Graphic Tintin

A bit of a strange story on Tintin via The Guardian. A Spanish author has created an explicit version of Tintin:

His sexuality was always a closely guarded secret that his creator Hergé sought to preserve. But a Spanish version of one of Tintin's most famous tales, The Blue Lotus, has dared to suggest the intrepid Belgian reporter was a voracious lover.

Entitled The Pink Lotus, there are graphic sex scenes that would raise the eyebrows of parents with young children.

But its Spanish author, Antonio Altarriba, has paid the price: the book has been withdrawn from bookshops after pressure from Hergé's estate, which controls the rights to the work of the Belgian writer Georges Remi. Hergé was the pen-name of Remi, who died in 1983.

Why strange? Well, as Paul LaFarge writes in his review of Tintin and the Secret of Literature (see our review here), the character is generally regarded as sexless:

Tintin was a word before it was a name; it means “nothing,” and the phrase faire tintin loosely means “to go without.” Hergé’s boy reporter does not bear this name by accident: “Tintin,” McCarthy says, “is pure negative, the whiteness of the whale, the sexlessness of the unconsummated marriage. . . . Tintin both offers and withholds.” Indeed, for all his crime-solving prowess, there is something strangely absent about Tintin, something strangely unyielding. He does not age, he has no sexuality, no desires of any sort, no past, no family, no first name.

Comments

[fausto]

Altarriba is by no means the first to try is hand at imagining Tintin's sexual life. I remember Belgian provocateur Jan Bucquoy doing the same in the 80's, with similar results.