Tintin Forums

I was casually thinking about how many women take part in Tintin's stories. The main characters (Tintin, Capt Harrock, and Prof Calculus) seem all single, and even chaste. Also no woman ever tried to seduce any of them, like in James Bond stories. I can only recall Bianca Castafiore, Peggy Alcazar, the woman who works as janitor at Tintin's building... Who else?
In any case, we may agree that women play a very limited role in Tintin, don't they?

I think you may actually be thinking of his landlady, Mrs. Finch?

I can also recall the lady in the phonebox with her poodle (Unicorn), Alembick's landlady (Sceptre), the Syldavian ladies near the end of Sceptre, and one or two air hostesses in Tibet.

snowybella
Is Mrs Finch the landlady? I always thought she was a janitor!

RicardoOlcese

Yes - in the English version of Crab, Tintin says "That was my landlady's voice" on page 8, frame 6.

By the way (and more on-topic), I've found two more landladies - Haddock's and Sakharine's ones in Unicorn.

Mrs.Snowball, the only female antagonist and the actress in Cigars.

Mrs. Wang from the Blue Lotus.

Mrs. Clarkson from the Seven Crystal Balls.

Irma, Castafiore's maid.

The Arabian women and the actresses in the Sheherazaade in the Red Sea Sharks.

Miarka and the old gypsy woman in the Castafiore Emerald.

Miss Martine Vandezande in the Alph-art.

Nushka and the rogue maid of the Professor in the Lake of Sharks.

That is all I can remember off the top of my head.

Herge once claimed in an interview that sentimentality had little place in Tintin's stories. They are mainly about men getting into all sorts of "misadventures rather than adventures" and "mocking women would not be nice". He did not consider it funny to draw women slipping on banana peals - though with men it was another matter.

Another factor may have been the general attitude of the time, in continental Europe, that women characters had little place in comics aimed at boys. As both a strip and as a character, Tintin was actually quite typical in being a male character with male friends and only very distant female acquaintances. These comics were for pre-teen boys (adolescents and younger) who were not seen to be old or mature enough to be chasing girls. If women did play an important role in the stories then it was made clear that their relationship with the male heroes was strictly platonic. The comic male characters Spirou and Fantasio, for example, sometimes shared adventures with a girl called Secotine but there was no indication of romance and Fantasio in particular saw her as pesky nuisance and a rival - they were both reporters after the same story.

This changed in the 1960s when female characters started to play more important roles in strips and even appeared as the titled characters. "Castafiore Emerald" with Bianca, Irma and the gypsy girl can be seen as an early example.

These days it is unusual if the main male character in a comic does not have a girlfriend - eventually maybe even a boyfriend in the full sense of the word, but that is another issue.

Oh yeah, this... Not that it really hurts the stories, which are (mostly) just fine as they already are. But still, it is a shame that most women in "Tintin" (except for Bianca Castafiore) became such minor characters, with just a line of two if they were lucky. A couple of stories even had no women present whatsoever. And the last time, that I read through "Flight 714 to Sydney", I had to raise my eyebrows over Ezdanitoff's remark that he was one of the gentlemen, who had been chosen to be a link to the alien civilization. Because I was like: "Really? They couldn't have picked just one lady too from the entire population on the planet Earth?"

Even if there are some quite understandable reasons for why it became this way (they have been mentioned already right here in this thread, so I won't repeat them), it is remarkable from a modern feminist viewpoint. And I do like that "Castafiore's Emeralds" and "The Picaros" give some women (Irma and Peggy in particular) some spotlight. Martine in "The Alph-Art" also had some promise, so I guess that Hergé was improving himself on this issue as the years went by.