The Blue Lotus – Hergé, 1936 [Revised 1946] ★★½

Tintin Goes Long

When Tintin fans talk about the greatness of the comic series, one oft-cited exhibit is The Blue Lotus, an ambitious tale set before World War II that sets the intrepid Belgian reporter against the international drug trade and Japan’s conquest of China.

For me, it’s a meh experience. I see what admirers mean when they talk about Hergé’s emerging artistry and storycraft. But I have never really taken to the work the way I have to other, less-touted installments of the series.

No question The Blue Lotus was a milestone for Tintin’s creator: It pulls the character far away from his native Europe, geographically and culturally. Hergé himself spent months researching China, reading books and talking to Chinese people in an attempt to imbue his story with more accuracy and sensitivity than prior Tintin adventures (e. g. Indian attacks in Tintin In America).

The resulting story places Tintin in an environment of danger and opportunity. Can he help a Chinese secret society in their battle against opium smugglers in Manchuria? Will he be stopped by the Japanese occupying that Chinese province or westerners whose corruption is exceeded only by their racism?

“What’s the world coming to?” fumes an American businessman named Gibbons, still smarting from having his cane cracked in two by Tintin after Gibbons used it to beat a rickshaw driver. “It’s up to us to civilise the savages! We soon won’t have any control at all…and look what we’ve done for them, all the benefits…”

I suspect The Blue Lotus’s willingness to take on racial injustice is a big reason for its outsized regard. Critics call it a positive turning point from a series that had previously celebrated colonialism (Tintin In The Congo) and attacked communism (Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets), as well as a sign Hergé could manage a more cosmopolitan, less naïve approach to Tintin’s globetrotting.

Regard for The Blue Lotus is near-universal, and quite profound. In 1999, France’s leading newspaper, Le Monde, placed The Blue Lotus eighteenth in its listing of “100 Books Of The Century,” higher than The Sound And The Fury, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Ulysses.

Hergé biographer Benoît Peeters calls The Blue Lotus “an essential turning point both graphically and ideologically” in the series. Other critics tout its realism and construction as series standouts.

Yet all this virtue-signaling praise for The Blue Lotus is hedged by a strong caveat, that being the treatment of the Japanese. The Japanese characters we meet here are not only the chief villains of the piece, but artistically depicted in a crude and pejorative manner.

This isn’t all on Hergé. He didn’t invent the invasion of Manchuria or Japan’s walk-out from the League of Nations after their war-mongering was formally rebuked. He wanted to shed some light on bad behavior. But it leaves a sour aftertaste all the same.

The handling of the Japanese is part of the problem for me, too. It’s not so much the crude visual stereotyping but the difficulty of introducing a real-world situation, and real countries, into a series that usually went for mythical lands and peoples instead, say like Syldavia being threatened by neighboring Borduria in King Ottokar’s Sceptre.

Back in the 1930s, Tintin and Hergé’s expanded alternate universe had yet to form, negating the use of Syldavia or Borduria. Prior Tintin installment Cigars Of The Pharaoh includes real-life countries like Egypt and India. The Blue Lotus, a direct sequel to Cigars, deepens the use of a real-world backdrop.

In terms of graphical depiction, it works. In fact, it’s here most of The Blue Lotus’s reputation was made and is earned.

Inside the opium den that gives The Blue Lotus its name. Image from http://spacemeat.com.au/2007/11/06/the-tintin-trilogy/

The use of Chinese settings is of a consistently high quality, dynamic cityscapes stuffed with exotic architecture and colorful banners which display authentic Cantonese lettering. Night scenes have an inky, almost spooky quality offset by the glow of a distant lantern’s light, or else the moon. With Tintin and his dog Snowy in the foreground, and human figures depicted in the classic ligne claire style, the result suggests a subtle marriage of Western and Eastern imagery.

You feel you are watching Tintin operate in a real setting, not an environment sketched out in a few minutes to accommodate a chase or a cliffhanger sequence. Even though Hergé remained in Europe while scripting and drawing The Blue Lotus, a sense of place holds true throughout.

Too bad about the contrived story, though. However intriguing it sometimes gets, it lacks for charm.

As mentioned, it is a direct sequel to Cigars Of The Pharaoh. There, Tintin was up against a group of opium smugglers using an ancient Egyptian tomb as a hiding place. He winds up in India, rescuing a maharajah’s son and sending the ring’s mysterious leader over a cliff.

The Blue Lotus begins with Tintin still tracking the ring in India. The trail quickly leads to China, but no sooner does Tintin go there than he is called back to India. En route to India, he is abducted by the Sons of the Dragon, a secret society of Chinese dedicated to stamping out the opium trade, and aware of the fact the trade is supported by Manchuria’s Japanese overlords. They convince Tintin of their good intentions.

Eventually the Japanese capture Tintin, too, after he spies them faking a terrorist attack on a train line: “China is an unhealthy place for little Nosy Parkers,” says the chief villain, Mitsuhirato.

There are lots of twists and cliffhangers to keep you flipping from page-to-page. Much of this follows the Cigars playbook, so you get Tintin mistaking an adversary for a friend or vice versa, getting captured, and chasing/being chased by desperadoes. While Cigars had an inspired whimsy about it, not to mention a frenetic pace, The Blue Lotus is more earthbound. I suspect this quality engages others; it puts me off.

Attempts to integrate classic Tintin humor into the mix are present, if in a minor key. One addled fellow pops up from time to time, chasing Tintin and Snowy with a sword. “Look, you needn’t be afraid. I only have to cut your head off,” he tells them.

The detectives Thomson and Thompson bumble around together late in the book to capture Tintin, about the only call-backs to the classic Tintin players apart from Tintin and Snowy. “Just our luck, ordered to arrest a friend,” Thompson mutters. Their biggest blunder: Walking around the Chinese city of Hukow in garish yellow robes, thinking they’ll blend in but attracting a crowd of mockers instead.

Thomson & Thompson's walk of shame in Hukow, as depicted in the 1946 color and 1936 black & white editions. This image is taken from a useful comparison site by comics expert and Tintin fan Sauvik Biswas. See more here: https://sauvikbiswas.com/2013/11/23/how-cigars-and-blue-lotus-got-a-facelift/

It’s a key theme of The Blue Lotus, westerners having a false notion of what the East is about. Tintin tells a Chinese boy he rescues all about how Europeans think Chinese people eat rotten eggs and throw unwanted infants into the river. “They must be crazy people in your country,” the boy replies.

A positive energy suffuses The Blue Lotus, a sense exploration can not only be fun but good for the soul. The experience of writing it led Hergé to a friendship with a Chinese artist, Zhang Chongren, who was the inspiration for Tintin’s young Chinese friend, in The Blue Lotus, Chang Chong-Chen.

The connections Hergé drew from made The Blue Lotus an aesthetically pleasing addition to the Tintin saga. The artwork is subsumed by a sense of quiet appreciation for beauty throughout. Clearly the Orient triggered something of the hidden artist in Hergé’s cartoon work. Still, I don’t think I’m being too chary in saying I am glad the series carried forward in another direction.

I do wonder if I’d like The Blue Lotus more if it fell under my own Tintin nostalgia umbrella. When I discovered Tintin in the late 1970s, The Blue Lotus was absent from the series, having been dumped by British publisher Methuen Publishing Ltd., presumably for its treatment of the Japanese characters. It was added back in 1983, the same year Hergé passed away.

Certainly The Blue Lotus lacks for the usual cast of supporting players like Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus. It’s also a more harrowing entry than the comfortable escapism of usual Tintin fare. I suspect this is a positive for its champions, but ligne claire images of drowned cows and devastated homes after a great flood feels wrong somehow, like a formula isn’t being broadened so much as stretched out of recognition.

But if Hergé didn’t try rattling the cage now and then, he wouldn’t have been Hergé, the pioneer and master of Franco-Belgian comic art who subverted many genres under the comfortable guise of child’s play. The Blue Lotus showcases the ambition more than it does the craft, but remains an arresting signpost for high comic narrative and art.