Tintin's Safari Massacre

I've been meaning to expose my Frenchie roots a little more, and a quote on Journalista today set me off. Quoth 19-year-old Tanya Ashreena: “I like Tintin and Asterix because they’re action packed but, there’s less violence. Superhero comics with their bloodthirsty, mad brutishness don’t make any sense.” I completely agree, mind you, the violence in never gory and even cartoony without sacrificing any of the excitement.

HOWEVER!

Tintin au Congo, the first widely released album (the primitive Tintin chez les Soviets only released later almost as an oddity), has an incredibly high body count. Mostly animals, but Tintin as Great White Hunter is sometimes seen as an embarrassment today. The thoroughly colonial view of Dark Africa has led people to say that Hergé was a racist, but I don't want to get into that arena of debate.

No, I'm just here to showcase Tintin's blatant disregard for animal life, endangered or no. In the course of 64 pages he...

Hurts a shark's bread and butter:
Makes a crocodile cry:
Massacres a herd of antelope (by mistake - oops!):
Shoots and skins a chimp:
Kicks another in the face (Chris Sims, take note):
Has his dog rip the tail off a lion:
Shoots a snake in the face:
Has his priest kill four crocs (cuz sometimes making them cry isn't enough):
Cuts his dog out of a live boa, then makes it eat itself:
Makes a leopard eat a sponge, then drink water, probably killing the animal:
Poaches ivory:
If you think this is just a costume, look at the chimp sequence again. Right, add a giraffe to the body count:
Kills a water buffalo:
And most horrible of all, blows up a rhinoceros:
Have you read this one, Tanya? ;-)