Ok, I'll chip in my 2 cents again on this...
I think
Tintin in the Congo is quite a mixed bag, but not in the overly-terrible sense it's so often made out to be. It's obvious it was written in a time when the social consideration of colonialism was quite different, there's no arguing that, and it contains a lot of content that's just not 'normal' Tintin fare, like wholesale animal slaughter. But again, it's a bit of a product of the time.
As I said
in another thread about Tintin in the Congo, I think the merit - and I do believe there's real merit in the book - lies in what poignancy it lends to Hergé's pre-
Blue Lotus body of work.
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets showed a pretty callous lack of any real facts or research underlying the story;
Congo shows a vapid buying-in to the regular social conceits about Africa, colonialism, casual racism, etc...;
Tintin in America shows marked disorganization of plot and story structure, as well as a bevy of inaccurate beliefs about America.
Then Hergé meets Chang Chong Chen, and
The Blue Lotus happens...
Sure, there's still some stereotypical elements, but on the whole it's a
radical change from his earlier work.
The Chinese people are presented in a more visceral way, with a real culture, real hopes, and real problems, not as the baby-eating yellow devils from the East that was the popular conception of the day... Hergé bucked the trend.
Each of the pre-
Lotus works illustrates something that changed in Hergé, be it in his character and how he viewed the world (the difference in racial representation from
Congo to
Lotus for example), or his work process (the difference between the plot structure of
America and
Lotus).
I just feel that
Tintin in the Congo makes those changes more poignant and visual. All the more sweet.
There's only so much I can personally understand about Hergé, living in the times that I do, without the chance of ever meeting him. But being able to clearly see such a personal change illustrated (pun intended) from his early work through
The Blue Lotus and into his later work is pretty cool, and I don't think it would be as cogent an insight without
Tintin in the Congo.
Bailey