Carl Barks, Tintin and Betty Boop

What can I say about those three subjects? They're all interesting in a variety of ways. To the point where I'm not even sure where to begin. I'll start with Betty Boop. When I was young, I had a Betty Boop doll that I would carry around with me everywhere. I think I actually watched some of the animations. I must have since I was such a big fan of her. But as usual, I never noticed all of what was going on when I was that age. Now that we've rewatched some of it, I've got to say one thing: Wow. Betty Boop is very dark! I never noticed it before. It's definitely more mature than I thought it was. For one thing, the song that the ghost sings to her. "Minnie the Moocher." I've heard that song in multiple places. While with Oingo Boingo, Danny Elfman uses it in "The Forbidden Zone". During that time, he is playing Satan and sings that song. The film was in 1980 although I didn't discover that the movie even existed until my roommate watched it a week ago. Where I'd heard the song the first time was in Family Guy's "Blue Harvest", their spoof on Star Wars. As Peter (as Han Solo) and Chris (as Luke) try to sneak onto the death star. It's amazing how much one song and reference can get around. I owe it to Betty Boop for bringing it up again so I could research it out of my curiosity.

Just like Betty Boop, I knew about Carl Barks when I was younger too. I was a huge Disney fan and Donald Duck was great. I read a story that was composed of eight pages called "Gyro Gearloose in Grandma's Present". It's about Gyro, and inventor. He goes to 'grandma's' farm to board for the Christmas vacation, hoping to get away from inventing. But in the end he creates a machine that can use dirt to produce anything on the farm. So nothing would be needed. No use for pigs, cows, anything. It was pretty interesting. I'd seen him in the old television shows and decided to read about him. It was pretty interesting to read. I noticed that the color palet was rather limited. Every single panel on all eight pages had a blue background. Whether it was sky or a wall, it was blue. And the ground was always white or yellow. If it's inside, the color is white. If outside, it's yellow. It was printed in 1956, so it's not a surprise that the color palette is minimal. It seems like that comic is generated to a much younger audience. It has easier concepts to grasp.

Then look at "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets". Children would not be the general audience for that. They could read it, but they probably wouldn't understand it. Unless you were actually in the time when Tintin was printed, because then the Soviet Union would be a current issue for you. But by the time I would have read this as a kid, I wouldn't have understood it. The comic is set up by Tintin trying to get to Moscow. But the Soviet police keep trying to stop him. He's put in jail, a torture chamber and more. Each time, he escapes and runs away. He puts on a number of disguises and gets hurt quite a few times. He gets in a car crash, he gets beaten up, and yet he always seems perfectly fine just in time for the next accident. He finds stolen goods that Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky had been gaining and tries to get back to Berlin to let the press know. The secret police still tries to stop him before he can get it out, but he manages to get back to Berlin. It's definitely something I wouldn't understand if I had read this before. And I have read it before too. When I was a student ambassador in France in 2005, I stayed with this family for three days and they had Tintin's comics in their house so I read them. And I wasn't fluent in French, but I knew enough to understand the gist of what was going on. I'm not sure which one I read, but I think it might have been Tintin in Thailand. But overall I find the comic a very interesting read.

It's amazing how each time I read a comic in this class, I understand it more than I ever could have when I read it previously. It seems like all comics are much more mature and sophisticated than I noticed.