Until Friday only, there is a special Christmas discount on Travels of the Boy Reporter. This one-off offer is limited to our current stock of posters and only available until the end of week otherwise they won’t arrive by Christmas.

Twice the Map!

For this one time offer, you can buy the A2 map for the price of the A3 map.

If you are unfamiliar with the A range of paper sizes, A2 is twice the size of A3. A massive 594mm x 420mm (23.4″ x 16.5″) poster that can take pride of place on any wall.

Free P&P

Because we love Tintin fans the world over, we have dropped the cost of postage and packaging to zero. Nothing. Nil. Not a cent.

So whether you live in Alaska, Antarctica or Azerbaijan, post and packaging is free.

Wrapped for Christmas

Because it is Christmas and we know you will be buying this map for that special Tintin fan in your life (possibly yourself), it needs to be wrapped, ready to go under the Christmas Tree.

Each Tintin map ordered by Friday will be beautifully wrapped in suitable paper, all ready for Christmas day.

One Time Offer

This offer is only available until close of business on the 11th December and stocks are limited.

To order your pre-wrapped, cut-price map with free P&P, visit this page.

(c) Tintinology. Please click for a much larger version

I’m in the process of updating the Travels of a Boy Reporter map showing everywhere Tintin visited in his adventures. The updates are mostly technical and related to ensuring we our printers can produce the sharpest possible images. However this has involved re-entering all the text on the map and that means some typos might of slipped in.

Please examine the map looking for typos, spelling mistakes and other stupid gaffs.

If you find one, please tell me by commenting below. There will a free gift for anyone who finds a new mistake.

Many thanks and watch out for a special last minute Christmas sale in the next few days.

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.

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.

Our trip to Belgium has ground to a halt and I’m stuck in a hotel room.

Last night, I injured my knee. This is a repeat of an injury from about six months ago and that left me unable to walk any distance for several weeks. However this time it doesn’t seem as bad but walking across the room to the bathroom is still a major exercise.

This has wrecked our plans and it now seems unlikely I will be fit enough to visit the Herge museum tomorrow. The museum is shut on Mondays and we go home on Tuesday so there will be no chance to visit it even if my knee vastly improves.

I’m rather annoyed about this.

Mostly likely, the next two days of my life will be spent in a hotel room and, if I’m lucky, a nearby bar.

Between the 30th September and the 6th October TintinMovie.org (i.e. me, Chris) will be visiting the fine country of Belgium with my partner. We will be visiting a lot of Tintin related sites including the Comic Museum in Brussels, Cinquantenaire Museum (home to the statue that inspired The Broken Ear), the flea market from the start of The Secret of the Unicorn and few non-Tintin related places such as Waterloo.

Of course we will be visiting the Herge Museum and we invite everyone to join us.

Our plan is to visit the museum on Saturday 3rd October, probably around 11am. If any fellow Tintin fans would like to visit the museum with us, we would be delighted to meet you. Afterwards, we will be visiting bars either in Louvain-La-Neuve or back in Brussels.

I will post more details in a couple of soon but if would like to join us on our visit, please comment below. If anyone outside Belgium wants to join us, this map of our Brussels trip may be of help.

The early Tintin adventures, particularly Tintin in the Congo, were racist. Though the mind set they incorporated was common throughout the European and colonial powers. What redeemed Herge and his work was his ability to recognise and overcome his own prejudices. He became an ambassador of hope and for much his life, Herge worked to educate his readers about different cultures of world and show how, regardless of race, creed or colour, we are all the same.

Unfortunately the message Herge embodies – that we can overcome our fears and predjuices to be better human beings – is lost on people from the far left and the far right of politics. Calls for his books to be banned miss the point and play into the hands of extreme right wing racists.

Black People “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles”.

This quote from the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality ( CRE ) is the title of a thread from the white supremacists site Stormfront.org [ WARNING: This is a site dedicated to 'White Pride World Wide' and all the hate and stupidity that involves ]. The idiots who frequent the site have focused on using the CRE’s statement and have spouted some predicable racist claptrap in support of Herge and Tintin.

This subversion of the Herge’s work in support of such a perverse agenda is sickening and it highlights the dangers of either side of the political spectrum focusing on a narrow aspect of an author’s work. The subject of Herge’s and racism is complex, inexplicably tied to the culture he grew up in and above, a message of hope and humanity.

Note: Clicking the links to the Stormfront web site will cause offense to all right-thinking people. In the HTML, I’ve have marked them as ‘no follow‘ so that the search engines will ignore these links.

Thanks to my wonderful partner, I’m going to Brussels sometime soon (probably around September). This will be my first visit to the city and obviously I will be looking at a lot Tintin related stuff such as The Herge Museum and the Belgian Centre of Comic Strip Art. However I also want to see the less obvious side of Tintin & Brussels?

Can anyone suggests places to visit that are a bit more off the beaten trail? Great bookshops, smaller museums, interesting places to eat & drink, places to stay?

It doesn’t have to be Tintin related. I will be traveling with my partner so some of the trip has to be non-Tintin related. Anything relating to beer and / or chocolate will do nicely on this front.

Finally, is there a good time to visit? Are there any special events taking place in the early autumn? Should we avoid certain dates because of school holidays and the like?

Any advice and suggestions about the trip are welcome. I will be posting more details as we firm up are plans and of course, I will be writing and Twittering about it as we go.

Nothing to do with Tintin, other than it happened in Anterwerp, but I like flash mobs and this one is extremely well done.

It was done as a promotion stunt for a Belgian TV program / competition for the casting of The Sound of Music.

Until the first Tintin trailer comes out, we will have to get by on trailers for films from other classic children books.

If you have children and haven’t brought them a copy of Where The Wild Things Are then you are a bad parent. It is an essential part of every young child’s discovery of reading.