Tintin in America

Tintin in America is a comic-strip album written and illustrated by Hergé, featuring Tintin as hero.

Tintin in America is the third story of Tintin. The first strip was published in "Le Petit Vingtième" on September 3, 1931.

Tintin in America was published in a Black & white album in 1932. The album was reworked and published in color in 1945, this version was shortened to a standard 62-page format. The first American edition was issued in 1973. For this occasion many of the black characters were re-drawn to make their race white or ambiguous

The plot concerns Tintin fighting gangsters from Chicago to the Wild West. In this story Tintin meets Al Capone; this is the only case of a real person appearing as character in Tintin. Like previous stories there is no overall structure; the plot was probably written strip by strip.

The story merely a series of loosely-connected, often arbitrary-seeming incidents. Tintin is frequently saved from certain death by ludicrous and implausible twists of fate; in one scene the workers in a slaughterhouse go on strike just as the boy reporter is pushed into a giant meat-grinder.

In addition, the illustrations are flat and lazy, and there are few decent gags.

Whilst it is the earliest Tintin album available in English translation, Tintin in America is not a good starting-off point for new Tintin readers.

The only scene of any real interest is one in which Tintin discovers an oil-well on an Indian tribe's land, and is immediately beset by businessmen offering him hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. Tintin tells them that the well belongs to the tribe, and the next panel shows the chief being given twenty-five dollars and half an hour to get his tribe off the land. This is an early indication of Herge's keen sense of injustice.

Newcomers to Herge's work are advised to go straight on to the next album in the series (Cigars of the Pharaoh) which, whilst retaining its predecessor's episodic structure, at least has a sense of drama and atmosphere.