Breaking free

And today's pick is The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free, a classic tale of insurrection and urban uprising by J. Daniels. A "anarchist parody of the popular Tintin comics." Originally published by Attack International in April 1988 with their urging to freely distribute.

Content notes for racism, homophobia, swastika, fist fights, brick throwing, police violence, sex, and arson.

There's a couple of different ways to read this volume for free online. So maybe look that up on duck duck go. As you can see, because I'm really bad at ever tackling digital comics, I ultimately picked up a paper copy printed by Freedom Press, which also included the much shorter piece about Tintin and the Wapping Dispute. This was originally a pamphlet from The Scum in 1986.

Keywords that came to mind reading this volume was community, intersectionality, resistance, solidarity, unions, and striking.

The summary is "Finally back in print! He's back, and he's bad! Now Tintin's back with all his pals—Captain Haddock et al—battling it out against the State and bringing the old world to its knees, in a classic full-length graphic story of love, struggle and freedom. Give to your little niece or nephew for an adventure they can really get stuck into."

The creative team bios are very short today because J. Daniels is, unsurprisingly, a pseudonym.

Looking at the writing, I thought it was very readable, fairly action packed, and nicely paced. I particularly appreciated the way they were unafraid to show people as having flaws and learning. It does actually impress me how natural the arc of the story played out considering that our main protagonists are basically just being presented with a series of obstacles to mass organizing and learning how to overcome them one by one. First we have the divide between so called men's work and women's work; then someone wants to exclude none white workers and they get told off; then Tintin is homophobic and his squatter neighbor corrects him; we get a dash of solidarity strikes, critique of useless unions, gentrification and prisoner support. As someone who already agrees with all these points, obviously I'm less likely to find it preachy, but I think the comic doesn't come across as didactic because all these things happen fairly quickly and are framed as positive and natural changes.

The artwork was also pretty fun. Obviously this is a Tintin parody, and I think they were successful in recreating the look of those comics. Page layouts were easy to follow and the framing kept the action moving. A+.

Looking at Wikipedia, it does appear to have stirred up quite the controversy when it was originally printed. But would you expect much less, honestly.

Wrapping things up, we've already talked a bit about the different identities and points of diversity I like to highlight in each of my reviews.

I may have missed something but I feel like disability was perhaps the only identity that got missed. Which, while not totally unexpected, is a vital and very important aspect to take into consideration when discussing work related politics.

Finally, I'm going to give this five stars. It was just too much fun.