Tintin and Corto Maltese: The European Adventurer Meets the Colonial Other

The Tintin and Corto Maltese series are among the most famous European adventure comics. The adventure genre – both in novels and comics – is deeply related to nineteenth-century colonialism. This article compares the ways in which colonialism and the relationship to the colonial Other appear in Hergé’s and Pratt’s creations, focusing on Tintin and Corto Maltese’s adventures in Africa and Latin America. The comparison between Tintin and Corto shows that although Hergé developed an ambivalent view of European colonialism, Eurocentrism is constant through all his work. Pratt’s Corto, in contrast, shows a more critical, though ambiguous, view of colonialism, and a more egalitarian, though also ambivalent, conceptualisation of the colonial Other.