TintinTintin Travelsme

In order to make sense of Tintin, I travelled the world* in his footsteps.


*Belgium, France, Egypt, UAE, Taiwan, China, and India.

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Introduction to “تان تان”

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Major breakthrough! After a somewhat discouraging start at finding a tangible trace of Tintin’s legacy in Egypt, I quite literally took my search to the streets. After bringing up my fellowship with my roommate Mohamed’s family over Eid, his sister enlightened me about many potential resources, chiefly the existence of Egyptian comic magazines “Mickey,” “Maged,” and “Samir.” Soon after, Mohamed and I went to check out some local street book sellers who we hoped would have older issues of these magazines and I truly couldn’t be happier with the results. Above you can see some of Tintin’s translated into Arabic that I snagged which are such a joy to flip through. I tried to act cool about buying out everything they had and the one seller is going to keep his eye out for more as they come up. Allegedly, production of these translated editions in Egypt stopped in 2007, very abruptly and ambiguously ending a 30+ year relationship between Egyptian publisher Dar al-Maaref and Casterman. In fact, this article claims that importing the books was made illegal by Egyptian authorities (which seems like a potentially dubious claim I will try verify). The editions I bought from the 80s and by far the most notable difference is that every two pages the comics alternate between color and black-and-white. Isn’t that crazy? To illustrate here are pages 34 and 35 from The Seven Crystal Balls:

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To help contextualize how weird this is, it should be noted that The Seven Crystal Balls was originally published in color. Therefore, when travelling to Egypt Tintin was not only translated, but de-colored. I hope that I can meet with someone at the Egyptian publisher to figure out why this puzzling move was made. For now, my educated guess is that it probably had something to do with printing costs. Mohamed told me that as a child he would take it upon himself to color in these pages, which makes me wonder if they were intentionally made black-and-white to give readers a new way to interact with Hergé’s art. This is certainly one puzzle I look forward to solving!
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The second big discovery I made among the street book sellers is that – just like in post-World War II Europe – Tintin adventures were published first in “Tintin Magazine” and collected later in bound edition. Above are two of those magazines I bought and I really hope I can find more of these during my time in Cairo. This means that there was a system in place were “Tintin Magazines” were translated in their entirety to Arabic from French, which seems a little unnecessary. I hope to discover why this was done, but it great to have snippets of “Alix” and other Belgian comics Hergé grouped together all in Arabic.
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My luck streak continued in the form of this gorgeously old collection of “Sinbad” magazines that another book seller was offering (at this point, I was clearly “the comic’s guy” to the sellers). I don’t really know much about “Sinbad” yet, but the edition I snagged was published in 1954 in Egypt. This is a big step for my research because it illustrates that there was indeed an active Egyptian comics’ scene in the 50s that almost certainly goes back further and that was seemingly independent of the popular European or American markets. Here is peek inside “Sinbad”:
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Doesn’t the art look gorgeous? I can’t wait to start translating, scanning, and analyzing what these comics are actually about. Hopefully it will be a move away from the Orientalist creations of Western authors. Fingers crossed on this one!

Last, but certainly not least, I spied with my little eye some Arabic Superman (or “Suberman”) that I promptly purchased. These were published in Lebanon and I’m really not sure if these are direct translations or original stories. I will most definitely read through them during my time here! Check it out:

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Now for the crazy reveal: All of this loot was purchased from approximately $10.00 USD. From Tintin to Sinbad to Suberman, all for ten dollars! I’m smiling pretty big right now if you can’t read between the lines. I look forward to taking you along with me as I start to unravel the content of these beautiful panels.
  1. tintintravels posted this
Blistering Barnacles!
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