Tin Tin - The Brave Reporter

I’ve been asking this question to myself for a long time. Why still none of the “Tin Tin” books are available for Tamil market? We’ll come to this discussion at the end of the article as of now; let’s have a look on the history of Tin Tin series.

Undoubtedly “Tin Tin” is one best piece of work by Hergé, consist of 24 issues. 24th issue published after posthumously.

First Tin Tin stories are published in French in Le Vingtième Siècle on 10 January 1929 on a Belgian news paper. It’s been almost 80 years, but still you can’t find a single book store without Tin Tin books. These books have been translated into more than fifty languages and more than 200 Million copies sold as of today.

You can read more trivia about Tin Tin in Wikipedia.

One of the main reasons why these books are huge success is because of the main character and supporting characters.

Tin Tin is the hero of the series and a young, energetic, fearless, teen Belgian reporter. He looks deep into the peculiar matters and his investigative journalism leads to troubles. His four leg companion is Snowy.

No wonder many people are obsessed by this character. I used to call my dog “Snowy”, even though it’s a black Pomeranian. I used to imitate Tin Tin’s hair style when I was in school and tried to convince my friends that I was having a hair style just like Tin Tin.

There are more supporting characters. One notable character is “Captain Haddock”. He is a person easily getting annoyed on things, and his anger lets him do silly stuffs and ultimately end up giving giggles to the readers.

Another peculiar character is Professor Calculus. His inventions are real awesome such as the rocket used by Tin Tin and crew to land on moon, Shark shape submarine, etc. Throughout the series he brings up his inventions. I don’t have to tell you how funny it’ll be with a absent minded professor who can hardly hear others.

If I don’t talk about “Thomson and Thomson” then Tin Tin fan would hang me. Thomson and Thomson are identical detectives, who come to investigate but end up screwing the whole scene. You can differentiate them only by the shape of their mustache. Though they look identical, book never revealed anything personal about these detectives; therefore we don’t know whether these two are brothers or twins.

English translation of these books started in 1956 and it was a tedious project. Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner, who worked closely with Hergé to attain an accurate translation as true as possible to the original work. The works were also sold in the American market by Golden Books, a branch of the Western Publishing Company in the 1950s.

The albums were translated from French into American English with some blocks blanked except for the speech balloons. This was done to remove content considered to be inappropriate for children, such as drunkenness and free mixing of races. We can find blank balloons in Tin Tin books just because of these reasons. Anyway later British lads also translated this book into British English.

Now Stephen Spielberg is saddling up to make a Tin Tin animation movie.

Tin Tin in Tamil

Ok, now come to the point. I can find in net that Tin Tin books are published in Hindi. Also in Sri Lanka Tin Tin books are published in Sinhalese too. I’m just wondering why still we don’t have Tin Tin books in Tamil.



If we have it in Tamil, I’m sure Tamil kids will enjoy it and when they come to the age of 40s or 50s they can tell their grand children a story on how they read these books.

I personally don’t like these books to be published in Tamil with some poor quality. I know the translation will be met with the resources we have but when it comes to quality of the papers, it’ll be such a disappointment.

Most of us are used to read Tamil comics on poor paperback copies. I hope things will change sooner or later and we’ll get to read Tin Tin in Tamil. If someone publishes the book for Sinhalese market, which is 1/5 of Tamil market then, why not Tamil???


Meet you again in next post, bye bye addicts.