Interpreting the World Through the Lens of Tintin

In comic books created over the course of six decades, a young Belgian reporter named Tintin travels the world, embroiling himself in investigations and adventures. From Soviet Russia to Egypt to China, Tintin’s adventures took him to many exotic locales and into sticky situations with people of countless cultures. The comic has been translated into about 60 languages, and is now a major motion picture by Steven Spielberg, out in U.S. theaters this week. But despite its internationalism, Tintin’s creator, a Belgian artist with the pen name Hergé, famously hardly ever visited any of the settings of his character’s adventures. For the past year, budding “Tintinologist” and comics researcher Nadim Damluji has been traveling around the world, retracing Tintin’s steps to see these places firsthand. He’s trying to understand the often huge differences between the realities on the ground and the representations in the comic, but also to explore Tintin’s enduring popularity in these wide-spread countries.

In his grant-funded year-long travels, Damluji spent four months in Belgium and France, another four months in the Middle East, and another four months in Asia, just some of the many settings of Tintin’s adventures. Damluji documented his studies and tour on his website, Tintin Travels. Through this journey, he spent a lot of time looking at how the interpretations of these settings contradict their realities, and how the comics have influenced the ways readers understand the world.