Sunday, April 04, 2010

Tintin In The Congo – An Essay With Attitude


Here is the reason why I haven’t posted for a while. What started off as a good idea -soon became a nightmare, as I realised my thoughts and expectations far surpassed my IT competence.

This ‘essay’ has been changed a bit to cover my ass with the Open University, but not only that, it is impossible to plagiarise.

This particular part of the course on Children’s Literature, which covered illustrated children’s books, was a true eye opener, and I will never look at a kid’s book again without looking for all the minute details some of the creators of this genre invest in their prodigies. I am still astounded at the brilliant quality of the OU course materials and tutorship. I am not authorised to show my tutors comments, nor my result…but let’s just say I had a drink with Captain Haddock when they came in.

Two of the set books I have used in nuances of acknowledgement within the grand total of this essay – in particular Beatrice Potter and the post-modern Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne.

The work involved in this presentation nearly killed me! I simply could not fathom how to inbed images etc, so landed up doing it in a most painful way.

In the end, it is a MS Word document that is as functional as Captain Haddock after six bottles of whisky. Naturally, I couldn’t post it. Not only that, the file was so huge, at 11.5 mb, the OU refused to accept it!

Cut a long story short…dig this…after blowing up my computer with the nonsense (I tell no lie, I now have a brand new one with Windows 7), I printed the lot out and scanned it. Completely insane - as I ran out of ink on the second page! Ebay to the rescue…el-cheepo ink. It worked.

Some of the detail is amazing. The envelope has the address of the Tintin publisher and the stamp does really exist. I even found the Tintin fonts! The parodies are real. It was amazing what I all found and ‘stole’ to create this. I found out that copyrighting images on the internet is next to impossible, and should any one pursue this, you can shut down 99% of Google images overnight.

I thank all and sundry for the images I used, and the amazing links and information regarding not just Tintin, but the furore around his adventure in the Congo.

Finally – I thought of putting this up in bits, but the few people who have seen this already, insist it should go up as one.

HOW IT WORKS

Place curser on image > left click once.
Use Ctrl and the + or – at the same time to get the size perfect for reading.
Hit the 'Go Back Page' to go to the next image.



Page One


Page Two

Page Three

 
Page Four

Page Five

Page Six

Page Seven

Page Eight

Page Nine

Page Ten

Page Eleven

Page Twelve

Page Thirteen

And...The End.
Please leave comments...




6 comments:

Lisa L said...

Karl, just finished reading the first time. I'm sure if i read it again i'll see far more - bit like an Anthony Browne book! Huge admiration for you taking you're own unique stance with this question. Hope you got the mark you were after.

Lisa

Anonymous said...

Hope you got 100% for this - it's brilliant. Thanks for putting it online, you're a real inspiration, but I doubt that my tutors will ever see anything this good from me!
Lynne.

Ian McNeill said...

Brilliant !

If you ever want computer help coma e and see me at the College in Harlech...

Unless you want to offend more tourists outside the pub ? :-D

landkee said...

http://www.landkee.com/00660.html - Totally Tintin!

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your contribution to the understanding of 20th century children's literature.

I do feel a fuller understanding could have been achieved if you had made reference to the relationship between Big Ears and Noddy and how this was a huge influence on J K Rowlings treatment of the relationship between Ron Weasley and Harry Potter.

Very importantly since where was the reference to Daleks, I am most disappointed.

In all seriousness, the essay was very enjoyable but not long enough.

Karl said...

I fucked up. In total exhaustion and running out of time, even with a week's extension-
I could not hassle doing the correct references. Hence got marked down to 87%