I would say: skip the early ones. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and especially Tintin in the Congo are outrageously bad (Tintin in the Congo is horrendously racist). Tintin didn't really become the Tintin we know and love until Blue Lotus, though Cigars of the Pharaoh is still readable.
Like, the parts of Tintin that capture the imagination, the world travel, the realistic depiction of different cultures, the great adventure stories, all of that starts with Blue Lotus.
When people criticize Tintin for being racist, what they're really criticizing are those early stories. In the later stories, the ones that everyone falls in love with, Hergé went to enormous trouble to depict cultures accurately, gathering huge amounts of references to depict everything accurately (you see that in this article, with the image from Blue Lotus). In these stories, almost without exception, Tintin is the champion of colonized and oppressed peoples, and the stories hold up extremely well.
Like, the parts of Tintin that capture the imagination, the world travel, the realistic depiction of different cultures, the great adventure stories, all of that starts with Blue Lotus.
When people criticize Tintin for being racist, what they're really criticizing are those early stories. In the later stories, the ones that everyone falls in love with, Hergé went to enormous trouble to depict cultures accurately, gathering huge amounts of references to depict everything accurately (you see that in this article, with the image from Blue Lotus). In these stories, almost without exception, Tintin is the champion of colonized and oppressed peoples, and the stories hold up extremely well.