Tintin and Asterix go dark-n-gritty

Cafe Society
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In the late seventies and eighties, there was a shift in US comic books to go for more “mature” themes, but still using that goofiest of characters: the Super hero. It was considered a necessary step to keep characters that had been there for a loooong time still pertinent to the times. It was considered edgier and sharper, troubled times called for troubled heroes.
In Europe, while there were actual comic books that could be called dark-n-gritty, those were in series that were conceived that way from the start, they did not reuse established characters with a traditional lighter tone and pushed them into the dark. But, I wonder, what if ?
What if the two biggest household names in European comics, had been repackaged and rebooted in a dark-n-gritty way.

I am talking about Tintin and Asterix.

What would be your take on a dark-n-gritty Tintin or Asterix? What would the stories (either new ones, or well known stories but retold in such a way) or the characters be? What would that look like?

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Well of course, a darker, grittier Tintin would look something like this.

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I used to love TinTin but was never a big fan of Asterix.

4

Tintin is an antique, Asterix’s writer is dead although the artist and editor still crank out albums.

You should check out the current vast underground culture comics (“bande dessinee” ) in France and especially Belgium. Stemming from a long tradition, awesome art is made there currently, and the best stuff is translated in English. From extremely dark to very light and everything in between.

Some stuff I like that is translated is below. Not really everyday gritty, but still very dark.
Le Tendre and Loisel make a great team. Their six part series on Peter Pan is the grittiest, saddest, gruesomest and most beautiful you will ever read. I also like their series " Quest for the time bird".

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Those look interesting, Maastricht. Thanks for bringing them to my attention.

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::faint::

7

Is it just me or does that look like it’s from the very bottom of the uncanny valley?

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Just you, I 'spect. It looks like they struck a great balance between “realistic” 3D modelling and being faithful to the original character designs (Though I think I like just about every character’s look better than Tin Tin himself’s. I understand why, though - if they tried to stick as close for him, he’d end up looking just like one of those douchebags that are walking around with kewpie doll hairstyles lately.)

9

Not just you. Motion capture like the upcoming Tintin movie and The Polar Express always seems vaguely unsettling to me.

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Tintin. Spielberg. 3-D. The end is near.

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Woo Hoo! Thank you, Spoke! That’s the first I’d heard or seen of this! I’m definitely gonna want to see that in a theater! (But…I probably won’t pay extra for the 3-D effect. Not my cuppa…)

Tintin and Asterix are two of my very, very faves. (Anyone else here fond of Lucky Luke? Or, to get nice and obscure, Valerian, Spatio-Temporal Agent?)

(National Lampoon – “back when it used to be funny” – did a poisonously wicked parody of Tintin, which ends with him pressing “the button” to launch nuclear missiles into Beirut…)

For my part, I don’t want these icons of my late-blooming youth “updated” to a 21st century aesthetic. Instead, I think they belong “in their time,” even if that time never really existed. Like Disney’s “TaleSpin,” Tintin lives in a ghost of the 'tween-wars era, a time when people and technology lived in a closer balance than ever before or since.

(A WWI airplane would fall apart before the pilot did. A modern jet pilot will fall apart before his plane will! But for a brief period of time, the Hurricane and Mustang and Zero and Messerschmidt era, the planes and the pilots were roughly equal before the laws of physics.)

Sure, real adventure exists today. And, sure, the Tintin books are just as much fantasy as, say, the Tarzan books. The stories Herge told were fables. The two “Voyage to the Moon” books are science-fantasy…and some of the best sf ever written…but they are still fables. (Imagine a real astronaut getting drunk on duty… Ah, Captain Haddock!)

Herge was also wise enough to gloss over WWII. It basically “doesn’t happen” in the series.

re Asterix, was the live action version, ten or twenty years ago, any good? I never saw it…

Trinopus

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That’s a great way to describe it! But I don’t see what Jacksberg have done wrong. They do seem to have captured the aesthetic: what was new then seems quaint now, but just as cool for different reasons. And I’m glad this is being done now, with adequate technology. I cringe to think of a live-action version with probably Mickey Rooney playing Tintin, and everyone clumping around in hokey costumes and Snowy having to be filmed separately. Here, the motion capture makes it look like the original drawings. And the voice casting is spot-on. Cannot wait!