Too hot a potato?

Evidently bowing to public concern about its racist content, Little, Brown has dropped the controversial title “Tintin in the Congo” from its fall list and its planned 24-volume box set of the beloved mid-20th-century stories about the intrepid globe-trotting adventurer.

Little, Brown publicist Melanie Chang didn’t explain why the book had been dropped from the fall release schedule, but she told Publishers Weekly that it was being pulled from the commemorative set because “given the controversy surrounding the Congo title, we felt including it in the box set would eclipse the true intention of the collection, which is to showcase Hergé’s extraordinary art and his remarkable contribution to the graphic arts.”

The Borders chain had already decided in July that it would follow the lead of its British bookstores and place the book on adult-content shelves because of its colonial-era depiction of black Africans who resemble monkeys and speak pidgin English.

“Tintin in the Congo,” first published in 1931, was Belgian artist Hergé’s second book in a series chronicling the adventures of a quick-witted young reporter and his fluffy white dog, Snowy. Hergé, the pen name of Belgian cartoonist Georges Rémi, actually redrew the book in 1946 to excise references to the Congo as a Belgian colony. But it was not reprinted in Britain until recently because it still contained such images as a black woman bowing to Tintin and saying, “White man very great. ... White mister is big juju man!”

When the book was released there earlier this year, Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality denounced it for depicting black Africans as “savage natives” who “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.”
In light of the controversy, the U.S. publisher promised in July that it would try to “contextualize” the stereotypes Europeans had about black Africans at the time. Could that have proved harder than anyone thought?

Little, Brown says it still plans to reissue “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” and “Tintin and Alph-Art” in November as part of a centenary celebration of the author’s work. But the publisher is delaying release of the box set to coincide with a Tintin movie planned by directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. “We felt it best to time the publication of the box set closer to the release of what is sure to be a spectacular film,” Chang said.

Exactly when that will be is unclear. The duo only just signed British TV writer Steven Moffat (“Doctor Who”) to adapt three Tintin stories for the screen, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Tuesday.

All three will be shot in 3-D, using the same motion-capture style Jackson used to create Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. According to Variety, Spielberg finally succeeded last year in his quarter-century quest to secure screen rights to the Tintin series. Spielberg and Jackson haven’t revealed which three of Hergé’s titles they’ll film.

Kristina Lindgren