Thanks to a Hacker News comment, my kids, ages 7-13. Have been watching an episode of Tintin from the internet archive every week, and they love it. Link: https://archive.org/details/tintinseries43
Get them the comic books; they are well worth the money. The stories, the imagination, the artwork, the language, the settings across the world, the spirit of exploration all together fires one's mind. They are some of the best comics ever written.
I would say: skip the early ones. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and especially Tintin in the Congo are outrageously bad (Tintin in the Congo is horrendously racist). Tintin didn't really become the Tintin we know and love until Blue Lotus, though Cigars of the Pharaoh is still readable.
Like, the parts of Tintin that capture the imagination, the world travel, the realistic depiction of different cultures, the great adventure stories, all of that starts with Blue Lotus.
When people criticize Tintin for being racist, what they're really criticizing are those early stories. In the later stories, the ones that everyone falls in love with, Hergé went to enormous trouble to depict cultures accurately, gathering huge amounts of references to depict everything accurately (you see that in this article, with the image from Blue Lotus). In these stories, almost without exception, Tintin is the champion of colonized and oppressed peoples, and the stories hold up extremely well.
Nice post about Tintin, one of my top childhood influences. I have a new edition of all the albums (much better than mine) unopened and ready for when my kid grows enough. The TV show wasn't so good IMHO - of course the narrative was great because it came from the comics, but animation quality was just so-so, or at least that's how I remember it.
If you liked Tintin and long for more comics of the same kind, I recommend you to try Blake and Mortimer. They're different (e.g. with a more serious and wordy style, hardly any comical gags, but also with more fantastic elements). But they are the closest I know, and in some aspects even better (I personally prefer them although I'm aware it's due to very subjective factors, most people would still rank Tintin higher overall and Blake and Mortimer don't have such a universal acclaim).
The only thing I dislike about the post is the gratuitous rant on AI at the end. It is great news that Tintin joins the public domain. Especially great because it's one of these cases where the owners have been especially abusive, chasing fan efforts done as a labor of love, lest they harm their sales of overpriced merchandising.
Why exactly should be worry about people generating AI images of Tintin? What is the harm done? We know what the original albums are, they will probably be preserved as long as there is human civilization (despite copyright, not thanks to it), and we can freely decide if we also want to read/watch/see derivative works (and which) or not. I just don't see the problem at all.
What also comes to mind is Yoko Tsuno [1]. I'm not sure how well known this is in the US. The creator Roger Leloup was supporting Hegré on the technical drawings. For people who like the 'ligne claire' style, definitely check it out. The science fiction aspect of it might appeal to the audience on HN.
I was massively into Tintin as a kid in Ireland and when I met my Belgian wife she introduced me to this and I loved it. I was hoping I'd find it mentioned in here already!
> Artists in Europe have already been fighting to protect the copyright of Tintin to keep the artwork away from large language models (LLMs) training various AI algorithms.
There is no copyright in the character anymore, so there’s nothing to protect.
I really do not understand this perspective. Do people also wish to use legal force to prevent others from working with, for example, Gainsborough, or Moliere, or Julius Caesar, or Homer? Come on: at some point something has to enter the public domain and become part of the shared treasure of all mankind.
While I don't have a dog in that fight, describing the opponents position as being against Tintin "becom[ing] part of the shared treasure of all mankind" seems rather unfairly dismissive.
I would expect that most of those artists don't mind the journey into public domain. Rather, the are against large corporations hoovering up that treasure and regurgitating it with a profit motive.
So they don't mind work entering the public domain, but they do mind people making use of that work in an organized way after it has? Seems a bit strange.
In Europe, Tintin is under copyright until 2053 (death + 70 years).
And the rightsholders (Tintinimaginatio, previously Moulinsart) are very aggressive about it, even more so than Disney. They don't have the lobbying power of Disney, but they are going to do everything in their power to protect and possibly overstep their rights. It includes using trademark laws and publishing new Tintin adventures against the will of the original author as an attempt to renew their copyright.
Tintin is notable in that the series was not continued by other artists after the desth of Hergé. While the estate is critized for guarding the IP too zealously, I greatly respect this decision, which is part of what makes it such a classic.
Maybe not in the official series, though I’d love to see Al-far one finished by someone. But as far as tintin, there may not be official series, but there is a lot of new work based on it, from merch to the Spielberg movie, as bad as it was.
European comics are usually done by one artist only. I can’t explain why but it’s very different from American comics where the same concept (one character with a simple background) can be derived by a hundred people.
Both are good but I guess they come from a different background and tradition. You have Joachim Phoenix playing a joker without Batman, but people would never understand why a new Tintin would have a different art style than the old one. It would be very confusing even to me.
There's been weights on Civit.ai [1] for months, and I just assumed this was already done and a lost cause. When I asked ChatGPT/Dall-E for an image "... in the style of Herge" it didn't do a half bad job enough for me to see the inspiration either.
I can see a difference between being allowed to publish an expired work as-is, and profit from it, vs reusing the characters for a completely different story.
Right, so by that rule, someone could stage a theater production or movie of the exact text of one of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, but could not make anything similar to the characters and relationships of Holmes and Watson. Forever.
And exactly how similar must the new production be? Can there be any deviation from the exact words written by Doyle? It seems your rule would certainly ban the excellent BBC production of Sherlock [0]
What about Shakespeare? It seems this would ban the entire writing and production of West Side Story (of course a 1950's riff on Romeo and Juilet) [1,2].
That sounds like a permanent extension of copyright, with a limited media exception.
No, people have to be able to derive works from other works, especially when the latter are in the public domain. Up-thread I sardonically said to burn Picasso's Las Meninas, and I repeat that here because I think it's a good example, and I think you can probably think of many more on your own. E.g., A Fith of Beethoven vs. Beethoven's Fith Symphony -- good or bad?
In Europe (and Japan), training LLMs and AI "art" generators on copyrighted work is explicitly permitted. So this is doubly confusing to me, since even if it wasn't public domain, it'd still be legal to train on it.
In legal terms, that is not entirely correct. In practice, it is however. For now.
EU (which is not the whole of Europe) has regulation that allows a copyright owner to opt out of data mining for AI training.
But the framework is incomplete: there does not exist a generally agree-upon method to actually opt out. There are a few protocols and file formats from a couple of organisation but none which has been given any official status. While a publisher may use one, a web scraper might support only another.
Japan has traditionally been quite strict on copyright law. I would not be surprised if the law would get tightened to explicitly disallow AI training on copyrighted works.
Yes, or at least, we should prevent companies from cheapening our cultural legacy with endless tackyness, spin-offs, merchandice, advertisements, and other vulgar things.
I think I understand this perspective somewhat. It's coming from a mindset where it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism. They don't really want to keep Tintin from the common folk, but they want to keep it from the hands of greedy capitalists, and they assume that those will always be with us.
I look out my window and see the fires and the smoke and the homes lost forever. I look at Google News and half the stories are about cryptocurrency. The end of human civilization is much, much easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.
> it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism
Well, yeah, it absolutely is easier to imagine civilization collapsing than to imagine it a world in which human being do not expect to benefit from their efforts. Noting, of course, that "capitalism" as you mean it doesn't really even exist in the first place, as it's just an analytical model used to describe patterns of behavior that emerge from the motivations people already have.
Ahh Tintin. This takes me right back to the pre-internet era perusing the Tintin section at my school’s library. It was such a delight to occasionally come across one that I hadn’t read yet. Somehow this happened surprisingly often, I guess a bunch of us borrowers kept the series under heavy rotation.
In my school there was always a mad scramble every month to get first access to the latest addition to our school librarys' Tintin and Asterix sections; it resulted in many a schoolyard scrap, in fact. So much so, that our school librarian would often 'scramble' the day of the week that she'd release it into the collection .. some of us worked out that the release day of the week was simply incremented each month, however.
I vividly remember my disappointment that some of the richer kids just got their own 'subscription' to the Tintin/Asterix comics at home, and therefore often spoiled the stories for those of us dependent on the school library.
Was very non-Tintin like behaviour, I have to say .. which I eventually trumped by bringing to school a well-worn Lucky Luke collection that had been gifted to me, in order to share with the oik kids, exclusively ..
Destination Moon - the one where Tintin goes to the moon - is an absolutely remarkable piece of science fiction, considering it was published in 1950-1953, nearly twenty years prior to the actual moon landings.
The detail in panels like the Luxor (mid-article) was always my favorite part about Tintin. The world Hergé created felt lived in, but not worn out, and that was a big draw.
There is a very good documentary called "Tintin and I" (2003) [1] about Hergé's life and art. It goes quite deep into Hergé's personal life, influences, and psychology, including a dark period of his life that apparently ended up inspiring the story Tintin in Tibet (one of his best). It features some hand-animated Tintin panels that are very well done.
You know those guys? My friend and I used to come to tears to these during the old DubToons days. It's the only reason I know what a Middlesborough accent is. We still quote them!
10 Tintin comics/books came as donations to my small school in a small town in India. Hardy boys were also donated but Tintin just hit the sweet spot for me.
I sometimes think it's the artsy design which feels so warm. As an 11-year-old, I was mesmerised by them. I didn't understand a ton of things Captain Haddock said with English being the 2nd language.
The adventures were sooo good. I saw the movie when it came out more than a decade ago and it brought back so many memories.
Even today, I love it's aesthetic design a lot. I discovered Asterix and Obelix when I was 17 and they had similar vibes and energy with their designs in them too.
Popular Indian comics at the time (Chacha Choudhary and others) were great too but the design aesthetic were worlds apart.
Please correct me if I'm wrong... Tintin is in the public domain, so I can create a Tintin story where the character looks exactly like Tintin and I can call it Tintin.
But most of Herge's Tintin stories remain out of the public domain and still protected by copyright. Correct?
In Europe Copyright is the death of the author + 70 years, so until 2053. There is an exception to allow for copyright to lapse earlier if the copyright would run out in the original creator's country of origin first, to handle situations where American copyright for American authors will expire before European.
But Tintin will run out in 2053 in Europe because Herge is European.
In U.S however Tintin is public domain. You can use Tintin for things in U.S just don't try to go to Europe with it.
on edit: this applies of course to Tintin in the land of the Soviets.
I would imagine so. Hergé died in 1983, and the last finished story (Tintin and the Picaros) was published in 1973. I can't imagine its out of copyright.
The first story (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, a real stinker, this is before Tintin became Tintin) was published in 1930, in Le Petit Vingtième which was the children's edition of the newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. The newspaper presumably had copyright to the character, but it was shut down in 1940 by the Nazis. After that, Tintin was published in Le Soir (still exists), but I have no idea how the rights transferred. From 1950 onwards, it was published by Hergé's own company.
Very few cartoon openings have left a mark on me, but Tintin's lush opening credits paired with Ray Parker's and Tom Szczesniak's musical score and theme, still sends shivers down my spine.
I think it's only the case that the first book has entered the public domain, not all the others, so technically you are breaking copyright if you use images from later books (as does this article).
Also copyright is not the same as a trademark, and I expect "Tintin", and perhaps the visual image of Tintin, are trademarked.
He drew caricatures that would be easy for 1930s children to identify. There are very few depictions of non-white characters in the books that aren't in same way questionable.
It's unfortunate, but a lot of literature of the time needs to be read with the general ambient racism that was sloshing around in mind.
As a huge Tintin fan I find one of the interesting things about it is how few Tintin images you can find on the web. I expect that is because they have lawyers contacting sites that put up copyrighted images.
Bizarre coincidence but on way back through town today on lunch break saw several volumes of Tintin in a charity shop window and took it as fate after reading this article.
I've been thinking about Tintin as well recently after seeing Elon's rockets. The concept of a young investigative journalist travelling the globe while solving mysteries and seeing wonders both natural and cultural certainly does have an enduring appeal.
I received 4 years of schoolboy-level French education in high-school. Totally sucked at it, and dropped it the moment I could.
I moved to France in 2007, married a French girl in 2011. I obtained French nationality beginning last year. During my first years in France it was tough, but those 4 years did come back.
A couple of years ago I also amortized 4 years of German when I had to translate our ontology into German.
My conclusion : the ROI on learning a language is better than you think. And your investment will come back to you.
If you want to top up your French, try watching Netflix in French audio, or with French subtitles (or both!). Or even better, watch some of the French shows that they now offer : Call My Agent, Lupin, etc)
My eldest brother hated learning French in school. Hated it. He even made a deal with the French teacher that he would pass Grade 12 French if he promised not to take it in Grade 13.
Then, in his late 20s, he was travelling the world and ended up in the French island of La Reunion (kind of like Hawaii with French food and social programs).
He married and has two children and is only now, after more than 30 years and acquiring French citizenship, is he talking about moving back to Canada.
Try reading "French for Reading" by Karl C. Sandberg. It refreshed my French a lot, very quickly, and I was able to read young-adult-level fiction with a little help from a dictionary. Also, I can grok technical stuff pretty well. I get no practice at spoken French, unfortunately. We don't have a large population of speakers here.
Just came here to comment that I'm also introducing my childhood heroes, including Tintin, to my kids.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel that old comics focus on exploration and discovery. I grew up with the aspiration to visit those places, and I hope to pass that feeling on to my kids.
It started in the 1930s, so I think the answer is no, they weren't expected to do those things. I expect it would have been very difficult to get hired as a reporter (Tintin's profession) as a women in the 1930s. Even the detectives of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers were men, despite the authors being women.
But, you're in luck, there's Yoko Tsuno [1], also by a Belgian, I believe, but started 40 years later.
You might enjoy the Japanese TV series Miss Sherlock which uses female leads for a Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock style adventure series - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Sherlock
Thanks to a Hacker News comment, my kids, ages 7-13. Have been watching an episode of Tintin from the internet archive every week, and they love it. Link: https://archive.org/details/tintinseries43
Get them the comic books; they are well worth the money. The stories, the imagination, the artwork, the language, the settings across the world, the spirit of exploration all together fires one's mind. They are some of the best comics ever written.
Here they are:
1) https://archive.org/details/01TintinInTheLandOfTheSoviets/01...
2) https://readtintin.blogspot.com/
PS: Also Asterix comics - https://readasterix.blogspot.com/
I would say: skip the early ones. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and especially Tintin in the Congo are outrageously bad (Tintin in the Congo is horrendously racist). Tintin didn't really become the Tintin we know and love until Blue Lotus, though Cigars of the Pharaoh is still readable.
Like, the parts of Tintin that capture the imagination, the world travel, the realistic depiction of different cultures, the great adventure stories, all of that starts with Blue Lotus.
When people criticize Tintin for being racist, what they're really criticizing are those early stories. In the later stories, the ones that everyone falls in love with, Hergé went to enormous trouble to depict cultures accurately, gathering huge amounts of references to depict everything accurately (you see that in this article, with the image from Blue Lotus). In these stories, almost without exception, Tintin is the champion of colonized and oppressed peoples, and the stories hold up extremely well.
13 replies →
also spirou, also theres a lot more franco belgian comics
also books like the le petit nicolas series, little nicholas, by Sempe & Goscinny (who also did asterix) so funny and great for children!
1 reply →
Oh man, is there a way to get them in the original French on PDF?
2 replies →
What was the HN comment? Maybe we should add it to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights?
Nice post about Tintin, one of my top childhood influences. I have a new edition of all the albums (much better than mine) unopened and ready for when my kid grows enough. The TV show wasn't so good IMHO - of course the narrative was great because it came from the comics, but animation quality was just so-so, or at least that's how I remember it.
If you liked Tintin and long for more comics of the same kind, I recommend you to try Blake and Mortimer. They're different (e.g. with a more serious and wordy style, hardly any comical gags, but also with more fantastic elements). But they are the closest I know, and in some aspects even better (I personally prefer them although I'm aware it's due to very subjective factors, most people would still rank Tintin higher overall and Blake and Mortimer don't have such a universal acclaim).
The only thing I dislike about the post is the gratuitous rant on AI at the end. It is great news that Tintin joins the public domain. Especially great because it's one of these cases where the owners have been especially abusive, chasing fan efforts done as a labor of love, lest they harm their sales of overpriced merchandising.
Why exactly should be worry about people generating AI images of Tintin? What is the harm done? We know what the original albums are, they will probably be preserved as long as there is human civilization (despite copyright, not thanks to it), and we can freely decide if we also want to read/watch/see derivative works (and which) or not. I just don't see the problem at all.
What also comes to mind is Yoko Tsuno [1]. I'm not sure how well known this is in the US. The creator Roger Leloup was supporting Hegré on the technical drawings. For people who like the 'ligne claire' style, definitely check it out. The science fiction aspect of it might appeal to the audience on HN.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Tsuno
I would second this. There is archeology, space travel, time travel... Loads of fun. I'm still trying to get a hold of all the titles.
Oh, and evil AI! Right in the first album. Had totally forgotten about that.
I was massively into Tintin as a kid in Ireland and when I met my Belgian wife she introduced me to this and I loved it. I was hoping I'd find it mentioned in here already!
If we're going to recommend comics I'm gonna pitch The Red Knight. I have some of the old monochrome prints and they're an absolute blast.
Had never heard of it (in spite of being European, not from the US) and it looks like my cup of tea, so definitely will check it out.
> Artists in Europe have already been fighting to protect the copyright of Tintin to keep the artwork away from large language models (LLMs) training various AI algorithms.
There is no copyright in the character anymore, so there’s nothing to protect.
I really do not understand this perspective. Do people also wish to use legal force to prevent others from working with, for example, Gainsborough, or Moliere, or Julius Caesar, or Homer? Come on: at some point something has to enter the public domain and become part of the shared treasure of all mankind.
While I don't have a dog in that fight, describing the opponents position as being against Tintin "becom[ing] part of the shared treasure of all mankind" seems rather unfairly dismissive.
I would expect that most of those artists don't mind the journey into public domain. Rather, the are against large corporations hoovering up that treasure and regurgitating it with a profit motive.
So they don't mind work entering the public domain, but they do mind people making use of that work in an organized way after it has? Seems a bit strange.
26 replies →
In Europe, Tintin is under copyright until 2053 (death + 70 years).
And the rightsholders (Tintinimaginatio, previously Moulinsart) are very aggressive about it, even more so than Disney. They don't have the lobbying power of Disney, but they are going to do everything in their power to protect and possibly overstep their rights. It includes using trademark laws and publishing new Tintin adventures against the will of the original author as an attempt to renew their copyright.
If he sold his rights then it's not really against his wishes anymore.
6 replies →
Tintin is notable in that the series was not continued by other artists after the desth of Hergé. While the estate is critized for guarding the IP too zealously, I greatly respect this decision, which is part of what makes it such a classic.
Maybe not in the official series, though I’d love to see Al-far one finished by someone. But as far as tintin, there may not be official series, but there is a lot of new work based on it, from merch to the Spielberg movie, as bad as it was.
2 replies →
European comics are usually done by one artist only. I can’t explain why but it’s very different from American comics where the same concept (one character with a simple background) can be derived by a hundred people.
Both are good but I guess they come from a different background and tradition. You have Joachim Phoenix playing a joker without Batman, but people would never understand why a new Tintin would have a different art style than the old one. It would be very confusing even to me.
1 reply →
There's been weights on Civit.ai [1] for months, and I just assumed this was already done and a lost cause. When I asked ChatGPT/Dall-E for an image "... in the style of Herge" it didn't do a half bad job enough for me to see the inspiration either.
[1] https://civitai.com/models/488165/herge-tintin-sdxl
I can see a difference between being allowed to publish an expired work as-is, and profit from it, vs reusing the characters for a completely different story.
Right, so by that rule, someone could stage a theater production or movie of the exact text of one of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, but could not make anything similar to the characters and relationships of Holmes and Watson. Forever.
And exactly how similar must the new production be? Can there be any deviation from the exact words written by Doyle? It seems your rule would certainly ban the excellent BBC production of Sherlock [0]
What about Shakespeare? It seems this would ban the entire writing and production of West Side Story (of course a 1950's riff on Romeo and Juilet) [1,2].
That sounds like a permanent extension of copyright, with a limited media exception.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018ttws
[1] https://www.westsidestory.com/
[2] https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/west-sid...
2 replies →
No, people have to be able to derive works from other works, especially when the latter are in the public domain. Up-thread I sardonically said to burn Picasso's Las Meninas, and I repeat that here because I think it's a good example, and I think you can probably think of many more on your own. E.g., A Fith of Beethoven vs. Beethoven's Fith Symphony -- good or bad?
What you're seeing might be a smudge on your glasses. Legally, there is no such difference.
14 replies →
In Europe (and Japan), training LLMs and AI "art" generators on copyrighted work is explicitly permitted. So this is doubly confusing to me, since even if it wasn't public domain, it'd still be legal to train on it.
In legal terms, that is not entirely correct. In practice, it is however. For now.
EU (which is not the whole of Europe) has regulation that allows a copyright owner to opt out of data mining for AI training. But the framework is incomplete: there does not exist a generally agree-upon method to actually opt out. There are a few protocols and file formats from a couple of organisation but none which has been given any official status. While a publisher may use one, a web scraper might support only another.
Japan has traditionally been quite strict on copyright law. I would not be surprised if the law would get tightened to explicitly disallow AI training on copyrighted works.
Yes, or at least, we should prevent companies from cheapening our cultural legacy with endless tackyness, spin-offs, merchandice, advertisements, and other vulgar things.
I agree 100%.
I think I understand this perspective somewhat. It's coming from a mindset where it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism. They don't really want to keep Tintin from the common folk, but they want to keep it from the hands of greedy capitalists, and they assume that those will always be with us.
I look out my window and see the fires and the smoke and the homes lost forever. I look at Google News and half the stories are about cryptocurrency. The end of human civilization is much, much easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.
When capitalism falls, we can reevaluate those laws.
Both are equally impermanent ideas
3 replies →
> it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism
Well, yeah, it absolutely is easier to imagine civilization collapsing than to imagine it a world in which human being do not expect to benefit from their efforts. Noting, of course, that "capitalism" as you mean it doesn't really even exist in the first place, as it's just an analytical model used to describe patterns of behavior that emerge from the motivations people already have.
4 replies →
Ahh Tintin. This takes me right back to the pre-internet era perusing the Tintin section at my school’s library. It was such a delight to occasionally come across one that I hadn’t read yet. Somehow this happened surprisingly often, I guess a bunch of us borrowers kept the series under heavy rotation.
Same, always a surprise to see that "book" was even there along with Asterix comics.
When both were unavailable, I had no other option to read the other books. I think I manage to devour almost all the (for kid) library back them.
In my school there was always a mad scramble every month to get first access to the latest addition to our school librarys' Tintin and Asterix sections; it resulted in many a schoolyard scrap, in fact. So much so, that our school librarian would often 'scramble' the day of the week that she'd release it into the collection .. some of us worked out that the release day of the week was simply incremented each month, however.
I vividly remember my disappointment that some of the richer kids just got their own 'subscription' to the Tintin/Asterix comics at home, and therefore often spoiled the stories for those of us dependent on the school library.
Was very non-Tintin like behaviour, I have to say .. which I eventually trumped by bringing to school a well-worn Lucky Luke collection that had been gifted to me, in order to share with the oik kids, exclusively ..
Destination Moon - the one where Tintin goes to the moon - is an absolutely remarkable piece of science fiction, considering it was published in 1950-1953, nearly twenty years prior to the actual moon landings.
The rocket design in that one is SO iconic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_Moon_(comics)
The detail in panels like the Luxor (mid-article) was always my favorite part about Tintin. The world Hergé created felt lived in, but not worn out, and that was a big draw.
Not an original, but it's in keeping with the aesthetic.
There is a very good documentary called "Tintin and I" (2003) [1] about Hergé's life and art. It goes quite deep into Hergé's personal life, influences, and psychology, including a dark period of his life that apparently ended up inspiring the story Tintin in Tibet (one of his best). It features some hand-animated Tintin panels that are very well done.
Looks like the whole thing is on YouTube [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_and_I
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUTwf7w7ML4
> the story Tintin in Tibet (one of his best)
The Dalai Lama himself bestowed an award on the Herge Foundation for this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin#Award...
Some guys I grew up with dubbed TinTin with Northern English. It's exceptionally crude, but never ceases to make me laugh.
https://youtu.be/6iV5YrLYhCA
You know those guys? My friend and I used to come to tears to these during the old DubToons days. It's the only reason I know what a Middlesborough accent is. We still quote them!
Aye! We went to Teeside College together. I think it's been renamed Teeside Uni now or it's something else.
Can't find it, this is going back 19 years ago now. I grew up in Hartlepool and went to college there.
10 Tintin comics/books came as donations to my small school in a small town in India. Hardy boys were also donated but Tintin just hit the sweet spot for me.
I sometimes think it's the artsy design which feels so warm. As an 11-year-old, I was mesmerised by them. I didn't understand a ton of things Captain Haddock said with English being the 2nd language.
The adventures were sooo good. I saw the movie when it came out more than a decade ago and it brought back so many memories.
Even today, I love it's aesthetic design a lot. I discovered Asterix and Obelix when I was 17 and they had similar vibes and energy with their designs in them too.
Popular Indian comics at the time (Chacha Choudhary and others) were great too but the design aesthetic were worlds apart.
Please correct me if I'm wrong... Tintin is in the public domain, so I can create a Tintin story where the character looks exactly like Tintin and I can call it Tintin.
But most of Herge's Tintin stories remain out of the public domain and still protected by copyright. Correct?
In Europe Copyright is the death of the author + 70 years, so until 2053. There is an exception to allow for copyright to lapse earlier if the copyright would run out in the original creator's country of origin first, to handle situations where American copyright for American authors will expire before European.
But Tintin will run out in 2053 in Europe because Herge is European.
In U.S however Tintin is public domain. You can use Tintin for things in U.S just don't try to go to Europe with it.
on edit: this applies of course to Tintin in the land of the Soviets.
I would imagine so. Hergé died in 1983, and the last finished story (Tintin and the Picaros) was published in 1973. I can't imagine its out of copyright.
The first story (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, a real stinker, this is before Tintin became Tintin) was published in 1930, in Le Petit Vingtième which was the children's edition of the newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. The newspaper presumably had copyright to the character, but it was shut down in 1940 by the Nazis. After that, Tintin was published in Le Soir (still exists), but I have no idea how the rights transferred. From 1950 onwards, it was published by Hergé's own company.
All episodes of the 90s Tintin animated series are on DailyMotion:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x749uno
Brings back some great childhood memories, thanks! /
Very few cartoon openings have left a mark on me, but Tintin's lush opening credits paired with Ray Parker's and Tom Szczesniak's musical score and theme, still sends shivers down my spine.
If you are ever in Belgium, visit the Tintin museum in Louvain-La-Neuve (close to Brussels). It's quite nice.
I think it's only the case that the first book has entered the public domain, not all the others, so technically you are breaking copyright if you use images from later books (as does this article).
Also copyright is not the same as a trademark, and I expect "Tintin", and perhaps the visual image of Tintin, are trademarked.
That would be Tintin in the Land of the Soviets[0], I believe.
Hergé's depiction of black people was pretty awful, sadly. I know that many folks don't like to admit that Tintin in the Congo[1] exists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Sovi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Congo
He drew caricatures that would be easy for 1930s children to identify. There are very few depictions of non-white characters in the books that aren't in same way questionable.
It's unfortunate, but a lot of literature of the time needs to be read with the general ambient racism that was sloshing around in mind.
3 replies →
The article is allowed to use moderate amounts of copyrighted material for illustration and commentary. In the US this is called “fair use”.
As a huge Tintin fan I find one of the interesting things about it is how few Tintin images you can find on the web. I expect that is because they have lawyers contacting sites that put up copyrighted images.
1 reply →
Bizarre coincidence but on way back through town today on lunch break saw several volumes of Tintin in a charity shop window and took it as fate after reading this article.
I am no expert, but I like the aesthetics, especially the colours, much more than the superhero comics of the time.
I've been thinking about Tintin as well recently after seeing Elon's rockets. The concept of a young investigative journalist travelling the globe while solving mysteries and seeing wonders both natural and cultural certainly does have an enduring appeal.
I grew up on Tintin. I learned French, reading him (and Asterix).
I have since, almost entirely forgotten the language :(
My favorite Tintin fan art: https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3270528/random-cool-tinti...
I received 4 years of schoolboy-level French education in high-school. Totally sucked at it, and dropped it the moment I could.
I moved to France in 2007, married a French girl in 2011. I obtained French nationality beginning last year. During my first years in France it was tough, but those 4 years did come back.
A couple of years ago I also amortized 4 years of German when I had to translate our ontology into German.
My conclusion : the ROI on learning a language is better than you think. And your investment will come back to you.
If you want to top up your French, try watching Netflix in French audio, or with French subtitles (or both!). Or even better, watch some of the French shows that they now offer : Call My Agent, Lupin, etc)
My eldest brother hated learning French in school. Hated it. He even made a deal with the French teacher that he would pass Grade 12 French if he promised not to take it in Grade 13.
Then, in his late 20s, he was travelling the world and ended up in the French island of La Reunion (kind of like Hawaii with French food and social programs).
He married and has two children and is only now, after more than 30 years and acquiring French citizenship, is he talking about moving back to Canada.
I tried watching HPI[0], but she talks really quickly. Maybe I should try again.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPI_(TV_series)
1 reply →
Try reading "French for Reading" by Karl C. Sandberg. It refreshed my French a lot, very quickly, and I was able to read young-adult-level fiction with a little help from a dictionary. Also, I can grok technical stuff pretty well. I get no practice at spoken French, unfortunately. We don't have a large population of speakers here.
That fan art is incredible. I would love to read those!
Thse were absolute gems at my local library when I was a kid
tintin’s unique style and charm really stand out compared to most superhero comics. the mix of adventure and detailed settings makes it timeless
Just came here to comment that I'm also introducing my childhood heroes, including Tintin, to my kids.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel that old comics focus on exploration and discovery. I grew up with the aspiration to visit those places, and I hope to pass that feeling on to my kids.
I love this, but I feel sad that there's minimal presence of women or girls anywhere - it's almost entirely male.
Are women not expected to explore, discover the world, enjoy adventures, solve mysteries?
(I don't want to complain; it's just an observation.)
It started in the 1930s, so I think the answer is no, they weren't expected to do those things. I expect it would have been very difficult to get hired as a reporter (Tintin's profession) as a women in the 1930s. Even the detectives of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers were men, despite the authors being women.
But, you're in luck, there's Yoko Tsuno [1], also by a Belgian, I believe, but started 40 years later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Tsuno
You might enjoy the Japanese TV series Miss Sherlock which uses female leads for a Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock style adventure series - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Sherlock