Tintin in America () is the third volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper for its children's supplement , it was serialized weekly from September 1931 to October 1932 before being published in a collected volume by in 1932. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy who travel to the United States, where Tintin reports on organized crime in Chicago. Pursuing a gangster across the country, he encounters a tribe of Blackfoot Native Americans before defeating the Chicago crime syndicate.
Following the publication of Tintin in the Congo, Hergé researched a story set in the United States, desiring to reflect his concerns regarding the treatment of American Indian communities by the U.S. government. Bolstered by a publicity stunt, Tintin in America was a commercial success in Belgium and was soon republished in France. Hergé continued The Adventures of Tintin with Cigars of the Pharaoh, and the series became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition. In 1945, Tintin in America was re-drawn and colored in Hergé's style for republication by Casterman, with further alterations made at the request of his American publisher for a 1973 edition. The critical reception of the work has been mixed, with commentators on The Adventures of Tintin arguing that although it represents an improvement on the preceding two installments, it still reflects many of the problems that were visible in them. The story was adapted for both the 1976–77 West End play Tintin's Great American Adventure and the 1991 Ellipse/Nelvana animated series The Adventures of Tintin, which aired as the series finale.
Synopsis In 1932, Tintin, a reporter for , goes with his dog Snowy on an assignment to Chicago, Illinois, to fight against the city's organised crime syndicate. While travelling by taxi, their taxi driver is held at gunpoint by police and the police hijack their taxi alongside Tintin and Snowy. Soon after arriving there, their taxi is collided by another car with Tintin being injured. Tintin and Snowy are kidnapped by gangsters and brought before Pietro and his mobster boss Al Capone, whose criminal enterprises in the Congo were previously thwarted by Tintin. With Snowy's help, Tintin subdues his captors, but as he goes to inform the police, they reject his claims, and the gangsters escape while Tintin is away. After surviving attempts on his life, Tintin meets Capone's rival Bobby Smiles, who heads the Gangsters' Syndicate of Chicago. After Smiles is held at gunpoint, Tintin falls down to the basement and smoke billows everywhere as Tintin collapses on to the ground. He is being rescued by Nick and they place an unconscious Tintin into Lake Michigan but regains consciousness. Tintin is unpersuaded by Smiles' attempt to hire him, and after Tintin orchestrates the arrest of his gang, Smiles escapes and heads west.
Tintin pursues Smiles to the Midwestern town of Redskin City. Here, Smiles convinces the Blackfoot Confederacy that Tintin is their enemy, and when Tintin arrives dressed as a cowboy, he is captured and threatened with execution. After escaping, Tintin discovers a source of underground petroleum. Oil companies offer Tintin large sums of money for the land, but after Tintin states that the Blackfoot actually own the land, the United States Army forces them to leave and oil companies build a city on the site within 24 hours. Tintin evades a lynch mob and a wildfire before coming across train tracks which he decides to follow in order to get back to civilization and continue on Smiles' trail. However, he is ambushed by the gangster and one of his associates, who ties him down to the tracks to be killed by a train scheduled to come through. However, the train happens to stop right before running him over and he is safely rescued, allowing him to continue on his search and find Smiles' remote hideaway cabin. After a brief altercation, he finally captures the gangster.
Returning to Chicago with his prisoner, Tintin is praised as a hero, but gangsters kidnap Snowy and send Tintin a ransom note. After changing back into his civilian clothes, Tintin started his shift as a newspaper delivery boy but in the flat, a loud howling sound is heard as Tintin races up the flat to rescue Snowy but it is a baby crying with his mother after all. At the police station, Tintin is questioned by police about the kidnapping of Snowy. Tracing the kidnappers to a local mansion, Tintin hides in a suit of armor and frees Snowy from the dungeon. The following day, Tintin is invited to a cannery, but it is a trap set by gangsters, who trick him into falling into the meat-grinding machine. Tintin is saved when the machine workers go on strike and then apprehends the mobsters. In thanks, he is invited to a banquet in his honor, where he is kidnapped. His captors tie him to a dumbbell and throw him into Lake Michigan to drown, but Tintin survives by floating to the surface, with his dumbbell having been accidentally replaced with a fake. Gangsters posing as police capture him, but he once again overwhelms them and hands them over to the authorities. Finally, Tintin's success against the gangsters is celebrated by a ticker-tape parade, following which he returns to Europe.
History Background Georges Remi—best known under the pen name Hergé—was the editor and illustrator of (The Little Twentieth), a children's supplement to (The Twentieth Century), a conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native Brussels. Run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez, the paper described itself as a "Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information" and disseminated a far-right, fascist viewpoint. According to Harry Thompson, such political ideas were common in 1930s Belgium, and Hergé's milieu was permeated with conservative ideas revolving around "patriotism, Catholicism, strict morality, discipline, and naivety".
In 1929, Hergé began The Adventures of Tintin comic strip for , about the exploits of fictional young Belgian reporter Tintin. Having been fascinated with the outdoor world of Scouting and the way of life he called "Red Indians" since boyhood, Hergé wanted to set Tintin's first adventure among the Native Americans in the United States. However, Wallez ordered him to set his first adventure in the Soviet Union as a piece of anti-socialist propaganda for children (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets) and the second had been set in the Belgian Congo to encourage colonial sentiment (Tintin in the Congo).
Tintin in America was the third story in the series. At the time, the Belgian far-right was deeply critical of the United States, as it was of the Soviet Union. Wallez—and to a lesser degree Hergé—shared these opinions, viewing the country's capitalism, consumerism, and mechanization as a threat to traditional Belgian society. Wallez wanted Hergé to use the story to denounce American capitalism and had little interest in depicting Native Americans, which was Hergé's primary desire. As a result, Tintin's encounter with the natives took up only a sixth of the narrative. Hergé sought to demystify the "cruel savage" stereotype of the Natives that had been widely perpetuated in western films. His depiction of the Natives was broadly sympathetic, yet he also depicted them as gullible and naïve, much as he had depicted the Congolese in the previous Adventure.
Research Hergé attempted greater research into the United States than he had done for the Belgian Congo or Soviet Union. To learn more about Native Americans, Hergé read Paul Coze and René Thévenin's 1928 book ("Customs and History of the Redskin Indians") and visited Brussels' ethnographic museum. As a result, his depiction of the Blackfoot Native Americans was "essentially accurate", with artefacts such as tipis and traditional costume copied from photographs. Although Hergé's depiction of the Native Americans wearing war bonnets could be considered stereotypical, the Blackfeet were one of the few tribes who actually did wear these.
To learn about Chicago and its gangsters, he read Georges Duhamel's 1930 book ("Scenes from Future Life"). Written in the context of the Wall Street crash of 1929, Duhamel's work contained strong anti-consumerist and anti-modernist sentiment, criticising the U.S.'s increased mechanisation and standardisation from a background of European conservatism; this would have resonated with both Wallez and Hergé's viewpoints. Many elements of Tintin in America, such as the abattoir scene, were adopted from Duhamel's descriptions.
Hergé was also influenced by a special edition of radical anti-conformist magazine (The Mortar Shell) that was published in October 1930. Devoted to the United States, it contained a variety of photographs that influenced his depiction of the country. Hergé used its images of skyscrapers as a basis for his depiction of Chicago and adopted its account of Native Americans being evicted from their land when oil was discovered there. He was particularly interested in the articles in the magazine written by a reporter Claude Blanchard, who had recently traveled the U.S. He reported on the situation in Chicago and New York City and met with Native Americans in New Mexico. Blanchard's article discussed the gangster George Moran, whom literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès believed provided the basis for the character Bobby Smiles.
Hergé's depiction of the country was also influenced by American cinema, and many of his illustrations were based on cinematic imagery. Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier thought that Tintin's arrest of Smiles had been influenced by the Buffalo Bill stories, and that the idea of the gangsters taking Tintin away in their car came from Little Caesar. Despite his extensive research into American life, Hergé accidentally drew steering wheels on the right side of cars in some panels of the comic. It has been suggested that strongman Arthur Saxon, who died a decade prior to serialization of Tintin in America, may have influenced the character Billy Bolivar.
One of the individuals that Hergé could have learned about through Blanchard's article was the Chicago-based American gangster Al Capone. In the preceding story, Tintin in the Congo, Capone had been introduced as a character within the series. There, he was responsible for running a diamond smuggling racket that Tintin exposed, setting up for further confrontation in Tintin in America. Capone was one of only two real-life individuals to be named in The Adventures of Tintin, and was the only real-life figure to appear as a character in the series. In the original version, Hergé avoided depicting him directly, either illustrating the back of his head or hiding his face behind a scarf; this was altered in the second version, in which Capone's face was depicted. It is not known if Capone ever learned about his inclusion in the story, although during initial serialisation he would have been preoccupied with his trial and ensuing imprisonment.
Original publication, 1931–32