JUDGING FROM THE COVER, I guessed this early (1931-32) entry in the Tintin series was full of unpalatable stereotypes of indigenous American peoples, and in fact it is, so I am not sure why it has not yet been shuffled off into the same limbo where Tintin au Congo now resides.
More surprising was that the whole United States is satirized from first page to last: organized crime (page 1 et seq.), the hypocrisy of Prohibition (p. 36), lynching (pp. 35-37), sensation-seeking journalists (p. 44). The French are among the nations that have a robust strand of anti-Americanism in their culture, I know, but the strength of the satire took me a little by surprise.
The most surprising instance--also, I have to say, one I was glad to see--occurs on pp. 28-29. Tintin, while sitting on a rock on indigenous land, accidentally discover an oil gusher. He is instantly surrounded by oil speculators, who offer him five thousand, then ten, twenty-five, fifty, and finally a hundred thousand dollars for his oil rights. He explains that the land and its oil rights belong to the indigenous people he has just been spending time with. The oil men then offer the chief of the nearby settlement twenty-five dollars for the rights. "Le Visage-Pâle est-il fou?" ("Is the Paleface mad?") asks the chief. The oil men then send in the army to dispossess the natives and set up an oil operation.
It's like Killers of the Flower Moon in ten cartoon panels.
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