Quite the opposite. It's very interesting so see how his point of view on strangers and especially black people changed.
In an interview, he told his story wasn't racist on purpose ; he truly believed that was how black people were based on the very few informations he had at the time - he never traveled outside of Belgium.
When he made the next one with a chinese person, he contacted a student who was originally from China to educate himself on how Asia really was, the culture, the people, etc. And that's how he came up with one of the best books of this career.
>Hergé met Chang Chong-Ren for the first time in Brussels in 1934 at the urging of one Abbé Gosset. Gosset, the chaplain to a group of Chinese Catholic students at Louvain University, had been concerned about the racist stereotypes in Hergé’s first two hugely popular Tintin books, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, and urged him to ‘do a little research’ before embarking on his next book, The Blue Lotus, set in China.
Totally agree, but this context is important, the book in a vacuum is not the complete picture. The corrected version is much better, but there is still a lot of white saviorism. But Chang is indeed not a caricature.
This is why the most immediately jarring thing of the Congo comic, in my opinion, is not even the strong racism. It's the relentless animal-brutality-based “comedy”. The racism is not so much meant as the butt of the joke, more just a shoddy world view.
In an interview, he told his story wasn't racist on purpose ; he truly believed that was how black people were based on the very few informations he had at the time - he never traveled outside of Belgium.
When he made the next one with a chinese person, he contacted a student who was originally from China to educate himself on how Asia really was, the culture, the people, etc. And that's how he came up with one of the best books of this career.