Tintin
Comics A.M. | Tintin hearing delayed, copyright ruling ignored
Tintin
Legal | A Belgian court has postponed until next week a hearing in the months-long trial over whether to ban Tintin in the Congo because of its racist portrayals of native Africans. The legal battle was launched three years ago by Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a Congolese man living in Belgium, who wants the book removed from the country’s bookstores, or at least sold with warning labels as it is in Britain. An anti-racism group joined Mondondo in seeking the ban. Wednesday’s scheduled hearing was postponed after one of the plaintiffs withdrew from the case; however, the article doesn’t say which one. [Expatica]
Legal | Cartoonist Rich Koslowski discovers that winning a copyright-infringement lawsuit against a company that used his artwork without permission didn’t end the matter. More than a year later, Ontario-based Geeks Galore Computer Center still hasn’t complied with the judge’s order, and continues to use Koslowski’s art in signage and advertising. [Eye on Comics]
- December 9, 2010 @ 07:29 AM by Kevin Melrose
Was Palle Huld the original Tintin?
Palle Huld in 1928
Just last week, our own Chris Mautner provided an excellent introduction to the Tintin comics, and this week we have an interesting bit of Tintin-related news: Palle Huld, one of the possible models for Herge’s globetrotting reporter, has passed away at the age of 98. In 1928, at the age of 15, Huld won a competition sponsored by a Danish Newspaper to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne’s birth. The prize: A trip around the world, unaccompanied, in 44 days, or about half the time it took Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg. The following year, Huld published a book about his travels, A Boy Scout Around the World, and the year after that, Herge began his series of comics about a young, red-haired explorer who favored knickers and kept getting into trouble.
While his exploits were somewhat tamer, Huld’s journey had its share of perils. The most dangerous leg was Manchuria, which was at war at the time, but he made it through unscathed. He got lost in Moscow and missed his train in Newfoundland because he was trying to impress a girl (OK, that doesn’t sound very Tintinish). It is certainly easy to imagine that press accounts of Huld’s travels, or perhaps his book, planted the seed for Tintin. Pierre Assouline, Herge’s biographer, told the New York Times that he had never heard of Huld, but Huld himself believed there was a connection.
- December 6, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics College | Herge
Tintin in Tibet
Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.
Welcome and happy holidays to all our Comics College readers. Today, as a post-Thanksgiving treat to you, we’ll be talking a lengthy look at the career of one Georges Remi, better known by his pen name, Herge, and by extension, his most famous creation, the plucky boy reporter Tintin.
- November 29, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Tintin/Lovecraft mashups
The title says it all: Artist Murray Groat imagines what it would be like if the master of horror was writing Tintin.
- November 26, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
On your next trip to Italy, stay in comic book splendor
The Spider-Man Room at Villa Comics
If you’ve been thinking of heading to Italy and want to stay somewhere close to the water, Villa Comics has six rooms available with a private bathroom, air conditioning, TV, minibar and a comic book theme.
Located in the Gulf of Policastro – Cilento, “the theme is ‘comics,’” their website reads, “and each room is named after a comic character. There are room in honour of: Little Nemo, Tin Tin, Spiderman, Uncle $crooge, Corto Maltese, Spirit and Dylan Dog. Each room is decorated with a colourful canvas. Whether you’re a comic fan, or not, you’ll be enthralled by the attention to detail and the way in which ‘comics’ seeks to transport its guest into the world of fantasy to which each room has been dedicated.”
The proprietor, Gianfranco Martuscelli, is a cartoonist who wanted to combine his passions for comics and tourism.
- October 20, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
In the footsteps of Tintin
Tintin in Petra
The Guardian’s Georgia Brown takes a tour of Jordan that is explicitly designed to mirror Tintin’s travels in The Red Sea Sharks:
I was jolted back to the present when our driver suddenly pulled up and started animatedly talking to a group of Bedouin riders blocking the road. I half-imagined we had stumbled into a misadventure. But this was part of our planned adventure – these were our mounts for the next two hours as we recreated Tintin’s escape over the Heisha Mountains en route to Wadi Musa. We donned our own red and white keffiyehs – a playful nod to TT – before setting off along the dusty track, leaving the highway behind.
The tour was led by noted Tintinologist Michael Farr and included a visit to the ancient city of Petra as well as some sidelights on Tintin and his creator, Hergé.
- October 20, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
This is Charles Burns. This is Charles Burns on Tintin. Any questions?
Aboard the CBR mothership, Alex Dueben talks to Black Hole author Charles Burns about his new book X’ed Out, in stores this week from Pantheon. And by the sound of it, the book — the first in a trilogy — is thoroughly indebted to Belgian comics master Hergé’s timeless Tintin tales, from the cover to the coloring to the format itself:
There’s certainly a very strong Herge influence. If you just think of the Franco-Belgian style of creating comic albums in that format, the way those European make them which is the 64 pages, 48 pages. A hardbound albums with continuing characters. I was one of those rare kids of my generation who grew up reading Tintin and it had a very profound effect on me, so this is the way that I can kind of reflect on that and play with some of those ideas.
[...]
“Black Hole” was always conceived of as being a book that would be all collected together. I’m not conceiving of this as, “Here’s three books that will eventually be collected into one book.” When I get interviewed by the French and Belgian press, I won’t be answering this question, because it’s a different tradition. I’m kind of emulating that tradition by doing a series of books in this manner. For example, when I was doing a signing in Southern France, there was someone who came up to me and who explained that he was really hesitant to buy “Black Hole” for a long time because it just seemed too foreign to him, this idea of this big volume. He wasn’t used to that idea of the graphic novel format, whereas now, it’s really been assimilated over there and popular over there as well. Here, the questions I get asked are, “Gee, this seems like a really slender volume for a graphic novel.” It’s not trying to pass itself off as a big graphic novel. It’s a different style of storytelling.
Unfortunately, Hergé passed away before he could ever release a graphic album in which he processed the influence of Charles Burns. Too bad — I would have liked to have seen Captain Haddock grow a small but strangely erotic vestigial tail.
- October 19, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Brightest Day #7 (August's top-selling comic)
Retailing | Laura Hudson surveys a handful of retailers about what part higher cover prices may have played in August’s plummeting comics sales. “This summer has underperformed, and I think [the $3.99 price point] is a big part of it,” says Chris Rosa of Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles, “but also I think the lack of an event and the fact that the big books at both [companies] are extended denouements to events. There’s nothing really inspiring people to run out to the stores. People are tired of buying four Avengers titles at $3.99 a pop.” [Comics Alliance]
Publishing | Tom Mason looks at the return of Atlas Comics: “If you were 13 years-old in 1975 when the original books were out, you’d be 48 today. In other words, the age of the average direct market fanboy. But in order for these new books to succeed, they’d have to appeal beyond nostalgia because with most Marvel and DC comics at $4.00 a pop, you’ve got to have something special and excellent to lure some of those buyers into your own circus tent.” [Comix 411]
- September 17, 2010 @ 08:05 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comic Twart tackles Asterix, Tintin, Magnus, The Thing and more
It’s been awhile since I posted about Comic Twart, the comic art blog collective that includes Chris Samnee, Mike Hawthorne, Andy Kuhn, Mitch Breitweiser, Tom Fowler, Mitch Gerads and many others. They’ve been regularly posting art based on various themes, so let’s see what they’ve been up to recently …
by Chris Samnee
Above is Chris Samnee’s Magnus, Robot Fighter; you can see more Magnus drawings here.
- July 12, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Comic-Con International
Conventions | A limited number of four-day memberships for Comic-Con International will go on sale at 10 a.m. PST/1 p.m. EST today as part of hotel-stay packages. [Comic-Con]
Conventions | Michael Cieply looks at Comic-Con as a destination for filmmakers to promote their next big projects, and convention attendees as “consummate insiders” who don’t always pick the box-office winners. [The New York Times]
Legal | As a Brussels court decides whether Tintin in the Congo should be banned in Belgium, Pallavi Aiyar provides some background on the book’s history and on the civil case. [Business Standard]
- June 28, 2010 @ 08:27 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Tintin and Snowy
Legal | As rare Tintin memorabilia sold at a Paris auction for more than $1 million, an attorney for Moulinsart told a Brussels court that an attempt to ban the controversial Tintin in the Congo for racism is akin to book burning. “I cannot accept racism but I consider it equally lamentable that we burn books. To ban books is to burn them,” said Alain Berenboom, who represents the organization that controls the rights to Hergé’s works.
The civil case, which began last month, is the result of a nearly three-year-old effort by Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a Congolese man living in Belgium, to have the book removed from the country’s bookstores, or at least sold with warning labels as it is in Britain. The Court of First Instance is expected to announce on June 21 whether it, or a trade tribunal, should consider the case. [Agence France-Presse]
- June 1, 2010 @ 07:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Emma, Vol. 1
Publishing | More commentary on the July closing of DC Comics’ CMX manga imprint, courtesy of Deb Aoki, Matt Blind, Christopher Butcher, Simon Jones, David Welsh and the crew of Good Comics For Kids.
Blind: “So, DC: I’d like to ask — how much did you recently spend on plastic rings as opposed to, oh, say, the now-past 5-year marketing budget for now-defunct [alas] critically-acclaimed manga publisher CMX?”
Butcher: “It was a line that was poorly conceived, poorly run for the first half of its life and then barely run at all for the last half. Then it was unceremoniously killed. The end.” [CMX]
Comics | About 230 pieces of rare original Tintin art will be auctioned next week in Paris. The items range in value from about $3,700 to more than $300,000. [Reuters]
- May 20, 2010 @ 08:25 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
One Piece, Vol. 27
Publishing | Viz Media has confirmed that its public relations and design departments were among those affected by Tuesday’s layoffs. In a brief statement released yesterday, the company assured fans that, “We have no plans at this time for drastic measures such as product cancellations or business line closures. Your favorite series are not going away.”
Melinda Beasi, Simon Jones, Kai-Ming Cha and Lissa Pattillo provide more commentary. [Viz Media]
Legal | As a Belgian court decides whether to ban Tintin in the Congo because of racist content, Roger Bongos and Sebastian Rodriguez argue that Hergé’s book shouldn’t be censored but rather read and analyzed within the context of the era in which it was created. “You cannot deny however that the book is very discriminatory of black people,” Bongos writes. “Hergé wasn’t a racist person himself: he simply reflected the image the Western world had of the Congo and of Africa during those years, as well as the colonial aspirations of Belgians. In this sense, the book is kind of Proust’s ‘madeleine episode’ for us: it helps us remember our colonial history.” The court is expected to issue its ruling on May 31. [France 24]
- May 13, 2010 @ 08:11 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Tintin
Publishing | Stanley Pignal takes a look at the transformation of the Tintin brand since the death of Hergé in 1983, as the cartoonist’s widow Fanny Vlamynck and her husband Nick Rodwell drastically changed merchandising strategies. In the process, the prickly Rodwell has become a controversial figure, running afoul of fans and journalists alike in his effort to exert control over Tintin’s image.
Of particular interest is a brief profile of Bob Garcia, a novelist and fan who published a series of books examining Hergé’s possible inspirations for Tintin. Garcia believed he could legally reproduce a few copyrighted illustrations for the purpose of critique, but Moulinsart saw things differently: The writer is now fighting to keep his home as penalties and legal fees mount. [Financial Times]
Crime | Danny Wayne Barton, owner of Kryptonite Komics in Carbon Hill, Alabama, was arrested Thursday after he allegedly sold marijuana to police informants on four separate occasions. Three of those incidents reportedly occurred in Barton’s shop, which also sells smoking devices as the Good Karma Store. The 38-year-old retailer faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison on four counts of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance within a three-mile radius of a school. [Daily Mountain Eagle]
- May 10, 2010 @ 08:07 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Tintin
Legal | Leo Cendrowicz examines the issues surrounding the upcoming trial, set to begin Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, over whether to ban Herge’s Tintin in the Congo for its racist portrayals of native Africans. The legal battle was launched three years ago by Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a Congolese man living in Belgium, who wants the book removed from the country’s bookstores, or at least sold with warning labels as it is in Britain. “It shows the Africans as childish imbeciles,” Mbutu Mondondo says. “It suggests blacks have not evolved.” [Time.com]
Conventions | Amid Amidi reports that Comic-Con International has raised the price of additional-exhibitor badges from $75 to $200: “As anybody who has ever exhibited at Comic-Con can tell you, artists typically don’t earn truckloads of money at the event, and when all the costs of booth rental, travel, and lodging are factored in, the obscene $200 exhibitor badge essentially guarantees that an independent artist will leave the convention empty-handed.” [Cartoon Brew]
- May 4, 2010 @ 08:34 AM by Kevin Melrose