Tintin in Tehran

Iran is cool of course, so here's another post about that country.

Someone on the Danish music/hipster message board I occasionally roam, had stumbled on the "Tintin in Tehran" cover image while searching Google. What was this image about he wondered? Why was poor Snowy lying in a pool of blood? Being the self-appointed comics expert on the board, I set out to do some research.

I had seen the image before and had kind of wondered about the image myself. It didn't seem to paint a very nice picture of the Iranian capital. Was the image drawn by an Iranian? Or was it some kind of strange anti-Iranian propaganda.

It's not propaganda. A couple of searches in Google reveal that it was done by a young Iranian animator living in NYC, and it was done mainly to amuse his friends - read an interview here. So this is basically how a hip young Iranian living abroad would see Tehran, using self-deprecating irony about his own country. Flies and deadly traffic. Pretty amusing. Although it kinda makes me reconsider my idea of visiting Tehran as a tourist. Traffic tends to make me nervous. And a bit of research reveals that it IS a pretty serious problem :

"Last year nearly 28,000 people were killed in car crashes in Iran. Another 270,000 were injured. The statistics prompted a response this week from an alarmed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who normally reserves his pithier remarks for baiting the west."

Crazy! A fascinating country, but also somewhat deadly, apparently.