When Tintin entered the Cold War
In 1954, the Cold War was not even a decade old, and its imprint on pop culture in the form of the spy thriller was still in its infancy.
Ian Fleming had published the first James Bond novel a year prior, but in postwar film and TV, producers were mostly looking for escapist entertainments and historical epics that got as far from the political zeitgeist as possible. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when Bond broke into cinemas and The Man from UNCLE hit TV screens, that spies became cool, and the nuclear-powered struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union started to be truly mined for mass entertainment.
But one clean-cut pop-culture hero didn’t waste time diving into this conflict, and he did it in the pages of a French-language magazine for kids. In December 1954, the boy reporter Tintin embarked on an adventure that had all the hallmarks of a classic spy thriller: The Calculus Affair. It would take him into the heart of the Cold War, and embroil him in a secret struggle for the plans to a deadly superweapon.
This wasn’t entirely new ground for Tintin. Unlike most other comic strip heroes of the mid-20th century, Tintin operated in a world based in geopolitical reality; he was ostensibly a journalist, after all, and his creator, the Belgian artist Hergé, loved to take inspiration from the headlines. In the 1930s, The Blue Lotus took Tintin to China in the midst of Manchuria’s invasion by Japan, while King Ottakar’s Scepter foreshadowed the start of World War II as Tintin helped defend Syldavia, a fictional Balkan state, against the expansionism of its fascist neighbor, Borduria.
But by the mid-’50s, both Tintin and Hergé were in a different place. Tintin’s strip had moved from the pages of a Belgian
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