I started thinking about Tintin this week and, being the enthusiastic born-again Astro fan I am, I couldn't help but notice the many similarities between my favorite childhood TV hero and my favorite comic strip hero!
Obviously they both fight for justice, but they share a lot more.
- 1. Age: while Tintin is not a child, he is obviously young and kind of ageless. This characteristic makes it easy for a child to identify himself to both of them.
- 2. Gender: both are obviously males, but gender isn't a very important characteristic in any of them. Again, as a female, I never felt they were that different from myself, which made it easier for me to relate to them.
- 3. Purity: neither seem to have many shortcomings, if any. They both wouldn't want to kill anybody, as bad as they might be, even expressing sadness when a bad character dies.
- 4. Daddy Walrus - Capitaine Haddock/Captain Haddock/Kapitän Haddock: both are hot-tempered characters, which compensate for the perfection of the hero. Also, both like to drink!
- 5. Police: neither the Dupond/Dupont - Thomson/Thompson - Schultze/Schulze, nor Inspector Gumshoe seem to be able to solve anything without the hero's help (obviously, I realize that if they were, our main character would be jobless! ). But in both cases, policemen even get in the way of our heroes or even distrust them at times.
- 6. Science: plays a major role in both.
Tintin as a comic is older than Astro. I don't know if Tezuka was aware of Hergé's work, but I don't have the feeling that he needed to read Hergé to create his own world. In the end, obviously, both authors found some kind of universal recipe that attracted so many fans.
