Tintin Forums

I would like to know the publisher of Tintin in The Congo, please, as I want to suggest this to my library; please excuse my asking, but I don't know who they are.

The colour edition is Egmont, same as all the others!

R

The colour edition is Egmont, same as all the others!

Unless you live in the US, in which case you need to look for the Little, Brown publishers edition, which will come out in color in September.

which will come out in color in September.

Will this be the first color edition with the Rhino blown up, or the later, watered-down one?

The UK's Egmont edition has the "watered down" version, ie: with the rhino not being blown up, so my guess would be that the Little, Brown edition will follow suit. That's only a guess, but I'd say US publishers generally tend to be more cautious than UK publishers about controversial or potentially offfensive stuff in children's books, so it seems unlikely they'd choose a more violent page than the one used in the Egmont edition.

I think this rhino page was originally rewritten and redrawn by Hergé at the request of his Swedish publishers (if I'm remembering that right from Benoît Peeter's book). My Casterman edition, which I bought only a few years ago (before the colour English translation came out), features the original rhino-dynamiting page. Not sure which version of the page the most recent Casteman editions have. Maybe it's all been standardized across the world, or maybe French and Belgian children are still allowed to enjoy the sight of a rhino being exploded.

Oh :-( I do have the UK colored edition and was disappointed to see it was watered down. Hope one day they would release them all in Original state, especially the "Congo" and the colored "Tintin in America" with the original drawings that were considered non-PC.

Pharaoh
...and the colored "Tintin in America" with the original drawings that were considered non-PC.

The changes made by Hergé in the 1950s to Tintin in America at the request of his US publishers - namely, changing quite a few of the originally black background characters to white people - weren't made for "PC" reasons, but for entirely racist rasons. It wasn't that the US publishers felt that Hergé had portrayed the black people in a way that would offend black readers - it was the complete opposite. The publisher's problem was that Hergé had included black people at all, sharing frames of the comic with white characters, in a way that would offend white segregationist readers in the Southern states. So if you're wanting a non-PC version of Tintin in America, I'd have thought that the ethnically cleansed version that Hergé produced for them - the one that's currently in print worldwide - would be non-PC enough for anyone!

It's sad and disturbing that a US publisher would want to appease the segragationist lobby (presumeably to avoid losing sales and profit), and really shocking that Hergé agreed to go along with this, whiting-up several characters in this and other books to keep his US publishers happy. You could argue that that's just how things were in the fifties, but there are plenty of examples from the 1950s (and the 30s and 40s) of people (white and black) working in the arts and popular culture who were prepeared to risk profits and personal safety by refusing to tow the segragationist line.

I should point out that the US publisher who requested the changes wasn't the current US publisher of Tintin (Little Brown). I think Hergé's US publisher back in the 50s was called Golden Press. There's a good article on the whole subject elsewhere on this site.

For future reference, the latest colour edition that came out in either 2016 or 2017 is published by Casterman.

Hi guys. Sorry if this is old ground. I've found a copy of Tintin in the Congo online, but I was just wondering if it's a bootleg of some sort? Seems to have all the right markings but no Casterman logo on the front of the cover. Any ideas?

Books often appear as generic images in publicity material, without the publisher's name the on - look at the pictures of the covers on the reverse of a Tintin book, and you will see that they don't say Egmont.

Is image you have seen of an actual book, or just a picture of the cover? Oh, and is it the colour or the black-and-white version?