In 1929, the first book in the Tintin series, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was
published in Le Petit Vingtième, and it was a time when arts and literature were at a
crossroads in Europe. The High Modernism of the Eliots, Joyces, and Baudelaires
was about to give way to a more postmodern representation of art and literature, and an
animation series definitely fitted more into a postmodern pastiche than a modernist representation
of “high art”.
Hergé’s Tintin series, one of the most popular in the history of global animation series,
is constructed primarily to feed the cult of the masses that seeks to construct identity in
terms of consumerist capitalism. It must be pointed out that “mass culture” and “popular
culture” have often been used interchangeably, but the finer nuances show that the two
terms cannot be unproblematically used for each other. “Mass culture” relates to the kind
of culture that begins to get produced in the postindustrial Europe when the traditional
centers of power like family, feudalism, and aristocracy begin to break down, with human capital as its biggest investment. “Popular culture,” however, is more directed towards
the process of mass consumption and hence is produced within the matrix of capitalist
interventionist politics. If we put animation in general and Tintin in particular within the
folds of “popular culture,” then we will see that the approach is to use entertainment as a
saleable quality in order to create a “market” for the text.
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