back to article Rude Tintin pulls out

A salacious Spanish reinterpretation of a Tintin story has been yanked from bookshops as a yucky stain on the comic book character. Antonio Altarriba published The Pink Lotus last year, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tintin creator Hergé, the Guardian tells us. But the story - a new version of classic …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    It's well known

    Obelix is into doggy porn.

    Mine's the cloak with the Gallic clasp.

    Efrosix

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    "Racism-Free"?

    Anybody ever read any of the early Tintins, where blacks are depicted in a manner reminiscent of thos nasty KKK cartoons from the '20s?

  3. alain williams Silver badge

    @"Racism-Free"?

    I recently found a Rupert the Bear annual that I had when I was a kid (40+ years ago). If it were to be published today it would be deemed highly racist. Like the early Tintins it reflected attitudes of the times.

  4. Tony

    Been done before

    My brother picked up a copy of 'The Sexual Adventures of TinTin' on a visit to France years ago, which showed TinTin getting it on with all sorts of ladies from across Europe, the old sea captain bloke and even the dog at one point. Sounds like this latest incarnation was decidedly tame by comparison!

    I would agree that whatever debauched stuff he gets up to, it is not going to be half as offensive as the inherent racism in early TinTin books.

  5. lansalot
    Go

    saucy comics ?

    Had a cracker as a young man containing a rather rude version of "Oor Wullie".

    I could probably draw the whole thing from memory, but will just remind readers of the strap-line in case anyone has a jpg ;)

    "Willie, Soapy and Fat Bob, think f***ng Daphne's just the job!

    But Daphne thinks it is a farce, when they try to stick it up her wellyougettheideawiththat"...

    Anyone got a copy of this smutty classic? Answers on a saucy postcard please !

  6. Torben Mogensen

    Questionable ban

    If I recall copyright law correctly, you can use the names and likeness of copyrighted characters for purposes of parody and satire. One would think the offending book would fall into this category.

    The estate of Herge has previously tried to sue a painter, who uses characters from Tintin (including the boy himself) in pictures with scantily clad ladies, but they lost the case due to the parody/satire clause. See http://www.oleahlberg.dk/galleri-eng.html for some samples of the (quite well done) paintings.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    @ AC "Racism-Free"?

    whooooooosh

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Tangles with Obelix

    I understand Anne Widdecombe is saving herself for him.

  9. Alan White

    Haddock

    "Anybody ever read any of the early Tintins, where blacks are depicted in a manner reminiscent of thos nasty KKK cartoons from the '20s?"

    I think that was the point being made?

  10. anarchic-teapot

    Hergé's estate is bloody slow off the mark

    The French have been doing this sort of parody for years. Why suddenly object to the Spanish having a go? And where can I get a copy, I could do with a good laugh?

  11. Steve
    Joke

    "Racism-Free"?

    What did you expect - all frogs are degenerate racists.

    And Belgium is frog because they speak froggish.

  12. Toastan Buttar
    Alert

    The recently reprinted 1st edition of The Beano...

    ...featured a cowboy with a horse called Nigger.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hear that sound?

    So new work killed to support unproductive overhead known as 'the TinTin estate'.... McCreevy must be proud.

    All the productive stuff would still happen (all that and more), but without the overhead of supporting the 'estates' moral rights. As for moral rights, well the estate is now controlled by the husband of the second wife of Herge, what moral rights does he have? What moral right did his second wife have even?

    http://www.expatica.com/be/articles/news/herges-nephew-slams-tintin-estate-17944.html

    Do you hear that sound? [silence] That's the sound of the earth NOT shattering after Cliff Richard lost copyright on the recording of his early recordings of other people's creative efforts.

    Shockingly the world also didn't end when Bob the builder built the architects original plan of my house in brick form without 95 years exclusive rights to it.

    Remarkable that the earth doesn't shatter when things go out of copyright. Bill Haley did not rise from the grave because his moral rights to the original recording of rock around the clock expired. In fact remarkably little bad happened at all.

    /rant

    Perhaps a little common sense on copyright and other IP matters is called for.

  14. Simon Dragon

    Funny how things are forgotten

    It's funny how things get forgotten. A few years ago, the author Michael Tuten wrote a book called "Tintin in the New World", and, if memory serves, with the full support and knowledge of either Herge himself or the estate.

    One thing I certainly remember is that by the end of it young Tintin wasn't a virgin any more. I seem to recall at least one encounter with a female woman of the opposite sex. (I'd go and get the exact reference but unfortunately my copy is in storage at the moment.) I'd even be prepared to claim there's a reference to her pulling the estimable reporter's boxers down before the act, as it were...

    So it all this prudery is a bit late. Of course, it could be because it's drawn rather than written, but even so...

  15. Sam

    Asterix question

    Was a tranny in ancient Gaul called a Menhir?

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ Steve

    "What did you expect - all frogs are degenerate racists"

    And that is not a xenophobic and racist comments?

  17. Alex
    Coat

    @Simon

    "a female woman of the opposite sex. "

    So a bloke then?

    Mine's the one with the top-shelf Tintin comic in it...

  18. Sarah Bee (Written by Reg staff)

    re: frogs/racism/female women

    Have you all forgotten to take your irony pills this morning? Lord.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Asterix

    If I remember correctly, in the Asterix story ‘La Rose et la Glaive’ (I think the English title is “Asterix and the Secret Weapon”), Asterix clacks a woman who kisses him.

    I leave the collective to draw any conclusions.

    Paris because, well she would.

  20. Rob
    Thumb Down

    @Anonymous Coward

    "And that is not a xenophobic and racist comments?"

    Some people really just don't get sarcasm, and (slightly misguided) jokery do they...

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Irony Pills -Back Atcha

    I'm a REGular reader, so of course I took mine.

    I just thought it would be fun to stoke things up a bit.

  22. Sarah Bee (Written by Reg staff)

    Re: Irony Pills -Back Atcha

    Fibber.

  23. beast666
    Unhappy

    Re: Funny how things are forgotten

    "I seem to recall at least one encounter with a female woman of the opposite sex."

    Me too, I think...

  24. Guybrush Threepwood
    Coat

    Already been done...

    ...by Boro TinTin, the foul mouthed teesside version of Herge's aryan hero. He claims to have had intimate moments with some of the more troll-like denizens of the cartoon TV series, and we also find out that Snowy has a bit of a sausage-dog fetish. Interesting that Herge's estate have ignored this version, perhaps because it's so shit.

    I'm off to Berwick Hills baths in my new Hi-Tec trainers.

  25. Mark

    More racism

    Anyone heard the original recordings of The Beatles classic "Get Back"? It's probably only available as a bootleg.

    It's all about people of Pakistani origin coming over here and taking their jobs and how they should get back to where they belong.

    Of course, at that time, the beatles weren't *musicians* as a full time job, so their real jobs (and the jobs of their friends: this was, after all, before they became too famous to hobnob with the riffraff) were at risk.

    But, when they became musicians (with plenty of dosh) and their jobs weren't at risk, they changed the lyrics to something less racist.

  26. Glenn Alexander
    Happy

    Women? TinTin? NOOOOooooooo!!!!!!!

    I can only recall one woman appearing in the entire original series, though my school library may not have had the whole set so maybe there were two or even three women in the entire Tin Tin world. Surely having all these woman actually existing in the Tintin world is the real problem with the new version(s).

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Guybrush

    Heh, tintin of the boro, i'd forgotten about that. not exactly the pinnacle of humour, but some entertaining quotes from it.

    on a slightly different note, a while ago i bought a dvd with a few episodes of "superman vs the japs" on it for a quid, that was enlightening

  28. BlueGreen

    And another one

    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin:_Breaking_Free>

    For the record, it's not actually very interesting.

  29. Gerhard den Hollander

    a female woman of the opposite sex

    She walked up to me and she asked me to dance

    I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said lola

    L-o-l-a lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

  30. Mark
    Paris Hilton

    Female women of the opposite sex

    Well, if you're a man, a female woman IS of the opposite sex.

    Rather like "I've never done nothing" is merely an emphatic statement.

    The rules of common language do not follow the rules of mathematics.

  31. Chris Malme
    Thumb Down

    Satire, not racism

    The version of "Get Back" that Mark talks of actually appears on at least one Beatles album, the "Let It Be" sessions.

    The initial idea of the song was to lampoon the growing anti-immigrant opinions of the day, referencing Enoch Powell's "River of Blood" speech. Unfortunately, there were plenty of folk too ignorant to recognise satire, just as there seems to be today. So it was rewritten to the largely meaningless lyrics we know today.

    And rather than having been written before they were famous, the "Let It Be" sessions were recorded leading up to the album "Let It Be", which would have been towards the end of the Beatles time as a band.

  32. Lukin Brewer

    Nothing new under the sun.

    People have been creating derivative works on famous characters and stories for years, a substantial proportion of which are pornographic. In most cases, the creators have had more sense than to try to get their derivative works on general release. One example I have seen was Tintin in "Breaking Free", where he and Captain Haddock foment a workers' revolt in England. It was distributed privately, and sold through radical bookshops.

    Yes, Hergé stereotyped the black people. He also stereotyped the Japanese, the Chinese, the peoples of India, and also the Americans and the English. In fact, he stereotyped *everyone*, including his main characters. The sea captain battling alcoholism. The absent-minded inventor. The incompetent old-school detectives. Strangest of all, the boy reporter who travels the world, but never files a story. It should be noted that Hergé tried to mend his ways to a certain extent later in his career. The scenery in "The Blue Lotus" (and other later books) was properly referenced from life sketches done by friends who were touring, and there was a sequence where Tintin and Chang discuss, and laugh at, European stereotypes of the Chinese.

  33. b166er
    Paris Hilton

    Irony

    Sarah, I think we need a PlayMobil reconstruction of this fine literary work.

    Paris, because when in Paris, I've heard she likes a bit of Dupond et Dupont.

  34. heystoopid
    Paris Hilton

    So

    So in this 21st century of propaganda the end of parody is near !

  35. Charles Manning

    @@Steve

    woosh!

    You must be a short-arsed pinko to have had that one fly over your head.

  36. Jerry
    Boffin

    logic 101 - Mark

    Mark: " The rules of common language do not follow the rules of mathematics."

    Yeah, right.

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Re: Fibber

    eh. Whatever. I won't lose any sleep over it. I like this redtop, and I think that most of ya'll are pretty sharp.

    I also know that you're usually the point...man for beating up on us comment weenies, so I'm happy to lead with the chin.

    Carry on...

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Female women of the opposite sex"

    Good grief, have none of you ever seen "Allo Allo"?

    If the answer is no, then here is a simple explanation - it was something of a running joke with the Gestapo describing women as "female women of the opposite sex" especially when they brought in camp connotations. Geesh.

  39. Patrick R

    Tintin, not for pervs, not for children either.

    Nick Rodwell manages Herge's estate like a pitbull, trying to transform it into some posh concept and squeeze the most money of it he can of royalties. He's alienated all the comics world and Tintins friends in Belgium. He's not really loved. Nothing new.

  40. Jack Malvern

    satire clause

    Torben Mogensen says:

    "If I recall copyright law correctly, you can use the names and likeness of copyrighted characters for purposes of parody and satire."

    UK copyright law, and I'm fairly sure EU law, contains no get-out on the basis of parody or satire. This is, however, true of American copyright law.

  41. Schoofs
    Pirate

    @Steve

    <And Belgium is frog because they speak froggish.>

    For your information Steve: the majority of Belgians speak Flemish, a language closely resembling Dutch. A lot of Belgians are multilingual and also speak French and English as observed by many foreign visitors coming through our country.

    And what language(s) do you squawk, Steve?

    A skull because there is no brains in them.

  42. John Stevens
    Paris Hilton

    Been done far more obscenely...

    There's quite a head of steam behind the anti-Hergé movement. It seems to be composed in equal parts of people who dislike Hergé's politics....which appeared originally to be not far off seriously racist, fascist, etc....and French people who object to people believing Tintin to be French.

    Parodies appear with amazing regularity, including one I picked up whilst working in France many many years ago. This included graphic descriptions of Tintin, Captain Haddock and others engaging in almost every sexual perversion imaginable.

    Captain Haddock, I seem to remember, is screwed by that Castafiore woman, whilst Tintin screws both a pair of decidedly under-age girls, and Snowy. The Thomson twins shag each other. And I can't remember what the Prof gets up to.

    But at his age, he really shouldn't.

    According to an interview with the author, this work was produced as a political (anti-Hergé) statement.

    <cough>

    Paris. Because that's where this particular statement was purchased.

  43. Pete Jones
    Happy

    @schoofs

    >the majority of Belgians speak Flemish, a language closely resembling Dutch<

    That's like saying American closely resembles English!

  44. Mark

    re: Satire, not racism

    Of course it was.

    Nothing to do with people whose livelihood is on the line will look on any issue likely to see them fail will demonise the threat to them.

    cf RIAA vs P2P

    cf MPAA vs VHS home recording

    etc

    You can understand it happening.

    In the case of the Beatles, if they meant satire, why did they bury the recording?

  45. Chris Fleming

    Been Done Before!

    Yes I remember that some 30 years ago, think it was called "French Comics" a collection of hillarious offbeat COMIX.

  46. Robert Smits
    Happy

    So? Where is it?

    What I want to know is where's the first site for it online?

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