Tintin goes boom-boom

BRUSSELS (AFP): The Belgian prosecutor’s office says it has seized hundreds of forged comic books depicting Belgium’s fabled boy reporter Tintin and his trusty dog Snowy on a sex spree in Bangkok. Some 650 copies of a comic book entitled “Tintin in Thailand” were scooped up by undercover police over the weekend. They depict Tintin, always a model of propriety aimed at youthful consumption, being sodomized in a gay bar. Little Snowy, a fox terrier of equally impeccable morals, is depicted performing similar acts with a Siamese cat. Other scenes show Tintin and his habitual friends, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus, guzzling beer in a strip bar in Bangkok’s Patpong district. In the forged version, Tintin has acquired a new friend, Chang, who does abominable things to poor Snowy. The authorities knew right away they were forgeries because Tintin’s creator, Hergé, has never sent his roving hero to Thailand. And he has certainly never had him mouthing the kind of foul language peppering the phony version, which was signed by someone called “Bud E. Weyser”. The weekend raid resulted from a tip to Belgian federal police last month from Hergé’s publisher that copies of “Tintin in Thailand” were being offered to wholesale distributors. Police, initially posing as potential customers, arrested and questioned two men, and seized bundles of the comic books in Tournai in southern Belgium. They then questioned the “author” in the northern city of Antwerp. The three men were released after giving statements, said the prosecutor’s office, which said the counterfeiters had had some 1,000 copies of the comic book printed in Thailand for sale in Belgium at between 1,000 and 1,300 Belgian francs (1,035-1,350 baht) a copy.