Tintin in the Hot Seat Again
RSSBy Rocco Staino -- School Library Journal, 08/25/2009
Tintin, the 80 year old Belgian comic book character, is in trouble again—but this time it’s a book banning controversy.
A public outcry of censorship began after the New York Times recently reported that the New York’s Brooklyn Public Library had removed Tin Tin au Congo (Little, Brown 2005) from its general collection and 
relocated it the Hunt Collection, housed in a vaulted room.
Donna Lieberman, head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Daily News, that library was “taking the easy way out” and wasn’t considering the long term effects of “engaging in censorship.” Lieberman went on to tell WCBS News, "When you take books off the shelves because it's offensive, then you stifle public debate and you stifle freedom.”
The Tintin lockup followed a September 2007 complaint filed by a patron who objected to TinTin creator author/cartoonist George “Hergé” Remi’s depictions of black Africans, stating “culturally we have progressed beyond this depiction”.
The book, set in then-Belgian Congo, follow intrepid boy reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy in their adventures among Africans, who are depicted as simple savages prone to cowardice, superstition, and who use phrases like "White mister! You come save us!"
The 2007 complaint came on the heels of another Tintin controversy in which bookstores were being asked not to carry the book for the same reason. At the time, in Belgium, an African student took legal action to have the book declared racist and removed from bookstores. Its release in Britain earlier that year also prompted the Borders bookstore chain to move the book from the children's section to the adult graphic novels section following customer complaints. The retailer has taken the same action at its 499 U.S. stores.
Mike Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition strongly disagrees with a decision by the library’s material review committee’s to put the book behind lock and key.
“The librarians who banished Tin Tin must answer for what they have done, and also answer this pivotal question, ‘Whose voices count and whose don't in the campaign to remove books that are "offensive" to one group or the other?,’” Meyers wrote in a New York Daily News opinion piece
The controversial Tintin, however, hasn’t stopped directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson from producing and directing three movies based on the comic book. The first is entitled The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, due for release in December, 2011. Spielberg obtained the film rights to Tintin in 1983 after critics compared his Raiders of the Lost Ark to Tintin’s adventures in exotic lands.
