You're listening to Part Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what gave?
What's that Mango?
So in nineteen seventy two, a sixty five year old Belgian walks into Andy Warhol's factory in New York City.
Okay, this sounds like the setup for a really bad joke.
I know, I promise it is not. It was actually a historic meeting of two art world greats. So we've got Andy Warhol and Air Jay, the creator of Tintin. And while he's best known for his comic books starring the boy Reporter of tinton and his faithful dog Snowy, air Jay was also a highly knowledgeable art enthusiast and modern art collector, and so when he traveled to the US meeting, Warhol was actually on his bucket list. And
it turns out they had a ton in common. They both did commercial illustrations early in their careers, and they both kept plugging away until they achieved global success.
That's interesting, but honestly, I'm just enjoying the picturing this, like old Belgian guy hanging out in the factory with Warhol.
Yeah. Well, apparently the two artists hit it off because in nineteen seventy nine, air Jay asked Warhol to paint his portrait, which he did, making a set of four paintings similar as the ones you know you've seen of Marilyn Monroe, and Warhol later explained that the admiration actually went both ways. He said, quote, air Jay has influenced my work in the same way as Walt Disney. For me, Airjay was more than a comic strip artist.
Honestly, I had no idea. I never would have guessed Andy Warhol was a Tintin fan.
Yeah, and he is not alone. The books are incredibly popular, especially outside the US, so worldwide. Tintin books or albums as those fans like to call them, have sold more than two hundred and seventy million copies and have been translated into more than one hundred languages, and even today, between one point five to two million Tintin books are sold per year.
We throw around a lot of numbers on the show, but two million books. That's insane, it really is.
But like so many books from the nineteen thirties and forties, not everything has aged well. And Airje himself has this really fascinating and complicated biography. It spans everything from war to boy Scouts, to cultural stereotypes to overcoming cultural stereotypes, and also Will diffit to strange nightmares Steven Spielberg, and of course that eternal question do comic books turn kids into juvenile? The linquits, which I'm sure you have some
thoughts on. So there is so much to cover that we've actually turned the story of Tintin into a two parter, So let's dive in. Hey there, podcast listener as well, and a part time genius, I'm monga shittig and because Will is traveling this week, I'm here with my fellow Tintin fan, Gabe Lucier. And over there in the booth is uh gay? Where's Dylan? Uh?
Hang on, there's a There's a note taped under the microphone. It says, gone adventuring with my faithful dog, love Dylan.
I'm not sure who's recording this episode, but I always love Dylan's enthusiasm.
I guess he heard we were doing an episode on Tintin and decided to, you know, really lean into it. Dylan is always leaning in, as you know, speaking of which, this is one of those episodes that we've had on our Brainstorm list for a long time, and it's finally here, and it's all because of you, honestly, because you were obsessed with Tintin as a kid, Is that right.
Yeah. So, as a kid, we didn't have many relatives in the States, and so to see my grandparents, my mom, my sister, and I would go to India anytime we could afford it. And it was always during the summer,
and that was super fun. But if you go to India in the summer, you quickly realized that that is the monsoon season there, and it's also when your cousins returned to school, and so you're kind of stuck inside all day it's raining, and so, like, I ended up getting good at things that are indoor games, like cards or karm, which is like a cool game you play
with your fingers. I used to play karam and scrabble with my grandparents, and I would wait for my cousins to come home and I would read comic books and it was amazing because like, actually, you would love this. My cousin had like early Captain Americas and Spider Man's.
I'm sure there were reprints or whatever, but it was so fun to read and we'd read mystery books and then I discovered Tintin and it kind of played to everything I loved, right, Like I love dogs, I love journalism, I love traveling, I like stories about spies and intrigue, like learning about the world, and it all shows up in those panels, right. It was just amazing that you
could open these albums and be transported. And it's also one of the things like not that many kids in the States knew about tinton Like I think there were some cartoons that appeared on Nickelodeon or something at one point, but most of my friends growing up in Delaware had no idea what I was talking about. And so, actually, I know you're a huge comics enthusiast. I'm curious, did you ever read Tintin?
Not As a kid, my first introduction was that cartoon you mentioned, The Adventures of Tintin. It aired on HBO and then Nickelodeon back in the early nineties. And the funny thing is my family didn't have cable, so it was something I only got to watch when we went on vacation, but that just made it more special. Like I remember this one trip to the beach where my mom got super annoyed with me because I didn't want to go outside. I just wanted to stay in the
hotel room and watch Tintin. And I did eventually circle back to the books in college, you know, and I was really happy to see that the show was actually, you know, incredibly faithful to the books. But hearing you talk about Tintin, it's so clear that these books really pulled you into their world in a special way and became part of your world too, And it takes a pretty special artist to do that. And in fact, he's so special that he went by just one name.
I know. It is so rockstar, right, like very Madonna, very Prince very Air, Jay.
Very Erga. Yes, but I did some research into his early years so I can tell you that, unlike Madonna and Prince Air, Jay was not born Aja. He was born George Remi in nineteen oh seven in Brussels, and the pen name he chose Jay is actually his initials GR for George Remi in reverse RG and RG pronounced in French is J. I'm sure sounds so much cooler than Rgie. But I, you know, just think about it for my own name. I'm wondering about switching to the
nome to plume. Hm, what do you think you'd probably get mistaken for a chain of Swedish fast fashion stores. Familiar if it makes you feel better, it wouldn't work for me either, so gl backwards LG. That's an appliance.
So we'll just have to stick with our own name. So tell me about young Airj's life then.
Well, surprisingly enough, he did not come from an artistic family. His mom stayed home to take care of him and his younger brother Paul. His dad worked in a candy factory, and the family was solidly lower middle class. That said, there's actually a bit of lore around Airj's grandfather. So's dad had an identical twin brother, and growing up, the twins never knew who their father was. And that's because apparently, as a young single woman, Airjay's grandmother worked as a
maid at a countess's chateau. Then suddenly one day she was pregnant with twin boys. So a lot of people, including at one point Aga himself, believed she may have had an affair with someone higher up, you know, someone really wealthy or maybe even a noble.
So is there any evidence to support that or is this just kind of like wishful thinking that he's royal.
Well, there is one interesting clue. After the twins were born, the countess more or less treated them as her own and she let the family live at the chateau until the boys were fourteen, after which she kicked them out.
So she might have felt some sort of responsibility to them, yeah, or you.
Know, maybe she was just a decent person and felt bad for a single mom of twins. But the family legend was that the twins' father, who would be air Jay's grandfather, was actually Belgium's King Leopold the Second, who ruled the country from eighteen thirty five to nineteen oh nine. Now that's not substantiated, but it was something the family liked to toss around in private. And the other rumor is that the Countess's husband, the count, you know, he may have been the father.
So I guess potentially a mysterious and royal background, which I guess a little DNA testing could actually figure out today. But between the royal rumors, a father who worked in a literal candy factory, it sounds like a really exciting life. So to tell me a little bit about Airjay's childhood was it fun.
Actually the opposite. Airja described his childhood. Yeah, Airja described his childhood as quote gray and uneventful, and one of his biographers, Pierre Assoline wrote, quote everything was colorless, scentless, tasteless and of no interest. In the Remi home. There was no one to admire, no books to read, no
play to attend, no discussions. And you know that is a little bit of an exaggeration because Airje did have books and movies that he loved as a kid, and his parents did encourage his drawing, but overall art and culture wasn't really a focus in his family.
Yeah, and it sounds like not a childhood he sort of was nostalgic for. So did he always have an interest in illustration or was this something that came later in life.
No, he showed an aptitude in it from an early age. His school notebooks were filled with sketches, and when he got a bit older, like high school age, his parents enrolled him in art classes, though apparently he only lasted a day before dropping out because the focus was on technical skills like drawing Greek columns, and you know, he had zero interest in that.
That is funny that he loves to draw, but he won't like sit around to drug column Oh.
Yeah, not columns. You got to draw the line somewhere.
Well. I do know that in addition to drawing, there was another excitement in his life, and that is the Boy Scouts. Airjay joined them when he was about eleven years old, and he really connected the Scouts. He described it as the first color he remembers about his childhood, which I guess goes back to that gray comment you mentioned. And the Boy Scouts opened his eyes to this bigger world.
And for example, during the summers, they'd go to camps around western Europe where they do things like hike two hundred miles across the Pyrenees, and Airjay loved it so much that he eventually became an Eagle Scout and a troop leader, and he remained a Scout until he was in his twenties. But the Scouts gave him something else, even more important to this story. They gave him his
very first platform for his art. He published his first illustrations in a monthly Boy Scout magazine when he was around fifteen years old, and a few years later, in nineteen twenty six, the magazine published Airjay's first serialized comic strip. It was called The Adventures of Totor CP of the June Bugs. Totor is a Belgian boy scout and in the comic, he travels to Texas to visit his aunt and his uncle, and when he is there, he's captured
by angry Native Americans who he outwits. He also outwits bandits and he finds buried treasure, and so there is a lot of excitement.
Got it. So sounds like maybe Totor was kind of the prototype for Tintin.
That is an excellent guest, Gabe, and I'm going to tell you all about how Airjay's passion for art and scouting turned into the Tintin we know today. But first let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part time Genius. We're talking all things Tintin. So let me set the scene, Gabe. It is nineteen twenties Belgium. Airj is scouting and trying
to figure out what to do with his life. By this time, he's graduated from high school and he's working in the subscriptions department at this newspaper called Levutm Siecla, which means the twentieth century. And this was a Catholic newspaper run by father Norbert Wala. It was a right wing paper, to put it mildly, and father Wala actually kept a photo of Mussolini on his desk if you want to know his politics.
Yi, yeah, that's never a good sign. But okay, from what I've read though, you know, that was kind of the norm in Belgium after World War One.
Right, yeah, Belgium was a very conservative and very Catholic country. One of Airj's biographers said that right wing politics were an almost inevitable byproduct of that time. So by working there, Airja wasn't exactly taking a political stance, at least explicitly. It was more this job that he was excited to have and it was better than working at his father's store.
And by nineteen twenty eight, a couple of years after Totor appears in the Boy Scott magazine, Airja had managed to make his way out of the subscription department and into illustrations. Mostly that meant drawing women's clothes and things like that for the magazine, but he was making a living, and more importantly, Father Walla had taken a real liking to him, so he asked Erj to illustrate the new weekly children's supplement that he's planning to.
Start, which I'm sure he just jumped at right.
Definitely, because in November of that year the Extraordinary Adventures of Flup Nnesse who set a Hits newspaper stands.
That is some truly masterful French. I have to say, I know.
I feel so embarrass every time we do any French or any other language, unless it's kunkany, I'm not going to speak it properly. And I also love the word flop in that cartoon. That sounds really grad But the comic was actually universally considered a dud. Part of the problem is that it was written by the paper sports reporter and he wasn't much of a writer. The story
is super simple, it is plotting. It's about three kids, an inflatable rubber pig and their accidental trip to Africa, which is you know, overwhelming with stereotypes and of course caricatures as well. Now Urja did the illustrations, but they aren't particularly inspired either. One of the issues was that in Belgium at the time and most of Europe, cartoons didn't use speech bubbles. This was actually an American innovation.
So to tell the story, there's been a lot of text as captions and then drawings to accompany it.
So none of this boat's well for Flupin Friends long term.
Yeah, flup and Friends would have been a better name for that cartoon, but you are right. The strip ends after ten weeks. But this is where air Jay's fortunes turn. So Father Waile asked him to draw a new comic featuring a more totor like adolescent boy along with his dog. And he wants something wholesome, right, something that portrays good Catholic virtues, and he wants it with American speech bubbles.
So air Jay is excited and he gets to work right away, and in early nineteen twenty nine the first actual Tintin strips come out, and it's the beginning of what would become Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.
Aha, our hero is born. And I imagine the choice of Russia for that adventure like that had to be purposeful, right it was.
It was also Father Wala's idea. Father Walla wanted to show young Belgian readers basically how bad communism was. So Tintin has all these like very explicitly anti communist lines where he says things like those factories are running a bit too well, let's see, and then he looks under it and it's like great snakes just stage effects. They're simply burning bundles of straw to make smoke come out of these false chimneys. Right, So it's things like that,
and he's basically calling the Soviets poor idiots. He thinks that the Soviets are fooling the people, and he kind of paints this as this red paradise that is almost Wizard of Oz like.
So not particularly new once propagandas as far as that.
Goes, yeah, and it didn't really have to be right, Like, these sentiments didn't diverge much from what mainstream Belgian Catholics were thinking at the time. So, according to one of Airj's biographers, this is Harry Thompson, a lot of Belgians believe that Russians were quote grinning devils with knives between their teeth butchered small children for kicks, which is obviously
so sad and so ridiculous. But since air Ja hadn't been to Russia, the strip really relies on some of the more sensational accounts of Russia that's coming to him, as well as Joilet's own anti communist views.
Well, you know, despite its not so subtle anti communist messaging, the book does have a couple great things going for it. So for starters, it's actually the only time in all of the Tintin Adventures where the readers see him working as a journalist writing an article.
I actually never noticed that. Like, as much as I loved you did, I never realized he wasn't actually writing that much.
It does come up nearly as much as you'd think, but you know, the story is also where we first meet Snowy, Tintin's trusty dog and fellow adventurer, And most excitingly, it's where Tintin's trademark hair shape came to be, you know, the little swirl or squirrel on his forehead. Gotta have the swirl. But when the comic starts, Tintin actually has flat combed hair. But there's a scene early on where he's riding in a convertible and air draws his hair sticking up to show the speed of the car, and
it just stayed like that forever. Like I guess the wind was just that strong.
I like it, but I also like that in the first book it isn't just his physical appearance that kind of gets sorted right, Like his whole personality is there from the very start. Tintin is depicted as this honest, this intrepid kid reporter, and he is spreading Western values and ideas around the world.
Yeah. I'm glad you bring that up, because, you know, before we get too far into things, I want to talk a little about Tintin himself. A lot of the characterization that you're talking about, it was likely inspired by Air's time in The Boy Scouts, which would make sense Tintin is basically a boy Scout, but he's also an iconic character visually because of that tuft of red hair and his outfit blue sweater, white collar shirt, brown pants, and the question of who inspired Tintin, both in his
look and his lifestyle. Yeah, that's one that Tintinologists, which yes, are people who study Tintin. It's one they've been, you know, trying to figure out basically since Tintin first appeared.
I love Tintinologists, Like it's not something that was offered as a major at my college. But is there an answer do they figure out who Tintin is based on?
Well, no, but there are lots of guesses. For example, one idea is that he's based off of Airjay's younger brother Paul, who apparently looked enough like Tintin, especially with the hair style, that when he was an adult and in the army, fellow soldiers call called him Major Tintin. In fact, Paul Paul got pretty sick of the nickname. He eventually changed his hair style because he was so tired of the comparison.
Oh no, yeah, so brother Paul is one of the possibilities. Who are the other contenders?
Another is a Danish boy named pell Hooled. In nineteen twenty eight, when Pella was fifteen, he entered a newspaper competition celebrating the Jules Verne centennial, and the paper was looking for a teenage boy to reenact the journey of around the world in eighty days. The rules were that he'd have forty six days to get himself around the world without using airplanes, and he would need to do
it alone anyway. Pele, who was also a boy scout, won the competition, and his travels were all over the news after.
He made it home.
He wrote a book about it, which was published in nineteen twenty nine, which you'll note is the same year the first Tintin strips came out. And it's been confirmed that erge Red Pele's book, so's you know, some people think he may have modeled Tintin after him got it.
So we've got the brother with the hairstyle of this young kid who's traveling around the world. Anyone else in this mix?
Yeah, My favorite contender is this French journalist named Robert six. He was a war correspondent and a motorcycle enthusiast. Apparently he both looked and dressed like Tintin and had a best friend named Milu, which is, you know, phonetically the name of Tintin's dog, Snowy in French. And if that weren't enough, Tintin's travels also seemed to mirror Robert's. His first reporting mission, it was to Moscow.
So we've got the dog, we've got the motorcycle, we've got the mission to Moscow. All this is starting to come together.
Yeah, and then Robert goes to the Congo and the US after that, which is where Tintin goes next.
Yeah, where Tintin goes it's pretty alling.
There's enough there. Even the air Jay Foundation acknowledges the similarities between Tintin and Robert. They even admit that some of Airja's drawings in the books seem to have been directly inspired by the photographs Robert took personally, though, I think the most likely answer is that it, you know, may have been a mix of all of these guys. But for what it's worth, whenever he was asked about it, air Jay would simply answer, Tintin Simoa or Tintin is me.
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm sure it's all the parts of his personality he loved most right, inspired realities others. So why don't we get back to the story. So Tintin's starting to catch on in Belgium where we leave off and this successful comic album Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Father Wailea is excited to keep the
ball rolling. He has his strips published in book form in nineteen thirty and air Jay starts on the next installment, which is Tintin in the Congo, which was originally serialized
in the paper. And this is between nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty one, and just like with the Land of the Soviets, it was Father Wailea who suggested the new book's location, which is the Congo, and he chose it because there was this hyper conservative colonial mindset in Belgium at the time, which Juaala had fully bought into.
Of course he did. And of course this is the famous, most problematic of the Tintin albums.
Right, yeah, this is the one you could not get in India when I was growing up. And we'll get into that a little bit. But the result is a book that's full of Tintin quote civilizing the natives who are portrayed as these super cringy caricatures. They worshiped Tintin as he educates them on how wonderful Belgium's colonial system is.
It's you know, it's it's really bad. Yeah, And I do think it's probably helpful at this point to remind folks what kind of relationship Belgium had with the Congo. Belgium was an especially violent colonial power, particularly under Leopold the Second.
Yes, Leopold the Second, who is possibly but probably not air Jay's grandfather, is believed to be responsible for the deaths of millions and millions of Africans, and this is through brutal force, labor, famine. This wasn't something that was all that well understood in Belgium at the time, like most Belgians who weren't really paying attention to what was happening in Africa, didn't know the magnitude of the destruction there. And it's honestly still a pass that Belgium is reckoning
with anyway. So Leopold the Second passes away. In nineteen oh nine, his nephew Albert the First becomes king, and right around that time the Congo becomes an official colony
of Belgium known as the Belgian Congo. The congleates were forced to work as indentured servants on plantations and minds, and the Belgian authorities' attitudes towards the Congolese people reflected this common conservative European belief at the time of needing to quote civilize Africa, right, it's like the white man's burden essentially, and they treated Africans as if they were chill children who needed to be taught how to live
and airj put out Tintin in the Congo. Right when all of this was happening.
So Belgian readers they weren't like offended by this at all.
No, in fact, it was the opposite. It was a huge success. And to celebrate the strip's conclusion, Father While even organized this event a real life Tintin after his return from Africa.
What does that even mean?
Though? So the paper, the paper had actually tried something like this before when Tintin had returned from USSR, and that event had gone so well that they decided to try it again. And so the just as they dress up a little boy to play Tintin, uh, they've got a little white dog to play Snowy. And then the actor would arrive via train in the main Brussel station
where this real life crowd celebrates his arrival. Right, and for this particular event, they also had ten Congolese men accompanying him and a bunch of circus animals they'd rented, I guess to make it seem more African. And it worked because five thousand people showed up to this train station to watch Tintin come home. So it was clearly a success right from the start.
Yeah, it's just such a shame, because you know, these are great stories in so many ways, but obviously some of the early depictions, they are just really rough, really problematic.
Yeah, it's not the type of thing you pick up on as a kid, right, But as you get older you really see this stuff.
Yeah, especially if the harmful stereotypes don't refer to you or people who look like you. Is a kid, it's easy to overlook that kind of thing, but once you see it, oh man, it is impossible to ignore. Which makes me wonder if Airja ever grappled with any of this himself, Like, do you know if he ever acknowledged how insensitive these books were.
He does to a certain extent, and that's actually part of why I like Ja. He does tend to grow over the years, but he never outright apologizes or anything. He did want to say about the early books that quote, they are not very intelligent, I know, and they do me no honor. So he's clearly acknowledging it. And later he says these stories were created quote in the spirit of the pure paternalism which reigned at the time in Belgium. I'm not trying to excuse myself. I admit that my
early books were typical of the Belgium bourgeois mentality. Of the time and even later he doesn't want Tinton in the Land of the Soviets to be republished, and he redraws Tinton in the Congo in the nineteen forties. He makes some changes, like turning one of the school lessons Tinton gives into a math lesson instead of one about Belgian superiority. But you know, the caricatures and the drawings don't really change that much.
So basically his opinion was that it was almost impossible for a Belgian man from his background at that time to avoid absorbing, you know, this kind of perspective about other races and cultures.
Yeah. Though the public response is of course different now, right like today when people criticize specific Tinton books like you and I were saying, Tinton in the Congo is the one that everyone points to. In two thousand and seven, for example, the UK's Commission for Racial Equality recommended that not be sold due to its quote hideous racial prejudice, and there have been attempts to ban it or limit
its availability in the US, Sweden and Belgium. Like I was saying, in India, you couldn't find it in libraries. It was very difficult to find and as an American publisher, Lil Brown hasn't printed it for quite a while.
It's interesting because if Airja had stuck to creating Tintin in the Belgian mentality of the time, he might have continued drawing xenophobic, racist comics for the rest of his life. But that's not at all what happened. Instead, he had this life changing encounter that transformed the way he thought about other cultures and about Tintin's place in the world. It's a fascinating story and we're going to tell you all about it right after this quick break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius is two part exploration of air Ja and Tintin and Gabe. When we left off, you were just about to tell us, but I believe is the redeeming part of this story about how air Jay's life changed forever and for the better.
So have that, yes, yes, finally we get here. So by the early nineteen thirties, Tintin has been around for a couple of years. He's getting more popular, and he's traveling the world. But I am talking about Tintin here Airja himself. He is not traveling the world. He's just sitting at his desk at a conservative Catholic newspaper, so a lot of the cultural details he'd include came from secondary sources, full of their own assumptions and prejudices, which
he would then pairrot. But as many scholars have pointed out, there was a real change in that approach for the fifth Tintin installment, The Blue Lotus, and it happened almost by chance. When the newspaper announced that Tintin's next journey would take place in China, a Belgian priest who worked with Chinese student at a local university got in touch
with air Ja. The priest was like, Hey, my students are big fans of Tintin, but they'll be pretty upset if China and Chinese characters get portrayed as stereotypes, which you are known to do.
And knowing this Tintin universe, there had been some Chinese characters in earlier at tinton books, and obviously they were not portrade very fairly.
That's right, yes, But to air Jay's credit, he was really cool about the whole thing. He asked the priest, okay, can you find someone who could advise me on China? So the priest introduced him to a man named Jiang chong Ren, who was around the same age as air Je and a student at Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts. So for about a year the two men met each Sunday to talk and Jiong explained Chinese current affairs and
taught Airja about calligraphy. He also introduced him to concepts like Buddhism and Taoism, which Aja took a real interest in, especially later in his life. And so you know, an actual friendship started to emerge from this. In fact, Xiang later said that they were like brothers.
I mean, I love The Blue Loadus. There's so many great details in that book, like it takes place mainly in Shanghai. There are a lot of scenes that feature Chinese calligraphy in the background. And I don't understand Chinese, just like I don't pronounce French. Well, but it looked really beautiful.
That's so funny because that writing that you're talking about, it was actually done by Jiang. The calligraphy. Yeah, And according to an article about The Blue Lotus on the website The World of Chinese, the book includes quotes from the Old Book of Tong praising the virtues of an ancient doctor there were also posters on the street with messages like abolish unfair treaties and down with imperialism. And that's because the story is set around the time when Japan invaded Manchuria.
I like that Tintin, or rather air Jay just kind of like absorbs the influences of the people around him, right, like father Wallay's politics feed it, and like Jiang saw influence seems to be there. But but how did this friend of his influence the storytelling?
Well, he encouraged airj to use, you know, real events to inspire Tintin's adventures. So in the story, Tintin defends the Chinese against the Japanese, but also against American businessmen who are shown as ignorant and racist and aggressive. And none of this was really happening in other Belgian comic
strips at the time. And by the way, if the name of the arts student Jiang chong Ren sounds familiar to you and any other Tintin readers out there listening, it's because it sounds a lot like the name that appears in the Blue Lotus, Chong chong Chen. So he's the young Chinese orphan that sounds a lot lighter.
Right, Yeah, I figured that part.
Yeah right, yeah, yeah. He's the young Chinese orphan that Tintin saves from drowning towards the end of the book and later becomes friends with. Their friendship in the book actually echoes the men's real life relationship. So right after Tintin and Chong meet in the story, they discuss the misconceptions Europeans have of Chinese people and the stereotypes that their cultures have of one another, and they acknowledge that
all of these are incorrect. And so while Airja is still trying to educate the reader in future books, it's just in a different, more open minded way. For example, there's a scene towards the end where the British detectives Thompson and Thompson trying to disguise themselves by wearing what they believe is typical Chinese clothing, but in reality it's this outdated stereotype of what Westerners think Chinese people look like.
So the Chinese characters see the detectives and they just start laughing, And this time, you know, the reader is in on the joke. I love that.
So I read that the Blueloadus is also where Erge learned to go deeper for force photographs for different locations, and so before he'd been using whatever generic images were being used in popular media. But all of a sudden, now there's more nuance, more accuracy for these details, and that didn't really exist in Tintin's previous adventures.
Yeah you can really tell too, like you can see it. Which is not to say that the book is perfect. This is nineteen thirty four, and there is still a paternalistic attitude towards the Chinese.
Yeah, and the villains right, like the villains and the Blue Lotus are the imperialist drug dealing Japanese. So unsurprisingly the Japanese were not fans of the book. They wanted it benn which you can see why.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But but it was a hid in China, right, So Airje was even invited by the First Lady to visit the country. And perhaps more importantly, it's set a new standard for how Erje approached Tintin's adventures and depictions of places far from Belgium, you know, with deeper research and a wider range of content imporiary sources. Getting these details right mattered to him. But that said, there were
still issues in later books. For example, in Tintin and the Broken Ear, which came out right after The Blue Lotus, Er Jay didn't know anyone who spoke South American indigenous languages, so he just made one up and later got a lot of criticism for having some pretty overtly racist details and characters in nineteen forty one's The Shooting Star. He did later revise that book, but again he didn't really apologize. He said, basically, this was just reflecting the politics and
style of the time. Deal with it.
Yeah, obviously, meeting Jong doesn't erase all his prejudices and biases, but there is definitely a change in his approach and certainly this attempt to capture some truth about a location. So now we're going to jump ahead to the late nineteen fifties and Air Jay is going through a tough personal time. He is not a great husband, so his first marriage apart after about a year, and he's having
these regular nightmares where everything in it turns white. He in one of these dreams, he is climbing the stairs of a tower and he looks down and it's just a bunch of bones and skulls and demons, all white stuff, like that, and it's really disconcerting. So Airj goes to a Youngian psycho analyst, and this is in Switzerland, an actual student of Carl Jung, And he's like, I've been having these awful dreams, Doc, what should I do?
I'm picture I got to stop you on picturing. This psychoanalyst he's smoking a pipe, right, and there's like a view of Lake Zurich in the background. I'm just trying to set the scene.
Yeah, well, there is no photographic evidence of this meeting, so let's say that's where it occurs. But then the doctor tells air Ja, this is very simple. These dreams are all metaphors for being professionally and emotionally exhausted, and the only thing you can do to stop them is to stop drawing.
Stop drawing, telling the artist to stop drawing, like forever, just stop more or less.
So he tells Airj he can't work and recover from this personal turmoil at the same time, so he's got to pick one. And Airj is super shaken by this, right, and he does consider it because in some ways it's appealing. He loves Tinton, but Tinton has also become a burden and he's already been considering taking up abstract art instead. You find us with a lot of artists, right, like Bill Waterson had to take a spell. Conan Doyle retired
from homes for a bit before returning. Anyway, he thinks about it and then he says, you know what, I don't really like this advice, so maybe I should just lean into the white instead. And so, with his mind made up, he goes to work. And he'd rent a ton of books on Tibet, mostly by Western explorers and people going through the Himalias and the snow capped mountains there. He'd also read at least one book by this native Tibetan and so he's really inspired, and he studies maps
and photographs. He searches for photos and Belgian Alpine society, and he was so committed to getting the details right. Then one photo which he found in a book, it only showed the lower half of a policeman in New Delhi, and he actually writes the author asking for the original photo so you can see the whole uniform, because he really wants to depict it fully.
You that's awesome, Yeah, that is some serious commitment.
It's incredible when you see the details and you notice what's actually drawn and incorporated into the story. There's a bit in this cafe that I remember and like it's a cafe in Nepal and the way the waiters stressed, and then I saw a photo of the time that he'd used. It's remarkable anyway. What's also really interesting about Tinton and Tibet is that the plot is different from all the other Tintin books. It's not really about capturing a villain, and there's no car chases or classic Tintin
tropes like that. Instead, the book is about Tinton's quest to find his friend Chong.
Blue Lotus Chong the same gun, yeah, the same one.
And I actually think that proves how much the real Jong meant to j right like that he brings them back into the stories during this what feels like a pretty difficult period of his life. And in Tintin Inti that everyone thinks Chong has died in a plane crash, but Tintin refuses to believe it, and so he risks his life and his limbs to save him. And also there's a Yetti in this book, this appearance, which is just super fun and sweet and.
Oh yeah, any points for YETI.
Anyway said that it was his favorite of the albums he ever drew, and he calls it quote the story of a friendship. Ah.
Yeah, there's something really poetic in this. You know that the lessons he learned from his real friend Jong helped him, you know, make his favorite book.
Yeah, definitely. It's also sort of like a perfect place to end today's episode. But we are not done with Tintin yet, because this is just part one of the story.
That's right, So be sure to tune back in to hear part two, where we'll talk about Jay's behavior during World War Two, comic bands in America, and serious long lost play that one of our good friends actually just rediscovered.
It is an amazing story, and in the meantime, we'd love to hear what you think about Tinton or anything else. Email us at high Geniuses at gmail dot com. That's Hi Geniuses at gmail dot com, or give us a call on a hotline that is three oh two four oh five five nine two five. I love that it's a three or two areo code for all my Delawareans. And you can also find us on Instagram and Blue Sky. No matter how you get in touch, you know we'd love hearing from you. This episode was written by the
always adventurous Mursa Brown. Thank you, Marissa. It was also edited by Gabe and from Dylan, Mary, Gabe, Will and myself. Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongshatikler and researched by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan, with support from Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Vine Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.