Tintin Forums

Hello all. As we know, Hergé sincerely regretted many things about Tintin in Congo; Soviets was very dependent on its context and he wouldn't have written it at any other point; and America wasn't as crazy as these two but still quite underdeveloped and naive compared to what comes after.

None of the events of these 3 books is ever mentioned again in the series, nor do any characters reappear (except for a Rastapopolous prototype in America and the Thom(p)sons, which were included later on in the first page of Congo).

The later adventures commonly referenced the early ones, considering the reappearances of Rastapopoulos, Alcazar, Ridgewell, Dawson, Chang etc.

By ignoring the first 3 books, is there a possibility that Hergé didn't consider them canon anymore and wanted people to forget or am I just looking at this too much?

From what he said about those earlier books in interviews over the years I think it's more likely he felt the characters were rather one-dimensional, hence he never felt compelled to revisit them for cameos. I think this is mostly true, although I always thought Bobby Smiles should have been resurrected!

However, I'm not sure he didn't regard them as canon, especially Congo and America both of which had been redrawn in colour and were always available as part of the series. Soviets, on the other hand, he didn't redraw (although he did once begin an attempt) and this book was out of print for some time. I remember being amazed when I first became aware of it, which would have been in the 70s when I saw the Archives Hergé series we had in our school library.