Dealing with flawed works of art is challenging. Tintin fans know this quite well, for despite all the innocence in those books, there are several instances of ugliness.
Most good pieces about Tintin end up exactly where this Economist piece does: acknowledging that Herge was immensely flawed as a human, but that the Tintin books succeed exactly because of their flaws. Wildly imaginative - borderline expressionist, really - tales such as "Tintin in Tibet" stand as testimony to this. There's also a great POV on the topic, for all the PBS-lovers out there.
The oncoming Spielberg/Peter Jackson feature is already causing some predictable consternation. If this guy is right, I may be retiring my Captain Haddock shirt soon but I really don't think it will come to that. Lord knows a lot of things I've enjoyed quietly over the years are now BIG and SPLASHY: Revolutionary Road, Blindness, Watchmen, and now Tintin. I surmise that the next move will be someone filming a Glass family saga starring Ben Stiller as Seymour Glass?
Still, good for my tastes. They needed to see other people, and see other people they did. I'll be here waiting for them to come home.
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