Le Livre d'Argent

I find it darkly funny that "Tintin in Congo" is so completely racist that to simply translate it as-is into Lingála counts as an artistic intervention / social commentary
https://ilanmanouach.com/work/tintinakeikongo/

because after 112 languages up until that point nobody bothered to even translate it into the language of the actual people being caricatured

@elilla Worst thing is that the current version being sold has been reworked several times by Hergé. The original version was even even worst 😬.

@Sylvhem they're still selling it???

@elilla Well yeah. At least it was still sold a few years back in France.

@elilla @Sylvhem I remember my French class in the USA in the 90’s had one of the original, old, super racist ones (in French, of course). We also had Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which is like, similar level of ignorance except it’s like “communism bad” instead of “colonialism good”

@sidereal Oh wow. Those were really outdated, even by the standard of the time!
To give you a point of reference, I was born in the 90’s, and at that point “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” didn’t had a regular edition for *years*. For kid me, who loved Tintin, it had all the trappings of an urban legends.

@elilla

@Sylvhem @elilla strangest thing about this is that it’s a non-existent story of lame gags strung together, and even the art is bad by Tintin standards. So there’s no good reason to reprint it unless you really want to uphold racism

@ark_brut Yeah, it’s only reedited now as a curiosity, usually with commentary.

And yeah, the art is terrible, but Hergé was still learning how to draw by that point. His later art had such a big impact on Belgian and French comics.

@elilla