Research on popular geopolitics brings together the cultural study of media with the earlier tradition of geopolitical analysis. As Klaus Dodds says, “‘popular geopolitics’ considers films, magazines, television, the Internet, and radio and the way in which they contribute to the circulation of geopolitical images and representations of territory, resources, and identity”. Perhaps the most discussed aspect of the geopolitics of comics so far has been the popular geopolitics constructed through popular media narratives, the geopolitical knowledge that is constructed in media representations and in the everyday practices of media audiences and users.
In recent years, critical geography and geopolitical studies journals and other publications have explored a range of comics phenomena in relation to popular geopolitics, from the aesthetics of war comics to Joe Sacco’s reports; and from the relationship between geography and comics representations of cities to the geopolitics and geographies of Tintin. It may well be that the some of the richest scientific literature deals with this popular adventure series by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, “Tintin”. The almost global recognition, the popularity in English and French, the relatively closed corpus (published between 1929 and 1976) at the time of the author’s death, and the spread of allusions, pastiches and parodies, may have stimulated scholarly research. Colonialism, the Cold War, takeovers, attempts at conquest, espionage, smuggling, international crime, oil politics – Tintin reflects on geopolitical topicalities in the framework of adventure stories.
