Last week I asked for suitable titles for a 21st Century Tintin book and you have all amazed me with the quality of the entries. Many of you even put forward plot outlines which unfortunately I’ve had to remove from the web site for copyright reasons.

Picking just three entries that capture the nature of Tintin and the 21st Century has been hard. I’ve not used any formal criteria for picking the winners, I’ve simply gone for those titles that jump out to me.

The winners will received a free copy of Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin courtesy of Oxford University Press.

The Winners

Most Optimistic

Tintin’s adventures were frequently at the cutting edge of technology and unfailing optimistic about about the future. This entry captures both of these ideas.

Tintin on Mars

Congratulations Alex Razos

Most Geeky

In the 21st Century, the geeks run the world and geeks clever self-referential humour about the internet. The winning entry nails this.

Flight 404

Well done tweeter @PBX.

However we had another really good, geeky entry so I’m going to award special mystery bonus prize to tweeter @jamiepullman for this little gem.

Tintin and Wolfram Alphart

If you’re a little confused by this, check out this website.

Most Satirical

If I told you why the next winner had won I would probably get in trouble for both copyright infringement and libel. But if you have been following recent events relating to Moulinsart and noticing some changes around the web site, you will have a fair idea why this title wins.

The Moulinsart Conspiracy

Congratulations Dave.

Thanks Everyone

Thank you to everyone who entered. Judging the entries has been a lot of fun. I will be contacting the winners shortly and sending them their prizes.

Peter Jackson is in London for the opening of The Lovely Bones and mentioned Tintin at a press conference:

“Tintin is great. It’s made. The movie is cut together and now [we] are turning it into a fully-rendered film”.

That is it for Tintin news but for more on the Hobbit and The Lovely Bones see: Peter Jackson says Tintin film is ‘finished’

Sacrilege!

In 2006, a worldwide protest was created by the publication of a series of cartoons of Muhammad appeared in Danish newspapers. According to the protestors, such images were sacrilege and affront to muslims everywhere. So strong were the Islamist feelings that Danish flags were burnt, embassies attacked and over 100 people died in violent confrontations with the police.

Photo (c) sgrah, CC Some Rights Reserved

The Truth

The real story is much more complicated than that.

The protests were the result of a concerted effort to generate outrage that took several months to bear fruit. This included the creation of new cartoons by the agitators that were far more offensive than the original images. The irony of muslims deliberately creating offensive images to incite muslims over offensive images appears to be lost on the extreme elements of the muslim world.

The whole concept of banning images of Muhammad is itself relatively new and limited only to certain parts of the muslim faith. The image below show a young Muhammad meeting the monk Bahira. The image dates from around 1315 AD.

Tintin Meets Muhammad

In the May 17, 1977 edition of the Nouveau Tintin, the French language Tintin magazine ran an piece on the life of Muhammad. This sort of historical article was common in the Tintin magazine because Herge had very strong ideas about educating and informing the children who read his publication.

The article covered all of Muhammad’s life and he was repeatedly shown. His early life had simple illustrations but his later life is depicted as a full comic strip. In the sample page below, Muhammad is in the red turban, being wounded by an arrow.

Image (c) Nouveau Tintin magazine

For more on this, visit the Mohammed Image Archive

Our friends at Shop Tintin are doing a special promotion of discounted Tintin Merchandise in the run up to Christmas.

24 Days of Tintin

For 24 days, one day per Tintin Album, they are doing a special Tintin merchandise promotion that lasts for just 24 hours. As I write this, they are on Day 5 – The Blue Lotus and are offering a 30% discount of a package of the fascimile edition of The Blue Lotus, a great figurine and a Tintin jigsaw.

These are real “blink and you’ll miss them” promotions with genuine discounts. If you’ve had your eye on some Tintin merchandise or you are wondering about a christmas gift for the Tintin fan in you life, you need to keep an eye on the shop’s blog. Each day, there is a new post with details of a new special offer.

Travels of a Boy Reporter

Tintinology has been helping Shop Tintin with the Tintin merchandise promotion by putting together a bit of trivia about each book and a special extra treat: A map of Tintin’s journey in the featured book. Unlike the normal Travels of a Boy Reporter map, these map only feature a single book. Around Europe and the Red Sea, areas where Tintin travelled extensively, this make the individual journey much easier to see as the example below shows.

King Ottokar’s Sceptre

All Tintin’s Adventures in the Region

Twitterings

You can also follow news of the 24 Days of Tintin promotion on Twitter. @ShopTintin tweets about each new discount as it is announced and also carries the latest news about Tintin and Tintin merchandise.

There are growing signs of a public relations disaster for Moulinsart over the Bob Garcia case with several UK newspapers running stories about a potential boycott.

Trouble started when Moulinsart sued Bob Garcia over five short books he published about Tintin. In two of the books, he reproduced images owned by Moulinsart believing he was covered by the doctrine of fair use. At the initial trial Mr Garcia won but lost on appeal and is now facing bankruptcy over a €40,000 bill for damages.

Bob Garcia’s own blog contains no mention of a boycott. It does have some quotes that are alleged to have been made by Moulinsart to journalists about “Moulinsart [being a] victim of harassment by Bob Garcia” which is certainly an interesting spin on the situation.

Both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail have run stories on the case. For two major UK papers to cover a French story about copyright infringement is a demonstration of the power of Tintin’s name and the size of the potential PR disaster the Moulinsart are facing.

Help! (Or Should That Be Aider!)

My French is shockingly bad and I rely mostly on Google Translate to read non-English news coverage. If any of my readers are following this case (and other Tintin news) in the French or Belgium media, could you please keep me updated with any interesting links or developments.

I’m particularly interested in finding the Facebook group set-up in support of Mr Garcia. If you can track it down, please let me know. UPDATE: Thanks to @muziejus for tracking down the Support Bob Garcia Facebook group.

If you have any links or news you want to share, please just comment to this or any other post on the site, or email me: Chris [at] TintinMovie [dot] org.

Sources: Tintin fans threaten boycott of film after aficionado sued over pamphlets of comic hero, Tintin film boycott threat over row with Hergé widow’s British husband, Video of Bob Garcia in 2007 being interviewed on French TV about his books.

UPDATE: Some coverage on US web sites: Spielberg’s ‘TINTIN’ Euro Release Stirs Legal Debacle

There are a lots of words that can describe Nick Rodwell but popular is not one of them.

As head of Moulinsart and husband to Herge’s second wife Fanny, he holds in his hands one of the biggest, most iconic and most loved characters of the 20th Century. A man in this position has to make some hard decisions and will inevitably step on some toes but Nick Rodwell does seem to have a special gift when it comes to annoying people. Not many publishers are on the receiving end of a 200 pages of a book criticising nearly everything they have done.

Stéphane Steeman, Belgian humourist, radio presenter, writer, Herge collector and longtime president of The Friends of Herge has self-published a new book L’escalade. It is not all about Nick Rodwell but about The Friends of Herge and how the actions of Moulinsart destoryed his love for Herge’s works.

… censorship, bans, subpoenas, legal threats, blackmail and so forth, out of decency of our members I never mentioned the name of Mr. Rodwell in our reviews, I never criticized Moulinsart … And yet, I’m in a squad that Mr. Rodwell was nicknamed “The Black List”

It is hard to tell from the sources if this book is born out of personal bitterness against Nick Rodwell and Moulinsart or a genuine, well rounded criticism of the man and the company. Mr Rodwell’s behaviour has certainly been far from the standards set by Tintin and the company’s legitimate desire to protect its copyright has at times appeared self-defeating.

Boycott Moulinsart!

One of the company’s ongoing legal battles is against Bob García. As we reported earlier, Mr Garcia published five Tintin related books. Two of these books used a handful of images that are owned by Moulinsart that the author believed were usable under the idea of Fair Use. At the initial trial, the judge found in favour of Bob Garcia however Moulinsart won on appeal and are now forcing Mr Garcia into bankruptcy to collect damages. Some fans are now trying to organise a boycott of Herge products on behalf of Mr Garcia.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular case, it is certainly doing the image of Moulinsart and Nick Rodwell no good at all.

Sources: Stéphane Steeman consacre un livre à Nick Rodwell, son pire ennemi, Los fans de Tintin amenazan con boicotear la película de Spielberg, L’ESCALADE, de Stéphane Steeman

Win a Copy of Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin

I have three copies of the new biography Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin to give away in a very simple competition:

If Herge was still writing today, what would his next Tintin book be called?

The best suggestions for 21st Century Tintin titles will get a free copy of the biography. They can be silly or serious, I don’t mind. The winners will simply whichever ones I think are best.

To enter, you can put your suggestion in a comment below or send it via Twitter. Just use the hash tag #21cTintin. If you are a winner, I will contact you via a Twitter or email to get your postal address.

A special thanks to Emily at Oxford University Press for supplying the books.

The competition starts now and will run until the end of the week. So plenty of time to get thinking that ultimate 21st Century Tintin title.

EDIT: Copyright Concerns

We have had some wonderful entries and many of you have written plot summaries to go with the titles. Thank you everyone for your imagination and hard work.

However this puts Tintinology in a dangerous place regarding copyright. The plot outlines can be considered derivative works and are not covered by fair usage. To avoid having the 800 pound gorilla of Moulinsart legal team jumping on my head, I have edited out everything except the titles.

Thank you for everyone who has gone over and above the call of duty to write these wonderful and amusing plot outlines but we have to respect the law of copyright.

Glancing down Pierre Assouline’s own history, it is clear he is perfectly suited for writing a biography of Herge. The targets of his five other biographical studies read like the cast list for a Tintin story: Marcel Dassault (aeronautics pioneer), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (art dealer), Gaston Gallimard (publisher), Henri Cartier-Bresson (photographer) and Georges Simenon (detective novelist). But in tackling Georges Remi, Assouline is not documenting the life story of one man, but the story of Georges Remi, his public persona of Herge and his creation Tintin.

With the translation of Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin, English speakers get a chance to read Assouline’s take on this remarkable man and his creation. Thanks to the publishers, Oxford University Press, I got a chance to ask the man himself some questions about the book and his take on Herge.

Remi’s life (1907 – 1983) covered a turbulent time in history and the biography tells the story well over its 235 pages, splitting Herge’s life into three phases: the early years up until 1944; the dark years of isolation and rejection from 1944 to 1950, and the final years of reconciliation and personal growth until his death. Assuoline had full access to the Moulinsart archives and interviewed many people closely associated to Remi. However the results he draws are not flattering to the man.

Compared to the avuncular persona of Herge, Remi is a very different man. He appears a workaholic and a control freak, overly protective of his work, and later his Herge persona. Something that persists today in Moulinsart’s approach to his memory. Even his admirable qualities, such as his loyalty, are flawed and lead into his wartime choices and post-war problems. However Assouline believes this blind loyal was core to who Remi was.

“Hergé has never been a traitor to his country, to his faith, to his friends. [It is ] impossible to separate all his loyalties. That’s the man.”

One area where Assouline’s biography does fall down is his avoidance of Remi’s personal life. His first marriage lasted some thirty years but Germaine rarely is mention, despite his several affairs. When queried about this omission Pierre said “[The] french biographer will be always more discreet about private life than an Amercian or an English one…”. Which certainly is true but in missing an important part of a man’s life out of the book it leaves the reader unable to form a full picture of the man.

If the avoidance of Remi’s private life is an omission, the book excels during the coverage of the most provocative aspect his life, his wartime record. It is here that the friendly image of Herge that he and later Moulinsart tried to create is most at odds with reality.

The facts are not disputed. When the newspaper he was working on was shutdown by the German occupying forces, Remi went to work at the leading french language Belgium daily paper, Le Soir. Whilst not run by the Nazis, it was certainly an approved paper and its content heavily controlled, having been seized from its rightful owners. For producing Tintin (already a national figure) in a German controlled newpaper for four years, Herge was branded a collaborator.

Herge himself explained that he never considered his work any different from being a tram driver or coal miner and they were not called collaborators for working under German rule. However Remi did for work for a right-wing newspaper before the war and his seeming obliviousness to the how other people saw his collaboration will always raise questions about his motives. Assouline’s remarks that Herge “… never expressed any regrets. He never thought he was wrong.”.

We may be judging Remi too harshly. According to Assouline “About the concentration camps, [Herge] always said afterwards that, at the time, it was impossible to know anything about the holocaust”. To Remi, a man devoted to boy scout ethics, it probably seemed natural to keep working and to trust is superiors. In the biographer’s words “… he was loyal to his youth ideas and ideals, loyal to his friends …”

In dealing with this subject, and the similar hot potato of racism / anti-sematism, this biography does not draw any conclusions itself. It presents the facts but does so in a way that that is unflattering to Remi. Whether the man was criminally naive, willfully ignorant or had right-wing sypathies is left for the reader to decide.

This is both the great strength and weakness of the biography. It tells the story of three people: George’s Remi, the public persona of Herge, and Tintin but it never declares an opinion about any them. This is refreshing compared to the near hagiographies some writers have produced but it does leave the reader wanting more.