The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in the Congo

Snowball and Muganga are also characters in this adventure.

The meeting with the crocodile is the beginning of an animal parade, which will quickly turn into carnage. The animal massacres, although ensuring a (questionable) visual comedy in this album, are revealing of the spirit of the colonists who saw themselves free to massacre the local species for their leisure and their prestige.

These models were all produced in the 1920s and 1930s.

Just like Tintin, the missionary is an incarnation of the "good white" who brings education and modernization to the countries of Africa. This is an opportunity to remember that this album was thought of as a real advertisement for the colonies. However, the choice to send Tintin to the Congo was not that of Hergé, but that of the very conservative Abbé Wallez, director of the Petit Vingtième, in order to encourage vocations among Belgian youth.

When the story was originally published, Tintin was teaching colonial history: he then taught Congolese children that their homeland was Belgium. The box was redesigned in the 1946 reissue: Tintin now teaches mathematics, which is much less offensive.

The Leopard Men, or Aniota, were a secret society once active in the Belgian Congo.

The destruction of the local fauna at its height.

A direct bridge to the next adventure: Hergé was impatient to send his reporter across the Atlantic.

The colorization (just like the reduction in the number of plates) was a request from the publisher to meet the expectations of booksellers. In 1946, Hergé enlisted the services of his friend Edgar P. Jacobs to rework his first albums, redesigning them and adding color.

In his 1946 reissue, Hergé added the two policemen in the first panel. They originally only appeared from "Cigars of the Pharaoh".