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.

Tintin - The Blue Lotus

Granted, Hergé legendary series of "Tintin" comic books wouldn't reach their true peak until the much loved Captain Haddock character was introduced in the glorious adventure stories published during and immediately after WWII, but "The Blue Lotus" (1936) was still an early example of Hergé reaching a high artistic peak. The book features well researched depictions of the effects of the Japanese Invasion of China in the 30s.

The earliest Tintin books (particularly the much ridiculed "Tintin in Congo", done by a very young Hergé) had featured naive semi-racist depictions of racial steretypes. But before he embarked on his announced China project, Hergé was contacted by Father Gosset, the chaplain to the Chinese students at the University of Leuven, who begged him to please do proper reseach this time, so his students wouldn't be shocked by racist prejudiced depictions of Chinese people in the book. When Hergé agreed, he was introduced to the student Chang Ch'ung-jen, a young sculpture student at the Brussels Académie des Beaux-Arts. The two young artists became close friends, and Zhang introduced Hergé to Chinese history, culture, and the techniques of Chinese art. The result was "The Blue Lotus", the first masterpiece of the Tintin series.

The book features well researched depictions of street scenes in China in the 30s:



It also features opium use and sinister threat of violence that's quite surprising in a series usually considered comics for all ages.





This picture is one of many that were used as visual reference for the book:


More info about the book and about Herge´s research methods can be found in this excellent book: