September 30, 2025 • 41 mins
Millions of readers have been captivated by the adventures of Tintin, a swoopy-haired young journalist who races around the world with his little dog, Snowy. But it turns out the story behind the stories is just as interesting! Today Mango and Gabe bring you part one of our two-part dive into all things Tintin. We’ll meet the failed characters who served as prototypes (shout out Totor and Flup!), and we’ll discover how Tintin’s creator, Hergé, became more open-minded about other cultures… all thanks to a friendly art student. Tune in next week for part two!
Got a question you’d like us to answer? A rabbit hole you think we should explore? Email higeniuses@gmail.com or leave us a message at (302) 405-5925.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
You're listening to Part Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Guess what gave?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
What's that Mango?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
So in nineteen seventy two, a sixty five year old
Belgian walks into Andy Warhol's factory in New York City.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Okay, this sounds like the setup for a really bad joke.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
I know, I promise it is not. It was actually
a historic meeting of two art world greats. So we've
got Andy Warhol and Air Jay, the creator of Tintin.
And while he's best known for his comic books starring
the boy Reporter of tinton and his faithful dog Snowy,
air Jay was also a highly knowledgeable art enthusiast and
modern art collector, and so when he traveled to the
(01:01):
US meeting, Warhol was actually on his bucket list. And
it turns out they had a ton in common. They
both did commercial illustrations early in their careers, and they
both kept plugging away until they achieved global success.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
That's interesting, but honestly, I'm just enjoying the picturing this,
like old Belgian guy hanging out in the factory with Warhol.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yeah. Well, apparently the two artists hit it off because
in nineteen seventy nine, air Jay asked Warhol to paint
his portrait, which he did, making a set of four
paintings similar as the ones you know you've seen of
Marilyn Monroe, and Warhol later explained that the admiration actually
went both ways. He said, quote, air Jay has influenced
my work in the same way as Walt Disney. For me,
(01:42):
Airjay was more than a comic strip artist.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Honestly, I had no idea. I never would have guessed
Andy Warhol was a Tintin fan.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, and he is not alone. The books are incredibly popular,
especially outside the US, so worldwide. Tintin books or albums
as those fans like to call them, have sold more
than two hundred and seventy million copies and have been
translated into more than one hundred languages, and even today,
between one point five to two million Tintin books are
(02:10):
sold per year.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
We throw around a lot of numbers on the show,
but two million books. That's insane, it really is.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
But like so many books from the nineteen thirties and forties,
not everything has aged well. And Airje himself has this
really fascinating and complicated biography. It spans everything from war
to boy Scouts, to cultural stereotypes to overcoming cultural stereotypes,
and also Will diffit to strange nightmares Steven Spielberg, and
(02:37):
of course that eternal question do comic books turn kids
into juvenile? The linquits, which I'm sure you have some
thoughts on. So there is so much to cover that
we've actually turned the story of Tintin into a two parter,
So let's dive in. Hey there, podcast listener as well,
(03:14):
and a part time genius, I'm monga shittig and because
Will is traveling this week, I'm here with my fellow
Tintin fan, Gabe Lucier. And over there in the booth
is uh gay? Where's Dylan? Uh?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Hang on, there's a There's a note taped under the microphone.
It says, gone adventuring with my faithful dog, love Dylan.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I'm not sure who's recording this episode, but I always
love Dylan's enthusiasm.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I guess he heard we were doing an episode on
Tintin and decided to, you know, really lean into it.
Dylan is always leaning in, as you know, speaking of which,
this is one of those episodes that we've had on
our Brainstorm list for a long time, and it's finally here,
and it's all because of you, honestly, because you were
obsessed with Tintin as a kid, Is that right.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah. So, as a kid, we didn't have many relatives
in the States, and so to see my grandparents, my mom,
my sister, and I would go to India anytime we
could afford it. And it was always during the summer,
and that was super fun. But if you go to
India in the summer, you quickly realized that that is
the monsoon season there, and it's also when your cousins
(04:23):
returned to school, and so you're kind of stuck inside
all day it's raining, and so, like, I ended up
getting good at things that are indoor games, like cards
or karm, which is like a cool game you play
with your fingers. I used to play karam and scrabble
with my grandparents, and I would wait for my cousins
to come home and I would read comic books and
(04:44):
it was amazing because like, actually, you would love this.
My cousin had like early Captain Americas and Spider Man's.
I'm sure there were reprints or whatever, but it was
so fun to read and we'd read mystery books and
then I discovered Tintin and it kind of played to
everything I loved, right, Like I love dogs, I love journalism,
I love traveling, I like stories about spies and intrigue,
(05:07):
like learning about the world, and it all shows up
in those panels, right. It was just amazing that you
could open these albums and be transported. And it's also
one of the things like not that many kids in
the States knew about tinton Like I think there were
some cartoons that appeared on Nickelodeon or something at one point,
but most of my friends growing up in Delaware had
(05:29):
no idea what I was talking about. And so, actually,
I know you're a huge comics enthusiast. I'm curious, did
you ever read Tintin?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Not As a kid, my first introduction was that cartoon
you mentioned, The Adventures of Tintin. It aired on HBO
and then Nickelodeon back in the early nineties. And the
funny thing is my family didn't have cable, so it
was something I only got to watch when we went
on vacation, but that just made it more special. Like
I remember this one trip to the beach where my
(05:57):
mom got super annoyed with me because I didn't want
to go outside. I just wanted to stay in the
hotel room and watch Tintin. And I did eventually circle
back to the books in college, you know, and I
was really happy to see that the show was actually,
you know, incredibly faithful to the books. But hearing you
(06:18):
talk about Tintin, it's so clear that these books really
pulled you into their world in a special way and
became part of your world too, And it takes a
pretty special artist to do that. And in fact, he's
so special that he went by just one name.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I know. It is so rockstar, right, like very Madonna,
very Prince very Air, Jay.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Very Erga. Yes, but I did some research into his
early years so I can tell you that, unlike Madonna
and Prince Air, Jay was not born Aja. He was
born George Remi in nineteen oh seven in Brussels, and
the pen name he chose Jay is actually his initials
GR for George Remi in reverse RG and RG pronounced
(07:05):
in French is J. I'm sure sounds so much cooler
than Rgie. But I, you know, just think about it
for my own name. I'm wondering about switching to the
nome to plume. Hm, what do you think you'd probably
get mistaken for a chain of Swedish fast fashion stores.
Familiar if it makes you feel better, it wouldn't work
(07:27):
for me either, so gl backwards LG. That's an appliance.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
So we'll just have to stick with our own name.
So tell me about young Airj's life then.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Well, surprisingly enough, he did not come from an artistic family.
His mom stayed home to take care of him and
his younger brother Paul. His dad worked in a candy factory,
and the family was solidly lower middle class. That said,
there's actually a bit of lore around Airj's grandfather. So's
dad had an identical twin brother, and growing up, the
(08:00):
twins never knew who their father was. And that's because apparently,
as a young single woman, Airjay's grandmother worked as a
maid at a countess's chateau. Then suddenly one day she
was pregnant with twin boys. So a lot of people,
including at one point Aga himself, believed she may have
had an affair with someone higher up, you know, someone
(08:22):
really wealthy or maybe even a noble.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
So is there any evidence to support that or is
this just kind of like wishful thinking that he's royal.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Well, there is one interesting clue. After the twins were born,
the countess more or less treated them as her own
and she let the family live at the chateau until
the boys were fourteen, after which she kicked them out.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So she might have felt some sort of responsibility to them, yeah,
or you.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Know, maybe she was just a decent person and felt
bad for a single mom of twins. But the family
legend was that the twins' father, who would be air
Jay's grandfather, was actually Belgium's King Leopold the Second, who
ruled the country from eighteen thirty five to nineteen oh nine.
Now that's not substantiated, but it was something the family
(09:09):
liked to toss around in private. And the other rumor
is that the Countess's husband, the count, you know, he
may have been the father.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
So I guess potentially a mysterious and royal background, which
I guess a little DNA testing could actually figure out today.
But between the royal rumors, a father who worked in
a literal candy factory, it sounds like a really exciting life.
So to tell me a little bit about Airjay's childhood
was it fun.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Actually the opposite. Airja described his childhood. Yeah, Airja described
his childhood as quote gray and uneventful, and one of
his biographers, Pierre Assoline wrote, quote everything was colorless, scentless,
tasteless and of no interest. In the Remi home. There
(09:56):
was no one to admire, no books to read, no
play to attend, no discussions. And you know that is
a little bit of an exaggeration because Airje did have
books and movies that he loved as a kid, and
his parents did encourage his drawing, but overall art and
culture wasn't really a focus in his family.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, and it sounds like not a childhood he sort
of was nostalgic for. So did he always have an
interest in illustration or was this something that came later
in life.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
No, he showed an aptitude in it from an early age.
His school notebooks were filled with sketches, and when he
got a bit older, like high school age, his parents
enrolled him in art classes, though apparently he only lasted
a day before dropping out because the focus was on
technical skills like drawing Greek columns, and you know, he
had zero interest in that.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
That is funny that he loves to draw, but he
won't like sit around to drug column Oh.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, not columns. You got to draw the line somewhere.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Well. I do know that in addition to drawing, there
was another excitement in his life, and that is the
Boy Scouts. Airjay joined them when he was about eleven
years old, and he really connected the Scouts. He described
it as the first color he remembers about his childhood,
which I guess goes back to that gray comment you mentioned.
And the Boy Scouts opened his eyes to this bigger world.
(11:16):
And for example, during the summers, they'd go to camps
around western Europe where they do things like hike two
hundred miles across the Pyrenees, and Airjay loved it so
much that he eventually became an Eagle Scout and a
troop leader, and he remained a Scout until he was
in his twenties. But the Scouts gave him something else,
even more important to this story. They gave him his
(11:38):
very first platform for his art. He published his first
illustrations in a monthly Boy Scout magazine when he was
around fifteen years old, and a few years later, in
nineteen twenty six, the magazine published Airjay's first serialized comic strip.
It was called The Adventures of Totor CP of the
June Bugs. Totor is a Belgian boy scout and in
(12:00):
the comic, he travels to Texas to visit his aunt
and his uncle, and when he is there, he's captured
by angry Native Americans who he outwits. He also outwits
bandits and he finds buried treasure, and so there is
a lot of excitement.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Got it. So sounds like maybe Totor was kind of
the prototype for Tintin.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
That is an excellent guest, Gabe, and I'm going to
tell you all about how Airjay's passion for art and
scouting turned into the Tintin we know today. But first
let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part time Genius.
(12:48):
We're talking all things Tintin. So let me set the scene, Gabe.
It is nineteen twenties Belgium. Airj is scouting and trying
to figure out what to do with his life. By
this time, he's graduated from high school and he's working
in the subscriptions department at this newspaper called Levutm Siecla,
which means the twentieth century. And this was a Catholic
(13:09):
newspaper run by father Norbert Wala. It was a right
wing paper, to put it mildly, and father Wala actually
kept a photo of Mussolini on his desk if you
want to know his politics.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yi, yeah, that's never a good sign. But okay, from
what I've read though, you know, that was kind of
the norm in Belgium after World War One.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Right, yeah, Belgium was a very conservative and very Catholic country.
One of Airj's biographers said that right wing politics were
an almost inevitable byproduct of that time. So by working there,
Airja wasn't exactly taking a political stance, at least explicitly.
It was more this job that he was excited to
have and it was better than working at his father's store.
(13:53):
And by nineteen twenty eight, a couple of years after
Totor appears in the Boy Scott magazine, Airja had managed
to make his way out of the subscription department and
into illustrations. Mostly that meant drawing women's clothes and things
like that for the magazine, but he was making a living,
and more importantly, Father Walla had taken a real liking
to him, so he asked Erj to illustrate the new
(14:14):
weekly children's supplement that he's planning to.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Start, which I'm sure he just jumped at right.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Definitely, because in November of that year the Extraordinary Adventures
of Flup Nnesse who set a Hits newspaper stands.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
That is some truly masterful French. I have to say,
I know.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I feel so embarrass every time we do any French
or any other language, unless it's kunkany, I'm not going
to speak it properly. And I also love the word
flop in that cartoon. That sounds really grad But the
comic was actually universally considered a dud. Part of the
problem is that it was written by the paper sports
reporter and he wasn't much of a writer. The story
(14:57):
is super simple, it is plotting. It's about three kids,
an inflatable rubber pig and their accidental trip to Africa,
which is you know, overwhelming with stereotypes and of course
caricatures as well. Now Urja did the illustrations, but they
aren't particularly inspired either. One of the issues was that
in Belgium at the time and most of Europe, cartoons
(15:18):
didn't use speech bubbles. This was actually an American innovation.
So to tell the story, there's been a lot of
text as captions and then drawings to accompany it.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
So none of this boat's well for Flupin Friends long term.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Yeah, flup and Friends would have been a better name
for that cartoon, but you are right. The strip ends
after ten weeks. But this is where air Jay's fortunes turn.
So Father Waile asked him to draw a new comic
featuring a more totor like adolescent boy along with his dog.
And he wants something wholesome, right, something that portrays good
(15:54):
Catholic virtues, and he wants it with American speech bubbles.
So air Jay is excited and he gets to work
right away, and in early nineteen twenty nine the first
actual Tintin strips come out, and it's the beginning of
what would become Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Aha, our hero is born. And I imagine the choice
of Russia for that adventure like that had to be purposeful,
right it was.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
It was also Father Wala's idea. Father Walla wanted to
show young Belgian readers basically how bad communism was. So
Tintin has all these like very explicitly anti communist lines
where he says things like those factories are running a
bit too well, let's see, and then he looks under
it and it's like great snakes just stage effects. They're
(16:40):
simply burning bundles of straw to make smoke come out
of these false chimneys. Right, So it's things like that,
and he's basically calling the Soviets poor idiots. He thinks
that the Soviets are fooling the people, and he kind
of paints this as this red paradise that is almost
Wizard of Oz like.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
So not particularly new once propagandas as far as that.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Goes, yeah, and it didn't really have to be right, Like,
these sentiments didn't diverge much from what mainstream Belgian Catholics
were thinking at the time. So, according to one of
Airj's biographers, this is Harry Thompson, a lot of Belgians
believe that Russians were quote grinning devils with knives between
their teeth butchered small children for kicks, which is obviously
(17:24):
so sad and so ridiculous. But since air Ja hadn't
been to Russia, the strip really relies on some of
the more sensational accounts of Russia that's coming to him,
as well as Joilet's own anti communist views.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Well, you know, despite its not so subtle anti communist messaging,
the book does have a couple great things going for it.
So for starters, it's actually the only time in all
of the Tintin Adventures where the readers see him working
as a journalist writing an article.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
I actually never noticed that. Like, as much as I
loved you did, I never realized he wasn't actually writing
that much.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
It does come up nearly as much as you'd think,
but you know, the story is also where we first
meet Snowy, Tintin's trusty dog and fellow adventurer, And most excitingly,
it's where Tintin's trademark hair shape came to be, you know,
the little swirl or squirrel on his forehead. Gotta have
the swirl. But when the comic starts, Tintin actually has
(18:21):
flat combed hair. But there's a scene early on where
he's riding in a convertible and air draws his hair
sticking up to show the speed of the car, and
it just stayed like that forever. Like I guess the
wind was just that strong.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I like it, but I also like that in the
first book it isn't just his physical appearance that kind
of gets sorted right, Like his whole personality is there
from the very start. Tintin is depicted as this honest,
this intrepid kid reporter, and he is spreading Western values
and ideas around the world.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Yeah. I'm glad you bring that up, because, you know,
before we get too far into things, I want to
talk a little about Tintin himself. A lot of the
characterization that you're talking about, it was likely inspired by
Air's time in The Boy Scouts, which would make sense
Tintin is basically a boy Scout, but he's also an
iconic character visually because of that tuft of red hair
(19:15):
and his outfit blue sweater, white collar shirt, brown pants,
and the question of who inspired Tintin, both in his
look and his lifestyle. Yeah, that's one that Tintinologists, which yes,
are people who study Tintin. It's one they've been, you know,
trying to figure out basically since Tintin first appeared.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
I love Tintinologists, Like it's not something that was offered
as a major at my college. But is there an
answer do they figure out who Tintin is based on?
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Well, no, but there are lots of guesses. For example,
one idea is that he's based off of Airjay's younger
brother Paul, who apparently looked enough like Tintin, especially with
the hair style, that when he was an adult and
in the army, fellow soldiers call called him Major Tintin.
In fact, Paul Paul got pretty sick of the nickname.
(20:05):
He eventually changed his hair style because he was so
tired of the comparison.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Oh no, yeah, so brother Paul is one of the possibilities.
Who are the other contenders?
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Another is a Danish boy named pell Hooled. In nineteen
twenty eight, when Pella was fifteen, he entered a newspaper
competition celebrating the Jules Verne centennial, and the paper was
looking for a teenage boy to reenact the journey of
around the world in eighty days. The rules were that
he'd have forty six days to get himself around the
(20:38):
world without using airplanes, and he would need to do
it alone anyway. Pele, who was also a boy scout,
won the competition, and his travels were all over the
news after.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
He made it home.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
He wrote a book about it, which was published in
nineteen twenty nine, which you'll note is the same year
the first Tintin strips came out. And it's been confirmed
that erge Red Pele's book, so's you know, some people
think he may have modeled Tintin after him got it.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
So we've got the brother with the hairstyle of this
young kid who's traveling around the world. Anyone else in
this mix?
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, My favorite contender is this French journalist named Robert six.
He was a war correspondent and a motorcycle enthusiast. Apparently
he both looked and dressed like Tintin and had a
best friend named Milu, which is, you know, phonetically the
name of Tintin's dog, Snowy in French. And if that
(21:34):
weren't enough, Tintin's travels also seemed to mirror Robert's. His
first reporting mission, it was to Moscow.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
So we've got the dog, we've got the motorcycle, we've
got the mission to Moscow. All this is starting to
come together.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, and then Robert goes to the Congo and the
US after that, which is where Tintin goes next.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, where Tintin goes it's pretty alling.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
There's enough there. Even the air Jay Foundation acknowledges the
similarities between Tintin and Robert. They even admit that some
of Airja's drawings in the books seem to have been
directly inspired by the photographs Robert took personally, though, I
think the most likely answer is that it, you know,
may have been a mix of all of these guys.
(22:19):
But for what it's worth, whenever he was asked about it,
air Jay would simply answer, Tintin Simoa or Tintin is me.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm sure it's all the parts
of his personality he loved most right, inspired realities others.
So why don't we get back to the story. So
Tintin's starting to catch on in Belgium where we leave
off and this successful comic album Tintin in the Land
of the Soviets, Father Wailea is excited to keep the
ball rolling. He has his strips published in book form
(22:50):
in nineteen thirty and air Jay starts on the next installment,
which is Tintin in the Congo, which was originally serialized
in the paper. And this is between nineteen thirty and
nineteen thirty one, and just like with the Land of
the Soviets, it was Father Wailea who suggested the new
book's location, which is the Congo, and he chose it
(23:11):
because there was this hyper conservative colonial mindset in Belgium
at the time, which Juaala had fully bought into.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Of course he did. And of course this is the famous,
most problematic of the Tintin albums.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Right, yeah, this is the one you could not get
in India when I was growing up. And we'll get
into that a little bit. But the result is a
book that's full of Tintin quote civilizing the natives who
are portrayed as these super cringy caricatures. They worshiped Tintin
as he educates them on how wonderful Belgium's colonial system is.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
It's you know, it's it's really bad. Yeah, And I
do think it's probably helpful at this point to remind
folks what kind of relationship Belgium had with the Congo.
Belgium was an especially violent colonial power, particularly under Leopold
the Second.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yes, Leopold the Second, who is possibly but probably not
air Jay's grandfather, is believed to be responsible for the
deaths of millions and millions of Africans, and this is
through brutal force, labor, famine. This wasn't something that was
all that well understood in Belgium at the time, like
most Belgians who weren't really paying attention to what was
(24:21):
happening in Africa, didn't know the magnitude of the destruction there.
And it's honestly still a pass that Belgium is reckoning
with anyway. So Leopold the Second passes away. In nineteen
oh nine, his nephew Albert the First becomes king, and
right around that time the Congo becomes an official colony
of Belgium known as the Belgian Congo. The congleates were
(24:41):
forced to work as indentured servants on plantations and minds,
and the Belgian authorities' attitudes towards the Congolese people reflected
this common conservative European belief at the time of needing
to quote civilize Africa, right, it's like the white man's
burden essentially, and they treated Africans as if they were
chill children who needed to be taught how to live
(25:01):
and airj put out Tintin in the Congo. Right when
all of this was happening.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
So Belgian readers they weren't like offended by this at all.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
No, in fact, it was the opposite. It was a
huge success. And to celebrate the strip's conclusion, Father While
even organized this event a real life Tintin after his
return from Africa.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
What does that even mean?
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Though? So the paper, the paper had actually tried something
like this before when Tintin had returned from USSR, and
that event had gone so well that they decided to
try it again. And so the just as they dress
up a little boy to play Tintin, uh, they've got
a little white dog to play Snowy. And then the
actor would arrive via train in the main Brussel station
(25:44):
where this real life crowd celebrates his arrival. Right, and
for this particular event, they also had ten Congolese men
accompanying him and a bunch of circus animals they'd rented,
I guess to make it seem more African. And it
worked because five thousand people showed up to this train
station to watch Tintin come home. So it was clearly
a success right from the start.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah, it's just such a shame, because you know, these
are great stories in so many ways, but obviously some
of the early depictions, they are just really rough, really problematic.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, it's not the type of thing you pick up
on as a kid, right, But as you get older
you really see this stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, especially if the harmful stereotypes don't refer to you
or people who look like you. Is a kid, it's
easy to overlook that kind of thing, but once you
see it, oh man, it is impossible to ignore. Which
makes me wonder if Airja ever grappled with any of
this himself, Like, do you know if he ever acknowledged
how insensitive these books were.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
He does to a certain extent, and that's actually part
of why I like Ja. He does tend to grow
over the years, but he never outright apologizes or anything.
He did want to say about the early books that quote,
they are not very intelligent, I know, and they do
me no honor. So he's clearly acknowledging it. And later
he says these stories were created quote in the spirit
(27:01):
of the pure paternalism which reigned at the time in Belgium.
I'm not trying to excuse myself. I admit that my
early books were typical of the Belgium bourgeois mentality. Of
the time and even later he doesn't want Tinton in
the Land of the Soviets to be republished, and he
redraws Tinton in the Congo in the nineteen forties. He
makes some changes, like turning one of the school lessons
(27:21):
Tinton gives into a math lesson instead of one about
Belgian superiority. But you know, the caricatures and the drawings
don't really change that much.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
So basically his opinion was that it was almost impossible
for a Belgian man from his background at that time
to avoid absorbing, you know, this kind of perspective about
other races and cultures.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah. Though the public response is of course different now,
right like today when people criticize specific Tinton books like
you and I were saying, Tinton in the Congo is
the one that everyone points to. In two thousand and seven,
for example, the UK's Commission for Racial Equality recommended that
not be sold due to its quote hideous racial prejudice,
and there have been attempts to ban it or limit
(28:04):
its availability in the US, Sweden and Belgium. Like I
was saying, in India, you couldn't find it in libraries.
It was very difficult to find and as an American publisher,
Lil Brown hasn't printed it for quite a while.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
It's interesting because if Airja had stuck to creating Tintin
in the Belgian mentality of the time, he might have
continued drawing xenophobic, racist comics for the rest of his life.
But that's not at all what happened. Instead, he had
this life changing encounter that transformed the way he thought
about other cultures and about Tintin's place in the world.
(28:38):
It's a fascinating story and we're going to tell you
all about it right after this quick break.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius is two part exploration
of air Ja and Tintin and Gabe. When we left off,
you were just about to tell us, but I believe
is the redeeming part of this story about how air
Jay's life changed forever and for the better.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
So have that, yes, yes, finally we get here. So
by the early nineteen thirties, Tintin has been around for
a couple of years. He's getting more popular, and he's
traveling the world. But I am talking about Tintin here
Airja himself. He is not traveling the world. He's just
sitting at his desk at a conservative Catholic newspaper, so
(29:34):
a lot of the cultural details he'd include came from
secondary sources, full of their own assumptions and prejudices, which
he would then pairrot. But as many scholars have pointed out,
there was a real change in that approach for the
fifth Tintin installment, The Blue Lotus, and it happened almost
by chance. When the newspaper announced that Tintin's next journey
(29:56):
would take place in China, a Belgian priest who worked
with Chinese student at a local university got in touch
with air Ja. The priest was like, Hey, my students
are big fans of Tintin, but they'll be pretty upset
if China and Chinese characters get portrayed as stereotypes, which
you are known to do.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
And knowing this Tintin universe, there had been some Chinese
characters in earlier at tinton books, and obviously they were
not portrade very fairly.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
That's right, yes, But to air Jay's credit, he was
really cool about the whole thing. He asked the priest, okay,
can you find someone who could advise me on China?
So the priest introduced him to a man named Jiang
chong Ren, who was around the same age as air
Je and a student at Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
So for about a year the two men met each
(30:46):
Sunday to talk and Jiong explained Chinese current affairs and
taught Airja about calligraphy. He also introduced him to concepts
like Buddhism and Taoism, which Aja took a real interest in,
especially later in his life. And so you know, an
actual friendship started to emerge from this. In fact, Xiang
later said that they were like brothers.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
I mean, I love The Blue Loadus. There's so many
great details in that book, like it takes place mainly
in Shanghai. There are a lot of scenes that feature
Chinese calligraphy in the background. And I don't understand Chinese,
just like I don't pronounce French. Well, but it looked
really beautiful.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
That's so funny because that writing that you're talking about,
it was actually done by Jiang. The calligraphy. Yeah, And
according to an article about The Blue Lotus on the
website The World of Chinese, the book includes quotes from
the Old Book of Tong praising the virtues of an
ancient doctor there were also posters on the street with
(31:48):
messages like abolish unfair treaties and down with imperialism. And
that's because the story is set around the time when
Japan invaded Manchuria.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
I like that Tintin, or rather air Jay just kind
of like absorbs the influences of the people around him, right,
like father Wallay's politics feed it, and like Jiang saw
influence seems to be there. But but how did this
friend of his influence the storytelling?
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Well, he encouraged airj to use, you know, real events
to inspire Tintin's adventures. So in the story, Tintin defends
the Chinese against the Japanese, but also against American businessmen
who are shown as ignorant and racist and aggressive. And
none of this was really happening in other Belgian comic
strips at the time. And by the way, if the
(32:34):
name of the arts student Jiang chong Ren sounds familiar
to you and any other Tintin readers out there listening,
it's because it sounds a lot like the name that
appears in the Blue Lotus, Chong chong Chen. So he's
the young Chinese orphan that sounds a lot lighter.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Right, Yeah, I figured that part.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah right, yeah, yeah. He's the young Chinese orphan that
Tintin saves from drowning towards the end of the book
and later becomes friends with. Their friendship in the book
actually echoes the men's real life relationship. So right after
Tintin and Chong meet in the story, they discuss the
misconceptions Europeans have of Chinese people and the stereotypes that
(33:14):
their cultures have of one another, and they acknowledge that
all of these are incorrect. And so while Airja is
still trying to educate the reader in future books, it's
just in a different, more open minded way. For example,
there's a scene towards the end where the British detectives
Thompson and Thompson trying to disguise themselves by wearing what
(33:36):
they believe is typical Chinese clothing, but in reality it's
this outdated stereotype of what Westerners think Chinese people look like.
So the Chinese characters see the detectives and they just
start laughing, And this time, you know, the reader is
in on the joke. I love that.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
So I read that the Blueloadus is also where Erge
learned to go deeper for force photographs for different locations,
and so before he'd been using whatever generic images were
being used in popular media. But all of a sudden,
now there's more nuance, more accuracy for these details, and
that didn't really exist in Tintin's previous adventures.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah you can really tell too, like you can see it.
Which is not to say that the book is perfect.
This is nineteen thirty four, and there is still a
paternalistic attitude towards the Chinese.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yeah, and the villains right, like the villains and the
Blue Lotus are the imperialist drug dealing Japanese. So unsurprisingly
the Japanese were not fans of the book. They wanted
it benn which you can see why.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But but it was a hid in China, right,
So Airje was even invited by the First Lady to
visit the country. And perhaps more importantly, it's set a
new standard for how Erje approached Tintin's adventures and depictions
of places far from Belgium, you know, with deeper research
and a wider range of content imporiary sources. Getting these
(35:02):
details right mattered to him. But that said, there were
still issues in later books. For example, in Tintin and
the Broken Ear, which came out right after The Blue Lotus,
Er Jay didn't know anyone who spoke South American indigenous languages,
so he just made one up and later got a
lot of criticism for having some pretty overtly racist details
(35:24):
and characters in nineteen forty one's The Shooting Star. He
did later revise that book, but again he didn't really apologize.
He said, basically, this was just reflecting the politics and
style of the time. Deal with it.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Yeah, obviously, meeting Jong doesn't erase all his prejudices and biases,
but there is definitely a change in his approach and
certainly this attempt to capture some truth about a location.
So now we're going to jump ahead to the late
nineteen fifties and Air Jay is going through a tough
personal time. He is not a great husband, so his
(35:59):
first marriage apart after about a year, and he's having
these regular nightmares where everything in it turns white. He
in one of these dreams, he is climbing the stairs
of a tower and he looks down and it's just
a bunch of bones and skulls and demons, all white stuff,
like that, and it's really disconcerting. So Airj goes to
(36:19):
a Youngian psycho analyst, and this is in Switzerland, an
actual student of Carl Jung, And he's like, I've been
having these awful dreams, Doc, what should I do?
Speaker 2 (36:29):
I'm picture I got to stop you on picturing. This
psychoanalyst he's smoking a pipe, right, and there's like a
view of Lake Zurich in the background. I'm just trying
to set the scene.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, well, there is no photographic evidence of this meeting,
so let's say that's where it occurs. But then the
doctor tells air Ja, this is very simple. These dreams
are all metaphors for being professionally and emotionally exhausted, and
the only thing you can do to stop them is
to stop drawing.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Stop drawing, telling the artist to stop drawing, like forever,
just stop more or less.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
So he tells Airj he can't work and recover from
this personal turmoil at the same time, so he's got
to pick one. And Airj is super shaken by this, right,
and he does consider it because in some ways it's appealing.
He loves Tinton, but Tinton has also become a burden
and he's already been considering taking up abstract art instead.
You find us with a lot of artists, right, like
(37:23):
Bill Waterson had to take a spell. Conan Doyle retired
from homes for a bit before returning. Anyway, he thinks
about it and then he says, you know what, I
don't really like this advice, so maybe I should just
lean into the white instead. And so, with his mind
made up, he goes to work. And he'd rent a
ton of books on Tibet, mostly by Western explorers and
(37:46):
people going through the Himalias and the snow capped mountains there.
He'd also read at least one book by this native
Tibetan and so he's really inspired, and he studies maps
and photographs. He searches for photos and Belgian Alpine society,
and he was so committed to getting the details right.
Then one photo which he found in a book, it
only showed the lower half of a policeman in New Delhi,
(38:10):
and he actually writes the author asking for the original
photo so you can see the whole uniform, because he
really wants to depict it fully.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
You that's awesome, Yeah, that is some serious commitment.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
It's incredible when you see the details and you notice
what's actually drawn and incorporated into the story. There's a
bit in this cafe that I remember and like it's
a cafe in Nepal and the way the waiters stressed,
and then I saw a photo of the time that
he'd used. It's remarkable anyway. What's also really interesting about
Tinton and Tibet is that the plot is different from
all the other Tintin books. It's not really about capturing
(38:42):
a villain, and there's no car chases or classic Tintin
tropes like that. Instead, the book is about Tinton's quest
to find his friend Chong.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Blue Lotus Chong the same gun, yeah, the same one.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
And I actually think that proves how much the real
Jong meant to j right like that he brings them
back into the stories during this what feels like a
pretty difficult period of his life. And in Tintin Inti
that everyone thinks Chong has died in a plane crash,
but Tintin refuses to believe it, and so he risks
his life and his limbs to save him. And also
(39:18):
there's a Yetti in this book, this appearance, which is
just super fun and sweet and.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Oh yeah, any points for YETI.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Anyway said that it was his favorite of the albums
he ever drew, and he calls it quote the story
of a friendship. Ah.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, there's something really poetic in this. You know that
the lessons he learned from his real friend Jong helped him,
you know, make his favorite book.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, definitely. It's also sort of like a perfect place
to end today's episode. But we are not done with
Tintin yet, because this is just part one of the story.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
That's right, So be sure to tune back in to
hear part two, where we'll talk about Jay's behavior during
World War Two, comic bands in America, and serious long
lost play that one of our good friends actually just rediscovered.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
It is an amazing story, and in the meantime, we'd
love to hear what you think about Tinton or anything else.
Email us at high Geniuses at gmail dot com. That's
Hi Geniuses at gmail dot com, or give us a
call on a hotline that is three oh two four
oh five five nine two five. I love that it's
a three or two areo code for all my Delawareans.
(40:25):
And you can also find us on Instagram and Blue Sky.
No matter how you get in touch, you know we'd
love hearing from you. This episode was written by the
always adventurous Mursa Brown. Thank you, Marissa. It was also
edited by Gabe and from Dylan, Mary, Gabe, Will and myself.
Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is
(40:56):
a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted
by Will Pearson and me Mongshatikler and researched by our
goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced
by the wonderful Dylan Fagan, with support from Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel
(41:16):
and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay,
trustee Dara Potts and Vine Shorey. For more podcasts from
Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
You're listening to Part Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Guess what gave?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
What's that Mango?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
So in nineteen seventy two, a sixty five year old
Belgian walks into Andy Warhol's factory in New York City.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Okay, this sounds like the setup for a really bad joke.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
I know, I promise it is not. It was actually
a historic meeting of two art world greats. So we've
got Andy Warhol and Air Jay, the creator of Tintin.
And while he's best known for his comic books starring
the boy Reporter of tinton and his faithful dog Snowy,
air Jay was also a highly knowledgeable art enthusiast and
modern art collector, and so when he traveled to the
(01:01):
US meeting, Warhol was actually on his bucket list. And
it turns out they had a ton in common. They
both did commercial illustrations early in their careers, and they
both kept plugging away until they achieved global success.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
That's interesting, but honestly, I'm just enjoying the picturing this,
like old Belgian guy hanging out in the factory with Warhol.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yeah. Well, apparently the two artists hit it off because
in nineteen seventy nine, air Jay asked Warhol to paint
his portrait, which he did, making a set of four
paintings similar as the ones you know you've seen of
Marilyn Monroe, and Warhol later explained that the admiration actually
went both ways. He said, quote, air Jay has influenced
my work in the same way as Walt Disney. For me,
(01:42):
Airjay was more than a comic strip artist.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Honestly, I had no idea. I never would have guessed
Andy Warhol was a Tintin fan.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, and he is not alone. The books are incredibly popular,
especially outside the US, so worldwide. Tintin books or albums
as those fans like to call them, have sold more
than two hundred and seventy million copies and have been
translated into more than one hundred languages, and even today,
between one point five to two million Tintin books are
(02:10):
sold per year.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
We throw around a lot of numbers on the show,
but two million books. That's insane, it really is.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
But like so many books from the nineteen thirties and forties,
not everything has aged well. And Airje himself has this
really fascinating and complicated biography. It spans everything from war
to boy Scouts, to cultural stereotypes to overcoming cultural stereotypes,
and also Will diffit to strange nightmares Steven Spielberg, and
(02:37):
of course that eternal question do comic books turn kids
into juvenile? The linquits, which I'm sure you have some
thoughts on. So there is so much to cover that
we've actually turned the story of Tintin into a two parter,
So let's dive in. Hey there, podcast listener as well,
(03:14):
and a part time genius, I'm monga shittig and because
Will is traveling this week, I'm here with my fellow
Tintin fan, Gabe Lucier. And over there in the booth
is uh gay? Where's Dylan? Uh?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Hang on, there's a There's a note taped under the microphone.
It says, gone adventuring with my faithful dog, love Dylan.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I'm not sure who's recording this episode, but I always
love Dylan's enthusiasm.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I guess he heard we were doing an episode on
Tintin and decided to, you know, really lean into it.
Dylan is always leaning in, as you know, speaking of which,
this is one of those episodes that we've had on
our Brainstorm list for a long time, and it's finally here,
and it's all because of you, honestly, because you were
obsessed with Tintin as a kid, Is that right.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah. So, as a kid, we didn't have many relatives
in the States, and so to see my grandparents, my mom,
my sister, and I would go to India anytime we
could afford it. And it was always during the summer,
and that was super fun. But if you go to
India in the summer, you quickly realized that that is
the monsoon season there, and it's also when your cousins
(04:23):
returned to school, and so you're kind of stuck inside
all day it's raining, and so, like, I ended up
getting good at things that are indoor games, like cards
or karm, which is like a cool game you play
with your fingers. I used to play karam and scrabble
with my grandparents, and I would wait for my cousins
to come home and I would read comic books and
(04:44):
it was amazing because like, actually, you would love this.
My cousin had like early Captain Americas and Spider Man's.
I'm sure there were reprints or whatever, but it was
so fun to read and we'd read mystery books and
then I discovered Tintin and it kind of played to
everything I loved, right, Like I love dogs, I love journalism,
I love traveling, I like stories about spies and intrigue,
(05:07):
like learning about the world, and it all shows up
in those panels, right. It was just amazing that you
could open these albums and be transported. And it's also
one of the things like not that many kids in
the States knew about tinton Like I think there were
some cartoons that appeared on Nickelodeon or something at one point,
but most of my friends growing up in Delaware had
(05:29):
no idea what I was talking about. And so, actually,
I know you're a huge comics enthusiast. I'm curious, did
you ever read Tintin?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Not As a kid, my first introduction was that cartoon
you mentioned, The Adventures of Tintin. It aired on HBO
and then Nickelodeon back in the early nineties. And the
funny thing is my family didn't have cable, so it
was something I only got to watch when we went
on vacation, but that just made it more special. Like
I remember this one trip to the beach where my
(05:57):
mom got super annoyed with me because I didn't want
to go outside. I just wanted to stay in the
hotel room and watch Tintin. And I did eventually circle
back to the books in college, you know, and I
was really happy to see that the show was actually,
you know, incredibly faithful to the books. But hearing you
(06:18):
talk about Tintin, it's so clear that these books really
pulled you into their world in a special way and
became part of your world too, And it takes a
pretty special artist to do that. And in fact, he's
so special that he went by just one name.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I know. It is so rockstar, right, like very Madonna,
very Prince very Air, Jay.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Very Erga. Yes, but I did some research into his
early years so I can tell you that, unlike Madonna
and Prince Air, Jay was not born Aja. He was
born George Remi in nineteen oh seven in Brussels, and
the pen name he chose Jay is actually his initials
GR for George Remi in reverse RG and RG pronounced
(07:05):
in French is J. I'm sure sounds so much cooler
than Rgie. But I, you know, just think about it
for my own name. I'm wondering about switching to the
nome to plume. Hm, what do you think you'd probably
get mistaken for a chain of Swedish fast fashion stores.
Familiar if it makes you feel better, it wouldn't work
(07:27):
for me either, so gl backwards LG. That's an appliance.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
So we'll just have to stick with our own name.
So tell me about young Airj's life then.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Well, surprisingly enough, he did not come from an artistic family.
His mom stayed home to take care of him and
his younger brother Paul. His dad worked in a candy factory,
and the family was solidly lower middle class. That said,
there's actually a bit of lore around Airj's grandfather. So's
dad had an identical twin brother, and growing up, the
(08:00):
twins never knew who their father was. And that's because apparently,
as a young single woman, Airjay's grandmother worked as a
maid at a countess's chateau. Then suddenly one day she
was pregnant with twin boys. So a lot of people,
including at one point Aga himself, believed she may have
had an affair with someone higher up, you know, someone
(08:22):
really wealthy or maybe even a noble.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
So is there any evidence to support that or is
this just kind of like wishful thinking that he's royal.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Well, there is one interesting clue. After the twins were born,
the countess more or less treated them as her own
and she let the family live at the chateau until
the boys were fourteen, after which she kicked them out.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So she might have felt some sort of responsibility to them, yeah,
or you.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Know, maybe she was just a decent person and felt
bad for a single mom of twins. But the family
legend was that the twins' father, who would be air
Jay's grandfather, was actually Belgium's King Leopold the Second, who
ruled the country from eighteen thirty five to nineteen oh nine.
Now that's not substantiated, but it was something the family
(09:09):
liked to toss around in private. And the other rumor
is that the Countess's husband, the count, you know, he
may have been the father.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
So I guess potentially a mysterious and royal background, which
I guess a little DNA testing could actually figure out today.
But between the royal rumors, a father who worked in
a literal candy factory, it sounds like a really exciting life.
So to tell me a little bit about Airjay's childhood
was it fun.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Actually the opposite. Airja described his childhood. Yeah, Airja described
his childhood as quote gray and uneventful, and one of
his biographers, Pierre Assoline wrote, quote everything was colorless, scentless,
tasteless and of no interest. In the Remi home. There
(09:56):
was no one to admire, no books to read, no
play to attend, no discussions. And you know that is
a little bit of an exaggeration because Airje did have
books and movies that he loved as a kid, and
his parents did encourage his drawing, but overall art and
culture wasn't really a focus in his family.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, and it sounds like not a childhood he sort
of was nostalgic for. So did he always have an
interest in illustration or was this something that came later
in life.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
No, he showed an aptitude in it from an early age.
His school notebooks were filled with sketches, and when he
got a bit older, like high school age, his parents
enrolled him in art classes, though apparently he only lasted
a day before dropping out because the focus was on
technical skills like drawing Greek columns, and you know, he
had zero interest in that.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
That is funny that he loves to draw, but he
won't like sit around to drug column Oh.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, not columns. You got to draw the line somewhere.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Well. I do know that in addition to drawing, there
was another excitement in his life, and that is the
Boy Scouts. Airjay joined them when he was about eleven
years old, and he really connected the Scouts. He described
it as the first color he remembers about his childhood,
which I guess goes back to that gray comment you mentioned.
And the Boy Scouts opened his eyes to this bigger world.
(11:16):
And for example, during the summers, they'd go to camps
around western Europe where they do things like hike two
hundred miles across the Pyrenees, and Airjay loved it so
much that he eventually became an Eagle Scout and a
troop leader, and he remained a Scout until he was
in his twenties. But the Scouts gave him something else,
even more important to this story. They gave him his
(11:38):
very first platform for his art. He published his first
illustrations in a monthly Boy Scout magazine when he was
around fifteen years old, and a few years later, in
nineteen twenty six, the magazine published Airjay's first serialized comic strip.
It was called The Adventures of Totor CP of the
June Bugs. Totor is a Belgian boy scout and in
(12:00):
the comic, he travels to Texas to visit his aunt
and his uncle, and when he is there, he's captured
by angry Native Americans who he outwits. He also outwits
bandits and he finds buried treasure, and so there is
a lot of excitement.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Got it. So sounds like maybe Totor was kind of
the prototype for Tintin.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
That is an excellent guest, Gabe, and I'm going to
tell you all about how Airjay's passion for art and
scouting turned into the Tintin we know today. But first
let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part time Genius.
(12:48):
We're talking all things Tintin. So let me set the scene, Gabe.
It is nineteen twenties Belgium. Airj is scouting and trying
to figure out what to do with his life. By
this time, he's graduated from high school and he's working
in the subscriptions department at this newspaper called Levutm Siecla,
which means the twentieth century. And this was a Catholic
(13:09):
newspaper run by father Norbert Wala. It was a right
wing paper, to put it mildly, and father Wala actually
kept a photo of Mussolini on his desk if you
want to know his politics.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yi, yeah, that's never a good sign. But okay, from
what I've read though, you know, that was kind of
the norm in Belgium after World War One.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Right, yeah, Belgium was a very conservative and very Catholic country.
One of Airj's biographers said that right wing politics were
an almost inevitable byproduct of that time. So by working there,
Airja wasn't exactly taking a political stance, at least explicitly.
It was more this job that he was excited to
have and it was better than working at his father's store.
(13:53):
And by nineteen twenty eight, a couple of years after
Totor appears in the Boy Scott magazine, Airja had managed
to make his way out of the subscription department and
into illustrations. Mostly that meant drawing women's clothes and things
like that for the magazine, but he was making a living,
and more importantly, Father Walla had taken a real liking
to him, so he asked Erj to illustrate the new
(14:14):
weekly children's supplement that he's planning to.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Start, which I'm sure he just jumped at right.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Definitely, because in November of that year the Extraordinary Adventures
of Flup Nnesse who set a Hits newspaper stands.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
That is some truly masterful French. I have to say,
I know.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I feel so embarrass every time we do any French
or any other language, unless it's kunkany, I'm not going
to speak it properly. And I also love the word
flop in that cartoon. That sounds really grad But the
comic was actually universally considered a dud. Part of the
problem is that it was written by the paper sports
reporter and he wasn't much of a writer. The story
(14:57):
is super simple, it is plotting. It's about three kids,
an inflatable rubber pig and their accidental trip to Africa,
which is you know, overwhelming with stereotypes and of course
caricatures as well. Now Urja did the illustrations, but they
aren't particularly inspired either. One of the issues was that
in Belgium at the time and most of Europe, cartoons
(15:18):
didn't use speech bubbles. This was actually an American innovation.
So to tell the story, there's been a lot of
text as captions and then drawings to accompany it.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
So none of this boat's well for Flupin Friends long term.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Yeah, flup and Friends would have been a better name
for that cartoon, but you are right. The strip ends
after ten weeks. But this is where air Jay's fortunes turn.
So Father Waile asked him to draw a new comic
featuring a more totor like adolescent boy along with his dog.
And he wants something wholesome, right, something that portrays good
(15:54):
Catholic virtues, and he wants it with American speech bubbles.
So air Jay is excited and he gets to work
right away, and in early nineteen twenty nine the first
actual Tintin strips come out, and it's the beginning of
what would become Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Aha, our hero is born. And I imagine the choice
of Russia for that adventure like that had to be purposeful,
right it was.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
It was also Father Wala's idea. Father Walla wanted to
show young Belgian readers basically how bad communism was. So
Tintin has all these like very explicitly anti communist lines
where he says things like those factories are running a
bit too well, let's see, and then he looks under
it and it's like great snakes just stage effects. They're
(16:40):
simply burning bundles of straw to make smoke come out
of these false chimneys. Right, So it's things like that,
and he's basically calling the Soviets poor idiots. He thinks
that the Soviets are fooling the people, and he kind
of paints this as this red paradise that is almost
Wizard of Oz like.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
So not particularly new once propagandas as far as that.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Goes, yeah, and it didn't really have to be right, Like,
these sentiments didn't diverge much from what mainstream Belgian Catholics
were thinking at the time. So, according to one of
Airj's biographers, this is Harry Thompson, a lot of Belgians
believe that Russians were quote grinning devils with knives between
their teeth butchered small children for kicks, which is obviously
(17:24):
so sad and so ridiculous. But since air Ja hadn't
been to Russia, the strip really relies on some of
the more sensational accounts of Russia that's coming to him,
as well as Joilet's own anti communist views.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Well, you know, despite its not so subtle anti communist messaging,
the book does have a couple great things going for it.
So for starters, it's actually the only time in all
of the Tintin Adventures where the readers see him working
as a journalist writing an article.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
I actually never noticed that. Like, as much as I
loved you did, I never realized he wasn't actually writing
that much.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
It does come up nearly as much as you'd think,
but you know, the story is also where we first
meet Snowy, Tintin's trusty dog and fellow adventurer, And most excitingly,
it's where Tintin's trademark hair shape came to be, you know,
the little swirl or squirrel on his forehead. Gotta have
the swirl. But when the comic starts, Tintin actually has
(18:21):
flat combed hair. But there's a scene early on where
he's riding in a convertible and air draws his hair
sticking up to show the speed of the car, and
it just stayed like that forever. Like I guess the
wind was just that strong.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I like it, but I also like that in the
first book it isn't just his physical appearance that kind
of gets sorted right, Like his whole personality is there
from the very start. Tintin is depicted as this honest,
this intrepid kid reporter, and he is spreading Western values
and ideas around the world.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Yeah. I'm glad you bring that up, because, you know,
before we get too far into things, I want to
talk a little about Tintin himself. A lot of the
characterization that you're talking about, it was likely inspired by
Air's time in The Boy Scouts, which would make sense
Tintin is basically a boy Scout, but he's also an
iconic character visually because of that tuft of red hair
(19:15):
and his outfit blue sweater, white collar shirt, brown pants,
and the question of who inspired Tintin, both in his
look and his lifestyle. Yeah, that's one that Tintinologists, which yes,
are people who study Tintin. It's one they've been, you know,
trying to figure out basically since Tintin first appeared.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
I love Tintinologists, Like it's not something that was offered
as a major at my college. But is there an
answer do they figure out who Tintin is based on?
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Well, no, but there are lots of guesses. For example,
one idea is that he's based off of Airjay's younger
brother Paul, who apparently looked enough like Tintin, especially with
the hair style, that when he was an adult and
in the army, fellow soldiers call called him Major Tintin.
In fact, Paul Paul got pretty sick of the nickname.
(20:05):
He eventually changed his hair style because he was so
tired of the comparison.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Oh no, yeah, so brother Paul is one of the possibilities.
Who are the other contenders?
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Another is a Danish boy named pell Hooled. In nineteen
twenty eight, when Pella was fifteen, he entered a newspaper
competition celebrating the Jules Verne centennial, and the paper was
looking for a teenage boy to reenact the journey of
around the world in eighty days. The rules were that
he'd have forty six days to get himself around the
(20:38):
world without using airplanes, and he would need to do
it alone anyway. Pele, who was also a boy scout,
won the competition, and his travels were all over the
news after.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
He made it home.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
He wrote a book about it, which was published in
nineteen twenty nine, which you'll note is the same year
the first Tintin strips came out. And it's been confirmed
that erge Red Pele's book, so's you know, some people
think he may have modeled Tintin after him got it.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
So we've got the brother with the hairstyle of this
young kid who's traveling around the world. Anyone else in
this mix?
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, My favorite contender is this French journalist named Robert six.
He was a war correspondent and a motorcycle enthusiast. Apparently
he both looked and dressed like Tintin and had a
best friend named Milu, which is, you know, phonetically the
name of Tintin's dog, Snowy in French. And if that
(21:34):
weren't enough, Tintin's travels also seemed to mirror Robert's. His
first reporting mission, it was to Moscow.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
So we've got the dog, we've got the motorcycle, we've
got the mission to Moscow. All this is starting to
come together.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, and then Robert goes to the Congo and the
US after that, which is where Tintin goes next.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, where Tintin goes it's pretty alling.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
There's enough there. Even the air Jay Foundation acknowledges the
similarities between Tintin and Robert. They even admit that some
of Airja's drawings in the books seem to have been
directly inspired by the photographs Robert took personally, though, I
think the most likely answer is that it, you know,
may have been a mix of all of these guys.
(22:19):
But for what it's worth, whenever he was asked about it,
air Jay would simply answer, Tintin Simoa or Tintin is me.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm sure it's all the parts
of his personality he loved most right, inspired realities others.
So why don't we get back to the story. So
Tintin's starting to catch on in Belgium where we leave
off and this successful comic album Tintin in the Land
of the Soviets, Father Wailea is excited to keep the
ball rolling. He has his strips published in book form
(22:50):
in nineteen thirty and air Jay starts on the next installment,
which is Tintin in the Congo, which was originally serialized
in the paper. And this is between nineteen thirty and
nineteen thirty one, and just like with the Land of
the Soviets, it was Father Wailea who suggested the new
book's location, which is the Congo, and he chose it
(23:11):
because there was this hyper conservative colonial mindset in Belgium
at the time, which Juaala had fully bought into.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Of course he did. And of course this is the famous,
most problematic of the Tintin albums.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Right, yeah, this is the one you could not get
in India when I was growing up. And we'll get
into that a little bit. But the result is a
book that's full of Tintin quote civilizing the natives who
are portrayed as these super cringy caricatures. They worshiped Tintin
as he educates them on how wonderful Belgium's colonial system is.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
It's you know, it's it's really bad. Yeah, And I
do think it's probably helpful at this point to remind
folks what kind of relationship Belgium had with the Congo.
Belgium was an especially violent colonial power, particularly under Leopold
the Second.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yes, Leopold the Second, who is possibly but probably not
air Jay's grandfather, is believed to be responsible for the
deaths of millions and millions of Africans, and this is
through brutal force, labor, famine. This wasn't something that was
all that well understood in Belgium at the time, like
most Belgians who weren't really paying attention to what was
(24:21):
happening in Africa, didn't know the magnitude of the destruction there.
And it's honestly still a pass that Belgium is reckoning
with anyway. So Leopold the Second passes away. In nineteen
oh nine, his nephew Albert the First becomes king, and
right around that time the Congo becomes an official colony
of Belgium known as the Belgian Congo. The congleates were
(24:41):
forced to work as indentured servants on plantations and minds,
and the Belgian authorities' attitudes towards the Congolese people reflected
this common conservative European belief at the time of needing
to quote civilize Africa, right, it's like the white man's
burden essentially, and they treated Africans as if they were
chill children who needed to be taught how to live
(25:01):
and airj put out Tintin in the Congo. Right when
all of this was happening.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
So Belgian readers they weren't like offended by this at all.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
No, in fact, it was the opposite. It was a
huge success. And to celebrate the strip's conclusion, Father While
even organized this event a real life Tintin after his
return from Africa.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
What does that even mean?
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Though? So the paper, the paper had actually tried something
like this before when Tintin had returned from USSR, and
that event had gone so well that they decided to
try it again. And so the just as they dress
up a little boy to play Tintin, uh, they've got
a little white dog to play Snowy. And then the
actor would arrive via train in the main Brussel station
(25:44):
where this real life crowd celebrates his arrival. Right, and
for this particular event, they also had ten Congolese men
accompanying him and a bunch of circus animals they'd rented,
I guess to make it seem more African. And it
worked because five thousand people showed up to this train
station to watch Tintin come home. So it was clearly
a success right from the start.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah, it's just such a shame, because you know, these
are great stories in so many ways, but obviously some
of the early depictions, they are just really rough, really problematic.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, it's not the type of thing you pick up
on as a kid, right, But as you get older
you really see this stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, especially if the harmful stereotypes don't refer to you
or people who look like you. Is a kid, it's
easy to overlook that kind of thing, but once you
see it, oh man, it is impossible to ignore. Which
makes me wonder if Airja ever grappled with any of
this himself, Like, do you know if he ever acknowledged
how insensitive these books were.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
He does to a certain extent, and that's actually part
of why I like Ja. He does tend to grow
over the years, but he never outright apologizes or anything.
He did want to say about the early books that quote,
they are not very intelligent, I know, and they do
me no honor. So he's clearly acknowledging it. And later
he says these stories were created quote in the spirit
(27:01):
of the pure paternalism which reigned at the time in Belgium.
I'm not trying to excuse myself. I admit that my
early books were typical of the Belgium bourgeois mentality. Of
the time and even later he doesn't want Tinton in
the Land of the Soviets to be republished, and he
redraws Tinton in the Congo in the nineteen forties. He
makes some changes, like turning one of the school lessons
(27:21):
Tinton gives into a math lesson instead of one about
Belgian superiority. But you know, the caricatures and the drawings
don't really change that much.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
So basically his opinion was that it was almost impossible
for a Belgian man from his background at that time
to avoid absorbing, you know, this kind of perspective about
other races and cultures.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah. Though the public response is of course different now,
right like today when people criticize specific Tinton books like
you and I were saying, Tinton in the Congo is
the one that everyone points to. In two thousand and seven,
for example, the UK's Commission for Racial Equality recommended that
not be sold due to its quote hideous racial prejudice,
and there have been attempts to ban it or limit
(28:04):
its availability in the US, Sweden and Belgium. Like I
was saying, in India, you couldn't find it in libraries.
It was very difficult to find and as an American publisher,
Lil Brown hasn't printed it for quite a while.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
It's interesting because if Airja had stuck to creating Tintin
in the Belgian mentality of the time, he might have
continued drawing xenophobic, racist comics for the rest of his life.
But that's not at all what happened. Instead, he had
this life changing encounter that transformed the way he thought
about other cultures and about Tintin's place in the world.
(28:38):
It's a fascinating story and we're going to tell you
all about it right after this quick break.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius is two part exploration
of air Ja and Tintin and Gabe. When we left off,
you were just about to tell us, but I believe
is the redeeming part of this story about how air
Jay's life changed forever and for the better.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
So have that, yes, yes, finally we get here. So
by the early nineteen thirties, Tintin has been around for
a couple of years. He's getting more popular, and he's
traveling the world. But I am talking about Tintin here
Airja himself. He is not traveling the world. He's just
sitting at his desk at a conservative Catholic newspaper, so
(29:34):
a lot of the cultural details he'd include came from
secondary sources, full of their own assumptions and prejudices, which
he would then pairrot. But as many scholars have pointed out,
there was a real change in that approach for the
fifth Tintin installment, The Blue Lotus, and it happened almost
by chance. When the newspaper announced that Tintin's next journey
(29:56):
would take place in China, a Belgian priest who worked
with Chinese student at a local university got in touch
with air Ja. The priest was like, Hey, my students
are big fans of Tintin, but they'll be pretty upset
if China and Chinese characters get portrayed as stereotypes, which
you are known to do.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
And knowing this Tintin universe, there had been some Chinese
characters in earlier at tinton books, and obviously they were
not portrade very fairly.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
That's right, yes, But to air Jay's credit, he was
really cool about the whole thing. He asked the priest, okay,
can you find someone who could advise me on China?
So the priest introduced him to a man named Jiang
chong Ren, who was around the same age as air
Je and a student at Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
So for about a year the two men met each
(30:46):
Sunday to talk and Jiong explained Chinese current affairs and
taught Airja about calligraphy. He also introduced him to concepts
like Buddhism and Taoism, which Aja took a real interest in,
especially later in his life. And so you know, an
actual friendship started to emerge from this. In fact, Xiang
later said that they were like brothers.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
I mean, I love The Blue Loadus. There's so many
great details in that book, like it takes place mainly
in Shanghai. There are a lot of scenes that feature
Chinese calligraphy in the background. And I don't understand Chinese,
just like I don't pronounce French. Well, but it looked
really beautiful.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
That's so funny because that writing that you're talking about,
it was actually done by Jiang. The calligraphy. Yeah, And
according to an article about The Blue Lotus on the
website The World of Chinese, the book includes quotes from
the Old Book of Tong praising the virtues of an
ancient doctor there were also posters on the street with
(31:48):
messages like abolish unfair treaties and down with imperialism. And
that's because the story is set around the time when
Japan invaded Manchuria.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
I like that Tintin, or rather air Jay just kind
of like absorbs the influences of the people around him, right,
like father Wallay's politics feed it, and like Jiang saw
influence seems to be there. But but how did this
friend of his influence the storytelling?
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Well, he encouraged airj to use, you know, real events
to inspire Tintin's adventures. So in the story, Tintin defends
the Chinese against the Japanese, but also against American businessmen
who are shown as ignorant and racist and aggressive. And
none of this was really happening in other Belgian comic
strips at the time. And by the way, if the
(32:34):
name of the arts student Jiang chong Ren sounds familiar
to you and any other Tintin readers out there listening,
it's because it sounds a lot like the name that
appears in the Blue Lotus, Chong chong Chen. So he's
the young Chinese orphan that sounds a lot lighter.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Right, Yeah, I figured that part.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah right, yeah, yeah. He's the young Chinese orphan that
Tintin saves from drowning towards the end of the book
and later becomes friends with. Their friendship in the book
actually echoes the men's real life relationship. So right after
Tintin and Chong meet in the story, they discuss the
misconceptions Europeans have of Chinese people and the stereotypes that
(33:14):
their cultures have of one another, and they acknowledge that
all of these are incorrect. And so while Airja is
still trying to educate the reader in future books, it's
just in a different, more open minded way. For example,
there's a scene towards the end where the British detectives
Thompson and Thompson trying to disguise themselves by wearing what
(33:36):
they believe is typical Chinese clothing, but in reality it's
this outdated stereotype of what Westerners think Chinese people look like.
So the Chinese characters see the detectives and they just
start laughing, And this time, you know, the reader is
in on the joke. I love that.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
So I read that the Blueloadus is also where Erge
learned to go deeper for force photographs for different locations,
and so before he'd been using whatever generic images were
being used in popular media. But all of a sudden,
now there's more nuance, more accuracy for these details, and
that didn't really exist in Tintin's previous adventures.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah you can really tell too, like you can see it.
Which is not to say that the book is perfect.
This is nineteen thirty four, and there is still a
paternalistic attitude towards the Chinese.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yeah, and the villains right, like the villains and the
Blue Lotus are the imperialist drug dealing Japanese. So unsurprisingly
the Japanese were not fans of the book. They wanted
it benn which you can see why.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But but it was a hid in China, right,
So Airje was even invited by the First Lady to
visit the country. And perhaps more importantly, it's set a
new standard for how Erje approached Tintin's adventures and depictions
of places far from Belgium, you know, with deeper research
and a wider range of content imporiary sources. Getting these
(35:02):
details right mattered to him. But that said, there were
still issues in later books. For example, in Tintin and
the Broken Ear, which came out right after The Blue Lotus,
Er Jay didn't know anyone who spoke South American indigenous languages,
so he just made one up and later got a
lot of criticism for having some pretty overtly racist details
(35:24):
and characters in nineteen forty one's The Shooting Star. He
did later revise that book, but again he didn't really apologize.
He said, basically, this was just reflecting the politics and
style of the time. Deal with it.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Yeah, obviously, meeting Jong doesn't erase all his prejudices and biases,
but there is definitely a change in his approach and
certainly this attempt to capture some truth about a location.
So now we're going to jump ahead to the late
nineteen fifties and Air Jay is going through a tough
personal time. He is not a great husband, so his
(35:59):
first marriage apart after about a year, and he's having
these regular nightmares where everything in it turns white. He
in one of these dreams, he is climbing the stairs
of a tower and he looks down and it's just
a bunch of bones and skulls and demons, all white stuff,
like that, and it's really disconcerting. So Airj goes to
(36:19):
a Youngian psycho analyst, and this is in Switzerland, an
actual student of Carl Jung, And he's like, I've been
having these awful dreams, Doc, what should I do?
Speaker 2 (36:29):
I'm picture I got to stop you on picturing. This
psychoanalyst he's smoking a pipe, right, and there's like a
view of Lake Zurich in the background. I'm just trying
to set the scene.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, well, there is no photographic evidence of this meeting,
so let's say that's where it occurs. But then the
doctor tells air Ja, this is very simple. These dreams
are all metaphors for being professionally and emotionally exhausted, and
the only thing you can do to stop them is
to stop drawing.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Stop drawing, telling the artist to stop drawing, like forever,
just stop more or less.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
So he tells Airj he can't work and recover from
this personal turmoil at the same time, so he's got
to pick one. And Airj is super shaken by this, right,
and he does consider it because in some ways it's appealing.
He loves Tinton, but Tinton has also become a burden
and he's already been considering taking up abstract art instead.
You find us with a lot of artists, right, like
(37:23):
Bill Waterson had to take a spell. Conan Doyle retired
from homes for a bit before returning. Anyway, he thinks
about it and then he says, you know what, I
don't really like this advice, so maybe I should just
lean into the white instead. And so, with his mind
made up, he goes to work. And he'd rent a
ton of books on Tibet, mostly by Western explorers and
(37:46):
people going through the Himalias and the snow capped mountains there.
He'd also read at least one book by this native
Tibetan and so he's really inspired, and he studies maps
and photographs. He searches for photos and Belgian Alpine society,
and he was so committed to getting the details right.
Then one photo which he found in a book, it
only showed the lower half of a policeman in New Delhi,
(38:10):
and he actually writes the author asking for the original
photo so you can see the whole uniform, because he
really wants to depict it fully.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
You that's awesome, Yeah, that is some serious commitment.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
It's incredible when you see the details and you notice
what's actually drawn and incorporated into the story. There's a
bit in this cafe that I remember and like it's
a cafe in Nepal and the way the waiters stressed,
and then I saw a photo of the time that
he'd used. It's remarkable anyway. What's also really interesting about
Tinton and Tibet is that the plot is different from
all the other Tintin books. It's not really about capturing
(38:42):
a villain, and there's no car chases or classic Tintin
tropes like that. Instead, the book is about Tinton's quest
to find his friend Chong.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Blue Lotus Chong the same gun, yeah, the same one.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
And I actually think that proves how much the real
Jong meant to j right like that he brings them
back into the stories during this what feels like a
pretty difficult period of his life. And in Tintin Inti
that everyone thinks Chong has died in a plane crash,
but Tintin refuses to believe it, and so he risks
his life and his limbs to save him. And also
(39:18):
there's a Yetti in this book, this appearance, which is
just super fun and sweet and.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Oh yeah, any points for YETI.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Anyway said that it was his favorite of the albums
he ever drew, and he calls it quote the story
of a friendship. Ah.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, there's something really poetic in this. You know that
the lessons he learned from his real friend Jong helped him,
you know, make his favorite book.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, definitely. It's also sort of like a perfect place
to end today's episode. But we are not done with
Tintin yet, because this is just part one of the story.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
That's right, So be sure to tune back in to
hear part two, where we'll talk about Jay's behavior during
World War Two, comic bands in America, and serious long
lost play that one of our good friends actually just rediscovered.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
It is an amazing story, and in the meantime, we'd
love to hear what you think about Tinton or anything else.
Email us at high Geniuses at gmail dot com. That's
Hi Geniuses at gmail dot com, or give us a
call on a hotline that is three oh two four
oh five five nine two five. I love that it's
a three or two areo code for all my Delawareans.
(40:25):
And you can also find us on Instagram and Blue Sky.
No matter how you get in touch, you know we'd
love hearing from you. This episode was written by the
always adventurous Mursa Brown. Thank you, Marissa. It was also
edited by Gabe and from Dylan, Mary, Gabe, Will and myself.
Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is
(40:56):
a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted
by Will Pearson and me Mongshatikler and researched by our
goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced
by the wonderful Dylan Fagan, with support from Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel
(41:16):
and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay,
trustee Dara Potts and Vine Shorey. For more podcasts from
Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Part-Time Genius News
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Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.