Book Project - Day 11 - WTF? An Adult Tintin Comic?

After putting up my post on the Tintin comic books series a couple of days go I started to get nostalgic about them, and so I spent some time online looking at some Tintin-related websites and discussion forums. It was through one of the forums that I first heard of Tintin in Thailand.



I was aware that there are Tintin books which I have not read; Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo are 2 of them. When I was a kid those 2 were not part of the series published by Indira, the publisher that held the rights to publish the books in Indonesia. So it was not until I came to the US that I became aware of their existence as well as that of the last Tintin book, Tintin and the Alph-Art (Tintin’s creator, Herge, died before it was finished and it has since been published in its rough form).

But Tintin in Thailand, as it turned out, is most definitely NOT part of a Tintin series! Rather, it is an adult parody of the Tintin comic book – like the Tijuana Bible version of a Tintin comic book. In it, a handful of recognizable characters from the Tintin series turned up in Thailand, indulging in not-so-clean fun times and language.

By all accounts I could find, the book first circulated in Thailand in 1999 with the author listed as “Bud E. Weyser.” In 2001, the Herge Foundation heard of Mr. Weyser’s attempt to market Tintin in Thailand as an unknown Tintin book in Belgium. Following a sting by the Belgian police in Thailand, arrests were made, copies were seized and the book was deemed to be a violation of copyright laws and is therefore illegal to be published. Still, this being the Great Electronic Age, online copies exist, and the Herge Foundation continues the effort to have online copies of the book removed.

I find the author’s attempt to market Tintin in Thailand as an unknown book of the Tintin series to be a laughable long shot. Although the front cover art may be a passable emulation of Herge’s work, the remaining graphics on the inside are all rough-drawn, black-and-white and bear little resemblance to Herge’s clear yet delicate lines. While you can certainly recognize some of the figures to be Tintin characters, I don’t see how a person familiar with the series would ever take this book to be one of Herge’s handiworks.

In case you’re wondering how I know, I did find a copy on pdf. I was curious. Apart from my fondness for Tintin I also have an interest in erotic comics, so I wanted to see how this brazen parody was executed. The effort is there, but the execution – while impressive for its sheer balls – was lacking. Although there aren’t necessarily a lot of depictions of X-rated actions, the book does include corruptions of a few Tintin sacred cows that left me feeling strangely dirty. What a weird footnote to add to the history of this beloved comic icon!