Tintin In America – Hergé, 1932 [Revised 1945] ★½

Dawn's Early Light

No great artist should be judged by their earliest published work; when plying one’s craft it takes time to develop a signature style and voice. You might think such consideration a bit much when said creation involves popular entertainment aimed mainly at children. But in such a case achieving the right calibrations can be even harder.

Case in point: The legendary Belgian cartoonist Hergé.

Reading this, the third installment of Hergé’s Tintin series, is not for today’s children; the ageless charm we associate with the comic-adventure series is still a book away from arriving. Serious fans will appreciate – perhaps even enjoy – this view of where Hergé’s head was at before the series matured into its better-known form. Be warned, though: What you get here is a choppy ride.

It’s 1931, and gangster-ridden Chicago is in dire need of cleaning. Mobsters tremble at the approach of Tintin, “world reporter number one,” as well as his wire fox terrier, Snowy, the only dog in history whose barks can be mistaken for a baby crying.

Al Capone, who had tangled with Tintin in the past, sets up the plot in the second panel: “Not one single day does he spend in Chicago.”

Capone is the only real-life figure ever to get a named cameo in a Tintin comic; ironically given both his stature and his ultimatum Capone is hastily dispatched, thanks to a misaimed vase tossed by one of Capone’s goons. The focus then moves to other villains, in particular Bobby Smiles, a rival Chicago crime boss who first tries to bribe Tintin, then leads him on a westward chase involving American Indians, oil, a railroad race, and attempted murder at a slaughterhouse.

Hergé was in his mid-20s when he began drafting in installment form the panels that make up the bones of Tintin In America. He had already made a name for himself in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième, a weekly children’s supplement of a Catholic newspaper, with a series of short pieces featuring such gag-oriented characters as Quick & Flupke. Tintin began like they had, featured in short bursts of a few pages, in Tintin’s case connected episodes punctuated by cliffhangers to keep the little nippers interested for another week.

This approach carries over to Tintin In America: There are a lot of close shaves with plenty of plot twists resolved very quickly and illogically in the next page. Perhaps it was what Belgian youngsters wanted at the time; in any case it’s what Hergé delivers. In time, he would find a way to smooth out the lurches in his storycraft for book form, but those days were still to come.

Tintin gets the drop on Bobby Shines as Snowy looks on in a sample panel from Tintin In America. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/173107179401346729/.

Also still to come at this point in the series is Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Thompson & Thomson, and other recognizable members of the Tintin stock company. Bobby Smiles is a particularly bland kind of villain, and the other baddies here (including Capone) fairly interchangeable.

Tintin and Snowy actually have conversations in this book, an adjustment for those like me who think of the pup as a kind of mute witness. It makes sense when you consider young Hergé needed a means for delivering exposition.

Tintin: How about that, Snowy? Wasn’t I right to keep away from the windows? Those dummies I used were peppered with holes…custom-made colanders!

Snowy: Dead right!... It strikes me… Wouldn’t it be a good idea… if those dummies did the whole job, instead of us?

Tintin In America supplies many twists and turns, but not much of a story. It’s more of an episodic travelogue with car chases and shootouts where a left-field plot detour becomes the main story over the course of a single page, only to be replaced by another a few pages later.

In just the first four pages, the newly-arrived Tintin is trapped inside a steel-shuttered taxi cab, escapes by using a handy saw, hops a ride with a passing police motorcyclist to chase the taxi down, interrogates the taxi driver only to see him clocked with a boomerang by a goon who happened to be hiding behind a nearby tree, hops on a police car to chase the boomerang guy, gets T-boned in said police car by another goon who happened to be waiting at an intersection for just such an eventuality, and is whisked away by an ambulance.

All this is resolved at the beginning of Page 5, when we see Tintin emerging from a hospital “some days later” and no worse for wear.

“I’m glad to be back on my feet again,” he tells Snowy. “It could have been much worse…”

Just two panels later, he is trapped again, when the sidewalk he stands on turns out to be a trapdoor. It is the first of three times a surprise trapdoor is employed by the bad guys.

People who don’t know Tintin might be thinking: It’s a comic book, right? Yes, but Tintin was rather unique. You can’t quite call them a grown-up name like “graphic novels,” but Tintin books usually involve a single story that you follow for an entire book, or even two. There’s a fierce internal logic to Tintin; once you get past the omnipresent dog and the gravity-defying cowlick you discover in Hergé’s stories a straightforward, reasoned path which compliments their distinctive look, what is called in French ligne claire [clear line] for its absence of shading.

You can spend a lot of time anatomizing the enduring charm of Tintin; many do. For me it boils down to Hergé’s way of blending a charmingly innocent mindset with realistic storycraft that can at times get rather dark. There’s a darkness to the story of Tintin In America; it’s just not realistic.

At least the first time around, it wasn’t ligne claire, either. When America was first published in 1932, Hergé still employed a cruder, derivative style in his artwork, virtually unrecognizable from what Tintin fans know today. It was also in black and white.

Tintin meets a "redskin" in a comparison of the same panel as it appeared in the 1932 and 1945 editions of Tintin In America. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_America. 

By 1945, Hergé had emerged into his more recognizable style, and got around to redoing his pre-war Tintin stories in the splashier style of his subsequent color books. As a result, this book got a complete makeover, both in its drawings and its text.

As with Hergé’s prior Tintin volumes, Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets (1930) and Tintin In The Congo (1931), Tintin In America is something of a problem comic for its socio-political content.

Soviets stridently attacks Russian communism, while Congo defends Belgian colonialism. Both provoke the liberal intelligentsia that defines cultural norms today. Tintin In America featured some racially insensitive caricatures which Hergé redid, but its strong satire of capitalism and white treatment of American Indians has drawn more positive notice.

The American Indians featured in Tintin In America are not negatively depicted, at least not in the 1945 revision, except in their naïve trust of white men. They harass Tintin after Bobby Shines gets them to believe Tintin is out to steal their hunting grounds. It’s a lie but an apt one; while hiding from the tribe in a tunnel Tintin strikes oil, which causes an immediate gusher and an even quicker invasion by American moneymen who, when discovering the oil is on Indian land, have the Army force the Indians to relocate at bayonet-point:

“Here, Hiawatha! Twenty-five dollars and half an hour to pack your bags and quit the territory!”

Another long section of Tintin visiting a slaughterhouse deals with automated industrialization. One panel shows a befuddled cow standing on a conveyer belt, emerging a panel later as sausage links and bricks of corned beef.

Billions of blue blistering barnacles! Could this really be the stuff of Tintin? This would not be the last time Hergé would inject social commentary into Tintin, but he got subtler about it.

Tintin In America does have ample humor, darker than one is used to from the series. Reflecting the time it was originally written, a radio bulletin announces: “24 banks have failed, 24 managers are in jail. Thirty-five babies have been kidnapped, 44 hoboes have been lynched.” Speaking of lynching, there is a long sequence where a bunch of slack-jawed yokels try to hang Tintin from a tree limb, only to tangle themselves up instead.

Other laughs are more innocent, like a meeting of the Distressed Gangsters Association in protest of Tintin’s “unfair discrimination.” Tintin is alternately saved from being run over by a speeding train and drowned by a weightlifter’s barbells in humorous, logic-defying ways that would later become a Hergé trademark, though he would come to lean on them much less over time.

Tintin In America is too herky-jerky in its narrative, and uneven in its tone, to be enjoyed as classic Tintin. No child today will get a hankering for more of the same after reading it. Tintin fans may draw something more positive seeing our hero at a time when he was still finding his feet.