Back in 2016, when I still had time to blog, Tuomas Kaila and I did a prank post about a suppressed Tintin comic book in which the hero works as a Nazi collaborator in occupied Belgium. It brought in a few new readers, and more importantly, served as a prelude to a more serious post titled Tintin, Hollywood, and Fascism.

Imagine my surprise when YouTube recommended me a video, with close to 700k views in five days, featuring one of my own crude photoshops in its thumbnail: “Tintin in the Land of the Nazis: Was Hergé A Wartime Collaborator?“

The video, by military historian Mark Felton, shows my silly illustration each time it mentions a certain Tintin parody — from 1944, published by a resistance newspaper. Fascinating stuff that led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. (Did you know there’s a whole Wikipedia page for Tintin parodies? And an entire series of bawdy Tintins created by someone in my native Finland under the pen name “Herpé”?)

I had in fact lifted the background for the image from a bizarre Christian propaganda comic from the 1970s called Hansi — The Girl Who Loved the Swastika. That’s a whole nother thing, though coincidentally, fits some of the themes discussed in both Felton’s video and the two posts Tuomas and I wrote back in 2016.

Not sure if a decade after publication our prank post pranked someone’s intern, but I don’t mind the use of the picture (it’s half-stolen already). I might have more of a qualm with the video’s description of Tintin in the Congo as merely “…very much of its time and quite controversial today.”

Mark Felton Productions describes itself as a “STRICTLY NON-POLITICAL” history channel, in all-caps, which fits. Our essays from 2016 might in fact help explain what I think is the problem with that.

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[Related articles:
Ten Thousand Thundering Typhoons! “Kommandant Tintin and the Concentration Camp Mystery”?
Tintin, Hollywood, and Fascism]