The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin in the Congo

In this adventure, Tintin sets off for central Africa to write a report. Dangerous adventures await him there, as his enemies pursue him to kill him. After Tintin's return from his trip to Russia, recounted in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Hergé was commissioned to send Tintin to the Congo, then a Belgian colony. This album is an excellent document to see how Europeans of the time imagined Africa and Africans. The story began to be published on June 5, 1930, in Le Petit Vingtième (See Hergé's Biography). In 1946, Hergé completely redrew the album to color it and reduce its original 110 plates to the 62 pages that the albums would henceforth have. In this new color version, he introduced numerous modifications, somewhat softening the colonialist overtones. Despite this, Tintin in the Congo fell out of favor from the 1950s onwards and became quite difficult to find. It was the tumultuous time of decolonization, and the album was not particularly timely. But curiously, it was in a Zairean magazine that the story first reappeared, ending the quarantine of Tintin in the Congo.