Background Georges Remi—best known under the pen name
Hergé—was the editor and illustrator of ("
The Little Twentieth"), a children's supplement to ("
The Twentieth Century"), a staunchly Roman Catholic,
conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native
Brussels. Run by the
Abbé Norbert Wallez, the paper described itself as a "Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information" and disseminated a far-right, fascist viewpoint. According to
Harry Thompson, such political ideas were common in Belgium at the time, and Hergé's milieu was permeated with conservative ideas revolving around "patriotism, Catholicism, strict morality, discipline, and naivety". In 1929, Hergé began
The Adventures of Tintin comic strip for , a series about the exploits of a fictional Belgian reporter named Tintin. Following the success of
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,
serialised weekly in
Le Petit Vingtième from January 1929 to May 1930, Hergé wanted to send Tintin to the United States. Wallez insisted he write a story set in the Belgian Congo, then a
Belgian colony and today the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. Belgian children learned about the Congo in school, and Wallez hoped to encourage colonialist and missionary zeal in his readership. He believed that the Belgian colonial administration needed promotion at a time when memories "were still fairly fresh" of the 1928 visit to the colony by the Belgian
King Albert and
Queen Elisabeth. He also hoped that some of his readers would be inspired to work in the Congo. Hergé characterised Wallez's instructions in a sarcastic manner, saying Wallez referred to the Congo as "our beautiful colony which has great need of us, tarantara, tarantaraboom". He already had some experience in illustrating Congolese scenes; three years previously, Hergé had provided two illustrations for the newspaper that appeared in an article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of
Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to the Congo. In one of these, Hergé depicted a native Congolese bowing before a European, a scene that he repeated in
Tintin in the Congo. As in
Land of the Soviets, where Hergé had based his information about the Soviet Union almost entirely on a single source, in
Tintin in the Congo he used limited source material to learn about the country and its people. He based the story largely on literature written by missionaries, with the only added element being that of the diamond smugglers, possibly adopted from the "
Jungle Jim-type serials". Hergé visited the
Colonial Museum of
Tervuren, examining their ethnographic collections of Congolese artefacts, including costumes of the
Leopard Men. He adopted hunting scenes from
André Maurois's novel
The Silence of Colonel Bramble, while his animal drawings were inspired by
Benjamin Rabier's prints. He also listened to tales of the colony from some of his colleagues who had been there, but disliked their stories, later claiming: "I didn't like the colonists, who came back bragging about their exploits. But I couldn't prevent myself from seeing the Blacks as big children, either".
Original publication, 1930–31 ; they are joined by Hergé, E. P. Jacobs, and Thomson and Thompson in the latter.|alt=Two comic book frames; the same basic scene of a young man being seen off at a railway station is depicted, but one image is in black and white while the other is in colour.
Tintin in the Congo was serialised under the French title of
Tintin au Congo in
Le Petit Vingtième from 5 June 1930 to 11 June 1931; it was
syndicated to the French Catholic newspaper
Cœurs Vaillants. Drawn in black and white, it followed the same formula employed in
Land of the Soviets, remaining "essentially plotless" according to the Hergé specialist
Michael Farr, and consisting of largely unrelated events that Hergé improvised each week. Hergé later commented on the process of writing these early adventures, stating: "The came out on Wednesday evening, and I often didn't have a clue on Wednesday morning how I was going to get Tintin out of the predicament I had put him in the previous week". The strip's visual style was similar to that of
Land of the Soviets. In the first instalment of
Tintin in the Congo, Hergé featured
Quick and Flupke, two young boys from Brussels whom he had recently introduced in another
Le Petit Vingtième comic strip, in the crowd of people saying goodbye to Tintin. Like
Land of the Soviets,
Tintin in the Congo was popular in Belgium. On the afternoon of 9 July 1931, Wallez repeated the publicity stunt he had used when
Soviets ended by having a young actor, Henry de Doncker, dress up as Tintin in colonial gear and appear in Brussels and then
Liège, accompanied by 10 African bearers and an assortment of exotic animals hired from a zoo. Co-organised with the
Bon Marché department store, the event attracted 5,000 spectators in Brussels. In 1931, Brussels-based Éditions de Petit Vingtième collected the story together into a single volume, and
Casterman published a second edition in 1937. By 1944 the book had been reprinted seven times, and had outsold each of the other seven books in the series. The series' success led Wallez to renegotiate Hergé's contract, giving him a higher salary and the right to work from home.
Second version, 1946 In the 1940s, after Hergé's popularity increased, he redrew many of the original black-and-white Tintin stories in colour using the ("clear line") drawing style he had developed, so that they fitted in visually with the newer
Adventures of Tintin that he had produced. Hergé first made some changes in this direction in 1940, when the story was serialised in the Dutch-language
Het Laatste Nieuws. At Casterman's prompting,
Tintin in the Congo was subsequently fully re-drawn, and the new version was published in 1946. As a part of this modification, Hergé cut the page length from 110 plates to the standard 62 pages, as suggested by the publisher Casterman. He also made several changes to the story, cutting many of the references to Belgium and
colonial rule. For example, in the scene where Tintin teaches Congolese school children about
geography, he states in the 1930–31 version: "My dear friends, today I'm going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!" whereas in the 1946 version, he instead gives them a
mathematics lesson. Hergé also changed the character of Jimmy MacDuff, the owner of the leopard that attacks Tintin, from a black manager of the Great American Circus into a white "supplier of the biggest zoos in Europe". In the 1946 colour version, Hergé added a cameo appearance from
Thomson and Thompson, the two detectives that he had introduced in the fourth Tintin story,
Cigars of the Pharaoh (1932–34), which was chronologically set after the Congolese adventure. Adding them to the first page, Hergé featured them in the backdrop, watching a crowd surrounding Tintin as he boards a train and commenting that it "Seems to be a young reporter going to Africa ..." In the same frame, Hergé inserted depictions of himself and his friend
Edgar P. Jacobs (the book's colourist) into the crowd seeing Tintin off.
Later alterations and releases When
Tintin in the Congo was first released by the series' Scandinavian publishers in 1975, they objected to page 56, where Tintin drills a hole into a live
rhinoceros, fills it with dynamite, and blows it up. They asked Hergé to replace this page with a less violent scene, which they believed would be more suitable for children. Hergé agreed, as he regretted the scenes of big-game hunting in the work soon after producing it. The altered page involved the rhinoceros running away unharmed after accidentally knocking down and triggering Tintin's gun. Although publishers worldwide had made it available for many years, English publishers refused to publish
Tintin in the Congo because of its perceived racist content. In the late 1980s, Nick Rodwell, then agent of
Studios Hergé in the United Kingdom, told reporters of his intention to finally publish it in English and stated his belief that publishing the original 1931 black and white edition would cause less controversy than releasing the 1946 colour version. After more delay, in 1991—sixty years after its original 1931 publication—it was the last of
The Adventures of Tintin to see publication in English. The 1946 colour version eventually appeared in English in 2005, published in Britain by
Egmont. ==Critical analysis==