Samir Magazine. Although not legal, these translations meant readers were exposed to Tintin well before Daar Al Maaref editions were available.

Strange Windows: The Adventures of Tintin in Otherland, Part V: Radio Coda

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Alex Buchet

On Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here on Earth program — moderated by the able Jean Feraca — Gene Kannenberg and I chat about Tintin and field listeners’ calls; you can find a streaming of the show at this link.

Enjoy my dulcet tones– or, rather, my robotic stammer.

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Some have chided me for overlooking the most excluded of “others” in the Tintin oeuvre, i.e. women.

This is indeed true. In all the albums, there are only three or four women with so much as speaking roles. I interpret this as a hangover from the fiercely puritanical Catholicism of Hergé‘s youth, mixed with his own dose of misogyny. Hergé’s own explanation fails to convince:

“True, there are only a few women, but not out of misogyny. No, it’s simply because as far as I’m concerned, women don’t belong in a world such as Tintin’s; it’s one dominated by male friendship, and there is nothing ambiguous about such friendship! Of course there are only a few women in my stories and when they do appear, they are caricatures, such as Castafiore.

If I were to create a character who was a pretty girl, what would she do in a world where all the other characters are caricatures? I love women too much to turn them into caricatures!

Anyway, pretty or not, young or not, women are rarely comical elements.

Would it be the maternal side of women which prevents us from making fun of them?”

(That last sentence would be of interest to a psychiatrist…and, indeed, Hergé spent years in analysis.)

But there is one woman in Tintin with enough force and character to dominate any story she shows up in; yes, the divine ‘Nightingale of Milan’, the Empress of the Opera:

Bianca Castafiore!

What mere male can fail to wilt before such beauty and power?

As the good Captain Haddock says, a formidable woman.

Ah, Captain, submit to the inevitable; the charm and might of La Castafiore will keep you in her thrall!

The transition from ogress to goddess is most satisfying, and is consummated in Hergé’s wittiest Tintin album, Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (‘The Castafiore Emeralds’)

Love her though I do, I must concede that the Castafiore is a monstrous caricature of woman.

What I delight in, however, is the way she serenely floats above every catastrophe…even when on trial for her life (in “Tintin et les Picaros”) she turns the courtroom into an opera stage!

You go, girl!

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Tintin wasn’t Hergé’s only series.

One may applaud the cosmopolitanism of the later Tintin albums (and of the redacted earlier work), yet still regret a certain earthy malice inherent to the initial work: Tintin was, in the beginning, a brawling, cunning trickster more than a boy scout. He was also definitely Belgian, as contrasted with the somewhat bland “international” Tintin of later years.

As a counterpoint, I recommend (to you who speak French) the series of albums featuring Quick & Flupke, a pair of wicked little Brussels street urchins.

The Belgian equivalents of the Katzenjammer kids or of Max and Moritz, these two lively pests were well grounded in the rich culture of that teeming capital, Brussels.

The series, composed of two-page stand-alone gags, also lets Hergé indulge one of his major talents as an entertainer– the gagman… but in a childlike, gentle mode that didn’t exclude mild satire:

And the establishment– represented by the police– comes in for some tweaking at the hands of this delinquent duo:

Try this strip some time!

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Tintin

Comics Tourism: Destination Brussels

Phantom Music

Timpa

Kim Thompson on Tintin in the Congo

J’Accuse

Can The Subaltern Draw?: The Case of the Arab Henchman

Strange Windows: The Adventures of Tintin in Otherland, Part V: Radio Coda