Building a Better Bike: The Evolution of the Modern “Safety Bicycle”

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Old technology, Social History, Society & Culture, Sport

THE absence of cars in cities during the coronavirus lockdown has been a boon to cyclists, both for the recreational kind and for commuter cyclists. There has been an “unprecedented surge in popularity” of bicycle traffic—even in the land of the automobile, the United States—with many bike shops reporting a doubling of their average sales…such is the demand now that bike manufacturers can’t build them fast enough [‘Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership’, (Miranda Bryant), The Guardian, 13-May-2020, www.theguardian.com; ‘Australia is facing a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ as cycling booms, advocates say’, (David Mark), ABC News, 16-May-2020, www.abc.net.au].

Starley’s Rover (Source: sewalot.com)

The renewed present enthusiasm to take up bike-riding in response to the pandemic recalls earlier periods of “bike-mania”in the West—late 1860s to mid-1870s and the 1890s—as the humble bike was evolving into its modern form. Credit for the basic look of the standard, no-frills bicycle as we we think of it today is generally given to John Kemp Starley for his 1885 invention, the “Rover Safety Bicycle”. The Rover’s similar-sized wheels, chain drive attached to the crankshaft and rear wheel, diagonal frame and relative lightness (20kg) retains the basic design of the modern bicycle [‘Pedal Your Way Through the Bicycle’s Bumpy History’, [Evan Andrews), History, 30-Jun-2017, [www.history.com].

1889 Ladies Rover Safety Bike (Image: bicyclehistory.net)

The Rover was seen as a curiosity at first, but when two years later John Boyd Dunlop manufactured the pneumatic tyre, it was a game changer for the new bicycle. Starley’s prototype and all two-wheelers that followed now had a smoother, cushioned ride on the typically bumpy roads of the 19th century. Being lighter the new bike also went faster [‘How bicycles transformed our world’, (Roff Smith), National Geographic,17-Jun-2020, www.nationalgeographic.com].

Fischer’s pedal-bike: Tretkurbelfahrrad
(Photo: www.schweinfurtfuehrer.de)

The bike by various other names

Most folk are aware that before the modern bicycle there was the penny-farthing – also known as the high-wheeler or by the all-purpose term, the ‘ordinary’. The farthing, whose feasibility owes much to French mechanic Eugène Meyer’s innovation of the tension-spoked wheel, was popular through to the end of the 1880s but prone to accidents❉. The lineage of the modern bike however goes back still further – to the bulky, all-wood laufmaschine (“running machine”), invented by Karl von Drais in 1817 in western Germany. The laufmaschine⌧ was the first mode of transport to utilise the in-line, bi-wheel principle, but slim-lined and graceful it wasn’t! Bereft of pedals, brakes and chains, it was propelled by the rider pushing against the ground. The addition of pedals came with another German inventor, Philipp Moritz Fischer, and modified by a French blacksmith/ inventor, Pierre Michaux, both contributing to the development of the modern bicycle. The 1860s brought a variant on the velocipede known as the ‘boneshaker’ (aptly describing the experience for the rider). Nonetheless, with its stronger and malleable metal frames it sparked the first bicycle craze in France which then spread worldwide. By the 1870s the ordinary was state-of-the-art in bikes with its hollow steel tubular frames and forks, steel rims and solid rubber tyres. By now the bike epicentre had crossed the Channel to England and the new standard became the ‘Ariel’ model designed by James Starley of Coventry (uncle of John K Starley), who added centre pivot steering, tangent spokes and a mounting step [‘A Beautifully Illustrated History of Nearly Two Centuries of Bicycle Design and Technology’, (Tony Hadland & Hans-Erhard Lessing), Slate, 22-Jul-2014, www.slate.com; ‘From boneshakers to bicycles’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].

The Drais Laufmaschine, 1817

1890s, the world gone crazy for the bicycle

By the 1890s demand for the new safety bicycle saw mass production take off. The earlier “high rollers” were now past tense. Bikes were now practical and stable vehicles with gears and brakes, the earlier serpentine-shaped frame replaced by a diamond pattern. By the decade’s end most bicycles were only 11 to 16 kg in weight (Britannica). Another technological breakthrough making riding easier for the cyclist came in 1898 when Briton William Reilly invented the prototype for variable gears, a two-speed gear called “The Hub”. Columbus Bicycles in Hartford, Connecticut, could make a bicycle a minute due to the speed of its automated assembly line – a technological innovation later successfully copied by the automobile industry⟴. The transfer of technology from bicycles could be seen in various ways. Both Henry Ford and the Wright brothers started as bike mechanics before making the switch to the invention and production of other, more advanced forms of transport (Smith).

Sturmey-Archer, 3/4-speed gears (Image: www.sturmey-archerheritage.com)

Instrument of freedom and independence
The bicycle gave the masses mobility, it no longer mattered that the less well-off couldn’t afford to travel by horse and carriage…bicycles were affordable, lightweight and easy to maintain. Ordinary folk suddenly were able to explore the countrysides, visit towns and places – far and near. Just about everyone, it seems, got into the act of riding bicycles – royalty and rulers in places like Russia, Zanzibar and Afghanistan took up cycling; First-wave feminists – Susan B Anthony declared that “bicycling emancipated women more than anything else”; women were especially enthusiastic as the activity allowed them to escape their voluminous and cumbersome Victorian skirts for more practical attire such as bloomers. When the lighter, less unwieldy safety bicycles came along, police in the UK were quick to adopt them in their work. Likewise, the NYC police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt mounted the city police on bikes to apprehend the new “public danger” of ‘scorchers’ (“speed demon” cyclists ) (Smith).

Source: Pinterest

The new craze for bicycles got the nod of approval from the US medical fraternity as well…advocated by doctors as “a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality” [David McCullough, The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story Behind the Legend, (2015)].

The conventional explanation for the demise of the bicycle boom is the rise of the commercially-viable automobile, but other factors may have contributed to the bicycle’s decline, such as the rapid growth of the early mass transit systems such as streetcars and trams which were a more practical alternative to bikes, especially in bad weather (Britannica).

1971 Tour de France (Source: Profimedia)

Endnote: in 2020 with the wholesale disruption to international sport due to COVID-19, the world’s premier event in the cycling calendar, the Tour de France was in a very select group of major sporting events given the green light to go ahead as normal, albeit delayed.

Columbia Bicycles, Connecticut (Source: etsy.com)

↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜
❉ the penny farthings were inherently unsafe hence the name applied to Starley’s improved-design bike, the Rover safety bicycle. Also appearing around this time were the tricycle and the unicycle
⌧ it also went by other names, draisienne and vélocipède, and by the derogatory name, “dandy horse”

⟴ Columbia Bicycles got into the business in the 1870s when its proprietor and bike enthusiast Albert A Pope starting importing Excelsoir Duplex ordinaries from England, the manufacturer also formed the League of American Wheelmen to advocate for better roads in American for bicycling – the “Good Road Movement” of the 1890s [‘Albert Augustus Pope’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

Moby-Dick and the Peculiar Pecuniary System of 19th Century Whaling

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics

༒🐳༒

ONE of the many memorable paragraphs of Herman Melville’s classic allegorical work of American fiction, Moby-Dick, is when the narrator/character Ismael speculates on what remuneration he might receive for signing on to the voyage of the whaler Pequod:

❝ I was already aware that in the whaling business they pay no wages; but all hands, including the captain, receive certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company… I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage…what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing ❞.

As Elmo P Hofman elaborated in a 1926 essay, “the whaleman was not paid by day, week or month, nor was he allowed a certain sum of every barrel of oil or for every pound of bone captured” …his earnings came from a “specified fractional share” (a lay) of the net profits of the trip (cited in ‘How Profit Sharing Sent Captain Ahab in Search of Moby Dick, Joseph Thorndike, Forbes, 15-Dec-2015, www.forbes.com). Rather than being wage-earners the entire crew including the skipper were sort of joint shareholders in the commercial venture.

The 1956 film

The experiences of real-life whaling boats of the era of Melville’s novel offers insights into the synchronic system of divvying up the profits – if we look at the profits of the 1843 whaling voyage of the Abigail of New Bedford⚀, it reveals a 70/30 split of the dividends, 70% to the owners and partners and 30% sub-divided between the captain and crew (Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, Karen Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan (1997)). This was pretty typical for the period of what has been described as “an oddly denominated profit-sharing scheme” (‘The Whaleman’s Lay’, Ahab Beckons, 04-Feb-2018, www.ahab-beckons.blogspot.com). A captain might score a lay of ⅛th whereas a ‘green’ hand might only net a ¹⁄₃₅₀th lay or worse, so the novice sea-hand Ismael was perhaps over-optimistic about his likely share (in the novel Ismael is offered an exceptionally long lay which after haggling hard he manages to have reduced to a more acceptable lay of ¹⁄₃₀₀th). So, like the unknowables or “known unknowns” of the stock exchange, a crew member of a whaling vessel engaging in this pelagic industrial arena, even if he knows what lay he had scored, still won’t have any idea of how much he’ll earn for his months and months of hard ship work. Everything hinged on the voyage’s profitability.

Then on top of all this there were deductions from a crew member’s lay when he did finally get the money…anything an ordinary whaleman purchased from the ship’s store during the voyage—tobacco, boots, clothes, etc—was subtracted from his lay. The same if he was given an advance to send to his family. A crew member, especially one with a very long lay, could easily end up in debt to the ship’s owners at voyage’s end (‘Life Aboard’, New Bedford Whaling Museum, www.whalingmuseum.org).

New Bedford Whaling Museum

𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪
⚀ 50 miles south of Boston, from the early 1820s on it supplanted Nantucket as America’s foremost whaling port

Accounting for James Bond’s Enduring Mass Appeal

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Cinema, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Media & Communications, Popular Culture

🇬🇧 🔫 🇬🇧
The phenomena of James Bond in both book and movie form was meant to be purely escapist entertainment, bereft of the slightest pretension that they were anything remotely cerebral. Interesting then that Bond has gleaned so much serious academic enquiry and analysis over the years. A sample of articles on JSTOR reveals a feast of scholarly entries on the subject of James Bond — “Shaken, Not Stirred Britishness: James Bond, Race, and the Transnational Imaginary”, “The Marketable Misogyny of James Bond“, “Paradoxical Masculinity: James Bond, Icon of Failure”, “Why James Bond Villains Prefer Post-Soviet Architecture”, “The Spy Who Loved Globalization”, ”How safe do you feel?: James Bond, Skyfall, and the Politics of the Secret Agent in an Age of Ubiquitous Threat”, and so on it goes.

The James Bond film franchise is certainly sui generis among English-language movie series. October 5 this year marked the 60th anniversary of the introduction of James Bond to cinema screen audiences (Dr No, 1962), and the cinematic sequence remains as yet unbroken, notwithstanding ”the elephant in the room” of last year’s No Time To Die in which the indestructible James Bond actually dies! Virtually all other elongated movie series have ultimately reached a natural (or unnatural) termination point – even the long-running, prolific and increasingly unimaginative Carry On comedy series ran out of steam by the Eighties 🄰.

Ian Fleming ‘Casino Royale’, 1st 007 novel (Image: bondfanevents.com)
°
Box office El Dorado
 Over a six-decade period the 25 movies🄱 constituting the James Bond industry made by Eon Productions (Broccoli and Saltzman’s production company) have earned a total somewhere north of US seven billion dollars. Boosted undoubtedly by the mass popularity of screen Bond🄲 the James Bond spy novels written by former WWII naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming, on which the cinema franchise is based, have themselves racked up sales of more than 60 million copies.

If you came anew to the Bond movies looking for a healthy dose of gritty social realism based on the world of espionage a la John LeCarre, you’d be sadly disappointed. The franchise’s entries are all about fantasy and high-adventure escapism. Unlike the shadowy cloak-and-dagger characters that the real world of spies and secret agents (apparently?) inhabit, James Bond 007 in his public persona is an open book, he doesn’t use a fake name, he doesn’t try to disguise his appearance or furtively hide in dark corners. He’s direct, brash, brutal and recklessly undisciplined in his actions and antics, with a propensity to be easily distracted from the assignment at hand by the happy prospect of a spot of horizontal folk-dancing.

Though wildly successful at the box office over an extraordinarily long shelf life, James Bond is not everyone’s cup of tea. An early critic Judith Crist described the series’ first vehicle Dr No as “an updated comic strip of the Fu Manchu school, fast moving, faster shooting, utterly fantastic”. JB has been pilloried by feminists for his unrepentant chauvinism—especially in Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s interpretations of the character—and four decades of “Bond Girl“ objectification of women. The backlash against JB’s misogyny compelled producers to tone down the blatant sexism in the most recent incarnation of the most famous of all British secret agents played by Daniel Craig. Bond has also been excoriated as a “thug trained to wear a tuxedo”…007’s “license to kill” green-light unleashes the agent’s deep predilection for perpetrating extreme, lethal violence in cold blood.

Predictable Bondery
Then there’s the plots! The storylines are more than fanciful…James Bond’s arch-villains hatch mind-bogglingly ludicrous schemes which suggest that they have been maxing out on the Kool-Aid – such as nuking Fort Knox’s gold reserves; constructing a massive capsule-gobbling rocket to capture the space crafts of both superpowers; detonating explosives along the Californian fault lines to destroy Silicon Valley; ad nauseum. The franchise has also been lambasted for being BORING! Agent 007 has been called out for living “the same story over and over” (Elizabeth Winterhalter). Repetition is a constant motif…we see Bond right on cue rendezvous with a typically crotchety “M” to be briefed on his latest world-rescue mission, flirting with Miss Moneypenny in their regular tête-à-tête ritual, and getting a rundown on the very latest weapon gadgetry from an equally irascible “Q”. In every second scene, just about, JB is pursued by a posse of miscellaneous henchmen only to miraculously escape certain death by the barest of margins every time. The movies almost invariably end in the same formulaic fashion: Bond infiltrates the arch-villain’s impregnable lair, triumphs over the likes of Blofeld and Goldfinger and numerous assorted henchmen, and finishes by bedding his leading lady on an inflatable dingy, in space, a balcony, etc and signing off to “M” with a corny double entendre🄳.

Bond with “Jaws”, larger than life henchman turned ally

°

Cultural relevance to the West
 Some Bondphiles have an altogether different take on this Groundhog Dog trait in James Bond of repeating the same basic plot structure infinitum…they see it as a key ingredient of the franchise’s success: ”the simplicity of the plot arch allows the films to seamlessly transcend and become culturally relevant to the audience” (‘What is the Secret of James Bond’s Eternal Success?’, www.undandy.com). Another explanation of James Bond’s allure contends that the fictional MI6 spy instantly resonated with Western audiences in the climate of the Cold War, being seen as a kind of antidote to the prevailing morass of the social order (especially in the US). 007’s talent as a fixer of “global crises” casts him in the guise of a saviour salvaging the world from an inevitable downward spiral into chaos and discord (‘James Bond and America in the Sixties’, Drew Moniot, JUFA, Vol.28, No.3, 1976). Moniot also attributes JB’s popularity in America to the existence of a vacuum of real-life heroes in 1960s society, the emergence of 007, a mythological hero who was invincible, fulfilled that psychological need at that time.

British Bond and foreign Blofeld

°

Vicarious🄴 charm of the bon vivant lifestyle
 Part of the appeal lies in the character of James Bond. Fleming visualised 007 as fit, sensual, with superior grey matter and a technical wiz, a model of “red-blooded heterosexuality”. He also emphasises Bond’s “Britishness” in the novels, JB’s 100% success rate on missions and in the romance stakes presents Bond as representing the “Best of British”… Fleming’s idea of an antidote to the sad realities of a declining Britain denuded of empire. Leaving aside the ever-present mortal danger to his very existence, Bond leads “a ridiculously good lifestyle (by) any man’s standards”🄵(Undandy), his appearance is akin to a “GQ cover model”; an endless supply of the best alcohol (which the MI6 agent knocks back with worryingly frequency); the best cars (trademark Aston Martin DB5); his apparently irresistible sex appeal to women (‘Bond by rules’, Tim Brayton, 2012, www.alternateending.com). As crime doyen Raymond Chandler neatly put it, “Every man wants to be James Bond and every woman wants to be with him”.

Tropeville central
 Aside from JB’s personal magnetism, the series’ catalogue of recurring tropes helps to cement the franchise’s appeal. Familiar ingredients include the default opening sequence depicting 007 in action through the prism of a gun barrel; over-the-top hi-tech gadgets; a smorgasbord of diverse exotic locations; a brisk cocktail of action stunts (car chases, boat chases, ski pursuits, etc); the centre-stage presence of the Bond Girls and of a megalomaniacal arch-villain mastermind; all eagerly anticipated by James Bond‘s legion of rusted-on fans. Also adding value and lustre to the films are the high quality title-songs – like the utterly unforgettably iconic Goldfinger theme, and not far behind that Shirley Bassey classic, Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, and You Only Live Twice, etc, etc.

Bond, tapping into the zeitgeist of the day
 One (insider) view on the longevity of James Bond comes from those at the helm of the multi-billion dollar franchise today, Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and his step-son Michael Wilson. Broccoli’s heirs attribute the success to the family having managed to keep hold of the franchise’s reins throughout its entire history, and to JB’s and the franchise’s adaptability, 007 being able to change with the times🄶 (‘Why James Bond Has Endured For So Long, According to the Franchise Producer’, Joshua Meyer, Film, 8-Dec-2021, www.slashfilm.com).

Footnote: James Bond, books v films
The early James Bond movies kept pretty faithful to the plots of Ian Fleming’s crime thrillers, however as the series went on, the screen adaptations bore increasingly less resemblance to the novels (eventually everything except the Fleming titles were jettisoned). Other differences relate to the protagonist himself, 007’s proclivity for terminating with extreme prejudice (and without a skerrick of compunction) the various henchmen aligned against him increases tenfold from the books to the movies, as does his appetite for sexual conquests whilst on the job. Another point of departure from the novels for the films is the lack of story continuity from one picture to the next (eg, Bond in a grieving state at his wife’s murder at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service doesn’t get a mention in the follow-up Bond feature).

─═══─═══─═══─═══─═══─═══─

🄰 probably the closest to it is the Star Wars franchise (1977 to the present)

🄱 there was in addition one non-Eon Bond film, Never Say Never Again, a Taliafilm production

🄲 even Bond’s snobbish swipe at the Beatles in Goldfinger at the height of Beatlemania in 1964 didn’t dent his appeal with the public

🄳 with one or two notable exceptions…On Her Majesty’s Secret Service ends with the death of Mrs James Bond and No Time To Die ends with the death of 007 himself

🄴 in creating the overachieving superspy Fleming was in fact acting out his own vicarious impulses…endowing 007 with the sort of ideal, action-man hero lifestyle that the writer dreamt of

🄵 one writer characterised it as “elegant lifestyle porn” (Brayton)

🄶 one example: in the rebooted Skyfall (2012), the film and JB concern themselves with the very real and very contemporary threat of the ubiquity of the internet and cyber-terrorism

Hergé and Tintin, the Turbulent Afterlife of a Legendary Comic Strip

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Cinema, Creative Writing, Memorabilia, Popular Culture

Mention the topic of classic European comic strips and the names Astérix and Tintin spring instantly to mind. Previously I delved into the stupendous comic book institution that is Astérix the Gaul in the blog ‘The Astérix Series: High Comic Art with a Few Dark Shadows’ (19 November 2022). The Tintin comic strip shares with Astérix the same high pedestal of best-selling popularity, enduring iconic status and attendant cult following. Tintin is a boy reporter❶ of unspecified age with a distinctive (carrot) blond quiff of hair and trademark plus-fours who embarks on numerous adventures to exotic locations accompanied by his companions: a white wire fox terrier Snowy (Fr: Milou), Captain Haddock the good-hearted dipsomaniac seafarer and Professor Calculus, a genius if absent-minded inventor. Since the publication of the first Tintin comic book in 1929 total sales of Tintin books have clocked up more than 200 million copies, with an appeal that reaches both adults and children❷.

Hergé with a cinematic clone of his fictional boy hero
࿏

Graphical style
Tintin’s creator wrote and published under the name of Hergé (real name: Georges Remi)…the Belgian cartoonist pioneered a distinctive drawing style for comic strips which later became known as Ligne claire (“Clear line”) (coined by Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte in 1977). This comprises ”uniform strong lines, flat saturated colour” and “clearly delineated shapes and volumes” (‘The Afterlife of Tintin’, Jenny Hendrix, LA Review of Books, 27-Dec-2022, www.lareviewofbooks.org).

Blighted by propaganda, racism and chauvinism
Tintin was instantly and massively popular right from the cartoon’s onset—boosted by Hergé’s innovative use of speech bubbles, an American invention unfamiliar to the European comic scene at the time—despite this the comic has garnered its fair share of flak as has Hergé, the author. The first three books, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America, in particular drew the ire of critics. The first with its unsubtle anti-communist message was much disparaged as “cheap right-wing propaganda for small children” (Harry Thompson, Hergé: Tintin and his Creator (2011). The Congo and America books were pilloried in some circles for blatantly racist depictions of native populations. The youthful Hergé, swayed by a conservative Catholic upbringing, was very much a creature of the time and his crude depictions of the Black African tribes in particular reflected a prevailing Eurocentric sense of superiority and prejudice. Tintin Au Congo praises the virtues of colonialism and missionaries and expresses a wholly patronising view of the local Africans who are portrayed as primitive, lazy and infantile❸ (‘Hergé’, Lambiek Comiclopedia, www.lambiek.net). Another criticism of the Tintin comics is the charge of sexism, women are almost completely erased from the stories – the one female figure with anything like a steady presence in the books is operatic diva Bianca Castafiore who is portrayed unflatteringly as foolish and imperceptive (Hergé pointedly is on record as saying women have no part in the stories which “are all about male friendship”).

In the early Sixties there were 2 French-made film adaptations of Tintin
࿏
Other discordant voices against Tintin’s author surfaced during the Nazi occupation of Belgium during WWII. Hergé worked for collaborationist pro-Nazi newspapers Le Petit Vingtième and Le Soir and elements of Anti-Semitism emerged in his presentation of Jews. Unfortunately it didn’t end with the war, Jewish racial stereotypes also reappear in postwar Tintin stories, eg, Vol 714 pour Sydney (‘Flight 714 to Sydney’).
A parody by Belgian cartoonist Dubus depicting a captive Tintin begging businessman Rodwell for his liberty (Source: Sydney Morning Herald)
࿏

”Kidnapping” a children’s icon?
Since Hergé’s death in 1983 Tintin’s artistic providence and the author’s estate has been rigidly controlled to the nth degree by his widow Fanny Vlamynck and her second husband Nick Rodwell. Hergé’s heirs through their management firm Moulinsart S.A. Moulinsart spearheaded by an unflinching Rodwell have obsessively pursued a crusade, suing everybody who uses Hergé or Tintin’s name or image without their permission. Not content with cracking down on bootleggers, plagiarists and copyright infringers, perversely they have targeted Tintin parodists, students, collectors, fan clubs, comic stores and people auctioning original artwork as well. They even tried to block journalists from taking unauthorised photographs at the Hergé Museum opening event (Lambiek). Individuals subjected to Moulinsart’s trigger-quick lawsuits include a French novelist who reproduced a drawing of Tintin in a book with a print run of only 200 copies and an elderly artist (and friend of Hergé) who painted the image of Tintin on some old bottles (‘Meet Nick Rodwell, Tintin heir and least popular man in Belgium’, Julien Oeuillet, Sydney Morning Herald, 30-Oct-2015, www.smh.com.au). Bart Beaty, a professor of comics at the University of Calgary, described Moulinsart as being “relentless in the protection of the Tintin copyrights even to the point of discouraging academic study of the Tintin books” (‘Moulinsart Lost A Legal Case At The Hague Over Tintin Rights’, Comics Reporter, 08-Jun-2025, www.comicsreporter.com). Other detractors including Hergé’s nephew have pointed out how under Moulinsart‘s direction “a hero dedicated to children has become the lynchpin of a profit-minded machine that is stifling the enthusiasm of Tintin admirers“ (‘Fans of Tintin cry foul’, Stanley Pignal, Financial Times, 08-May-2010, www.ft.com).

Moulinsart have mined the full depths of Tintin’s merchandising potential, many spin-off items priced at the luxury high-end

Genootschap (Source: www.hergegenootschap.nl/)
࿏
A small win for Tintinphiles and Tintinologists
The pattern shifted a few years ago when Moulinsart and Rodwell’s attempt to prosecute a small Dutch fanzine of Tintin Hergé Genootschap (Hergé Society (or Fellowship)) for including Hergé’s strip in its newsletter backfired badly❹. In a surprise twist a Dutch court in 2015 ruled that a 1942 contract between Hergé and his publisher Ediciones Casterman presented by the defence gave Casterman, NOT Moulinsart, the rights to publish the 22 Tintin albums. The right “to exploit extracts of the books and pictures” however still belong to the Hergé heirs (‘Tintin and the Copyright Mystery, Carolina Sánchez, Lady Trademark, 06-Oct-2015, www.ladytrademark.blogspot.com).
Fmr Australian prime minster Kevin Rudd satirised as Tintin

Endnote: Imitating Tintin
Parodies and pastiches satirising Tintin have been around since the 1940s. When Hergé compromised his reputation by publishing (Tintin) in a collaborationist-run Belgium newspaper” in war-time, it provoked a satire of Tintin, ‘Tintin au Pays des Nazis’ (‘Tintin in the Land of the Nazis’). Other parodies featuring Tintin include as a disaffected working class English youth who turns to political radicalism; ‘Tintin in Lebanon’ and ‘Tintin in Iraq’, embroiling Hergé’s “golden boy” in the intractable maze of Middle East conflicts; ‘Tintin in The Shire’, Tintin as a stereotypical Sydney bogan, etc.❺

≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖

❶ though he acts more like a detective, investigating crimes and mysteries and at times carries a pistol and even makes arrests

❷ according to Tintin’s publishing house the books are marketed for “the youth between 7 and 77 years old” demographic

❸ to his credit Hergé did redress some of the crude and xenophobic representations of the earlier books in Le Lotus Bleu (‘The Blue Lotus’, 1934-35) in which Hergé depicts China and the Chinese people with more accuracy and evenness (Lambiek)

❹ Rodwell’s attempt to sue a French artist who did mash-ups of Tintin and Edward Hopper paintings was also thrown out of court with the judge determining that the artist’s works were legitimate parodies of Tintin which was fair game

❺ “most of these parodies would probably have remained obscure curiosities, if it weren’t for Moulinsart’s active attempts to hunt the makers down, giving them more publicity” (Lambiek)