Comment by starspangled

I love Tintin comics, but even the later ones Tintin is very much the archetype white savior. Everywhere he goes, he's saving the cowering savages and poor natives from themselves or racist whites, and the good ones are always groveling and indebted to the brave and wise Sahib.

Which is okay as a superhero story, but if one is terrified of their children being incapable of separating fact from fiction or inability to develop their own understanding of the time and environment these were created in, they may not be ideal.

There are a bunch of other problems too.

* I'm not big on everything having to be about equal representation all the time, but there is a glaring omission of women. Which I guess would be okay given the times, but the few that do show up are vain, narcissistic, selfish -- Castafiore and General Alcazar's American wife are two I can remember.

* Haddock can get a little racist when he's drunk. It does help that most of his more colorful insults are so old that they've fallen off the treadmill and kids wouldn't understand what they mean (or maybe they've been censored in recent editions?).

* Speaking of which, depictions of Haddock's alcoholism are for comedic value. Tintin often enables and exploits his addiction and gets him inebriated in order to consent to things he had refused. While his drinking usually ends in disaster, he generally comes out unscathed or even ahead and faces no real consequences.

* Non-whites / savages are often treated as simpletons, emotionally driven, gullible and superstitious. Quickly resorting to violence, being fooled by ventriloquism or other cheap tricks, terrified of spells and gods, etc.

I'm skeptical whether these kinds of things actually harm children. I read these as a young child and could recognize all these issues and understand they were based on stereotypes or opinions, but again if people don't think their children are capable, I would advise reading them first. Ones where he stays in Europe are generally pretty safe IIRC.

On a completely different note, it's funny in the English editions, they seemed to me to imply that he's living in Britain, but if you keep an eye out you can spot the inconsistencies. Cars drive on the right, he takes a ferry to get to Scotland, etc.