Captain Haddock too much for America in the 1950s

When we first encounter Captain Haddock, in The Crab with the Golden Claws, the adventure written by the Belgian comic strip artist Herge in1941, his drunkenness nearly kills him and his new friend, Tintin, who has been kidnapped and held on board the captain’s vessel. As in the recent film version by Steven Spielberg, which combines elements from other Tintin adventures, Captain Haddock is captaining the Karaboudjan, an Armenian vessel, and obviously a flag of convenience.

Thereafter, the plots divide. In the book, the first mate, Allan, is smuggling opium and keeps his unknowing boss compliant by feeding his alcoholic habit. Competent when sober, the captain’s drunkenness causes trouble for Tintin who is attempting to escape from the vessel after being kidnapped. The captain lights a fire on a lifeboat to keep warm – an incident repeated in the film – and knocks Tintin over the head to commandeer a light aircraft in a severe storm, resulting in a near-fatal crash.

Unlike for Spielberg, in the late fifies, Captain Haddock’s drunkenness in this adventure was too much for a prospective American publisher. A website for Tintin fans, Tintinologist.org, relates the story of how frames showing the captain drinking whisky neat from the bottle upset Golden Press in 1959.

Frenchman Georges Duplaix, who was negotiating on behalf of Golden Press, wrote to the Belgian publisher, Casterman, explaining, “I am sure you understand that an American, very often puritan, point of view is different from the European point of view. A joke that everyone would accept with a smile in France or Belgium would horrify people here. The presentation of alcoholism, especially in a humorous form, is absolutely taboo.”

Hergé re-drew three frames showing the worst of the drinking but was also prevailed upon to redraw several frames showing black characters. “The US censors didn’t approve of mixing races in children’s books,” Tintinologist.org’s UK’s correspondent, Chris Owens, notes.

The issue around black characters is an ironic twist for Hergé. Around the time of the controversy, he remarked sarcastically in an interview that, “Everyone knows that there are no blacks in America.”

Hergé second adventure, Tintin is in the Congo, written in 1930, has been even more controversial. It has recently been in the dock in Belgium for its alleged racist depictions. Congolese campaigner Mbutu Mondondo Bienvenu, backed by the UK Commission for Racial Equality, has been fighting since 2007 to have the book banned. The claim is being countered by the publisher, which is relying on the principle of free speech, saying that if a ban was imposed, the works of Dickens would be at risk for their instances of anti-Semitism. Although the saga continues, a Belgian judicial adviser recommended in November 2011 that the courts reject the bid to have the book banned because it was written in the spirit of the times and was not intentionally racist.

Hergé himself said as much in the years after it came out. The Congo adventure was the last of the 24 Tintin stories to be translated into English. In a new foreword, the English translators explain the historical prejudices contained in a story of simple, happy natives living under a benign Belgian administration where big game hunting is popular: “He [Hergé] himself admitted that he depicted the African people according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period – an interpretation that some of today’s readers may find offensive.”