Tintin, the little round-faced, button-nosed boy reporter with his untameable tuft of hair twirling in the wind in a recognizable trademark trailed by Snowy, his loyal dog, turned 95 this month. The cartoon knight in shining armour has been celebrated in 24 books and 128 languages round the world. While he has been translated into all the major languages including Bengali, Chinese, Turkish and Arabic, more recently a Tamil translation by the well-known Tamil comic book enthusiast Prakash Publishers of Muthu comics fame, has brought fresh cheer to diehard comics aficionados.
For nearly half a century, a small four-member team of translators has been quietly bringing to a very strong base of Tamil book lovers comic books from Italian, French and English. M Soundarapandian, who set up the comic publishing house, left Chandamama to start bringing out comic books in Tamil with the first title: The Steel Claw from the UK. Tamil readers fell upon this crime fighting hero with a steely prosthetic claw with great fervour and thus started a saga in Sivakasi, more famous in India for manufacturing firecrackers.
The printing of comic books, packaging them into affordable black and white editions in the easily accessible local patois at just Rs 5 each, was a masterstroke that split open a waiting market for the erstwhile Lion-Muthu Comics. People began to happily subscribe to the new waterfall of comics coming their way, be it Italian ones like Notturno Newyorkese, as well as others like Lucky Luke, Mike Blueberry, Modesty Blaise, Mandrake, Flash Gordon in echt Tamil. Today, for this south-based comic franchise, European translations are 70 percent exclusive to Tamil and readership for the monthly translations is steady.
As for Tintin, his boyish humour, his simple solutions to revolutions and the deadly mafiosi, clearly have a universal appeal. Over the years he has been shoved to the Right by the Left for not being revolutionary enough with no agenda in his head while the Right thinks he is not right enough for his sin of happily showing compassion to the underdog and his willingness to upset the conservative world. No surprise, then, with changing times he got cancelled along the way by the wokes but has resolutely bounded back because of his lonely stand, caring for neither Right nor Left, in what can be called solitary chivalry.
In any language or culture, he is chivalrous to the weak and good but also in a very early non-racial way, befriends locals like Chang in The Blue Lotus and dispels his xenophobia. Eventually, Chang is happy to note that all Westerners are not white devils and Tintin pooh-poohs the western conception of the Chinese as birds’ nest eaters and devourers of rotten eggs.
Tintin’s reportage, and by the way he seems to file not one single story, swept up as he is in the happy outcomes and love of his little coterie, makes him a cultural ambassador to all worlds and opens the window of many cultures to us. In fact, the bright visual language that doesn't stay away from the most luminous colours and the easy storytelling has made this an iconic comic book.
In the real world, Tintin has crossed into the 21st century without a hair harmed, and with an astounding 600-plus books written about his worldview and place in the world. How much the comic has meant to people across the world is evident in some simple figures. The Blue Lotus cover by Herge was bought for $3.9 million in 2021 and the original of King Ottokar’s Sceptre went under the hammer for $12 million in 2016. Over half a million copies are sold in France every year while the total number of comic sales seems to have crossed 270 million.
For less lofty people like me, how valuable a Tintin comic was/is exemplified by the fact that in book trading exchanges in school, one Tintin could typically fetch you an armful of Archies, Sad Sacks or Mandrakes.
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