Bequiffed cartoon reporter Tintin is entering the U.S. public domain next month, but only the incarnation found in early publications, badly-drawn and racist as they were. The character would only take his distinctive modern form in later works, as Hergé refined his skills and upended his politics: in the 1940s, he redrew most of his earliest works to bring them up to the quality of his later ligne claire style.

The simply drawn teen with dots for eyes and bangs like an ocean wave first appeared in a supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, and became a weekly feature. The comic also first appeared in the U.S. in 1929. Its signature bright colors — including Tintin's red hair — didn't appear until years later, and could, like Popeye's spinach, be the subject of legal disputes.And in much of the world, Tintin won't become public property until 70 years after the 1983 death of his creator.
We'll have to wait another decade for The Blue Lotus, widely held as the first classic in the series, not least for its explicitly anti-racist message.
Literary critic Tom McCarthy thought that The Blue Lotus showed evidence of Hergé's "left-wing counter-tendency" that rejected his earlier right-wing worldview. He believed that this was partly due to the influence of Zhang, who had destroyed Hergé's "European absolutism", and overall thought of it as "the most visually rich of all the Tintin books". Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès of Stanford University thought that Wang signified the forces of good in the story while Rastapopoulos represented evil, and that the character Didi – who was poisoned with Raijaijah – inverted "the model of justice ruling the world of the Good". He saw a similarity between Didi and Tintin, who both have "feline suppleness, a devotion to good causes, and the patience of an animal stalking its prey"
I once made a parody zine of Tintin where an elderly Haddock tracks down the now middle-aged Tintin to Kinshasa, where he is running guns during the Congo Crisis. Heart of Darkness, right? Dark humor, very bleak. L'acclameur! L'acclameur! If you have a copy, get in touch.