Tintin’s Politics

I never heard of Tintin while growing up in rural Nebraska. When I later encountered him on the syllabus of an English course during my undergraduate years (there is a whole field of Tintin studies manned by people called Tintinologists, Tintinolators, Tintinites or Hergélogues) he seemed like yet another Euro-import beloved of east-coast elites—the Perrier of comic book characters.

Tintin is the well-intentioned humanitarian cum freedom-fighter, a boy whose clean-living would bring equal pleasure to Jonathan Edwards and Michael Bloomberg. Not only moralistic but moral, not simply well-intentioned but in fact helpful, he represents Western liberalism at its best. His international adventures exude deep confidence in international interventions.

What’s strange about this is that Tintin was in many ways a classic red-America type: embodying the values of Belgium’s Catholic scouting movement, he debuted in the pages of a right-wing newspaper as an exposer of Soviet Communism. [more]

SOURCE

First Things