PRAISED PLAGIARISM…BLAH!

This morning one of my nephews who ‘inherited’ my avidity in reading came to my room and reported, “Aunty, I found a comic book that really looks like Tin-tin at the bookstore yesterday…look!”
As I scrutinized the comic in my hand, I could not agree with him more.
Alright, the name of the main protagonist is not the same (almost similar though…), but he looks like Tin-tin, not blondie but brunette, and instead of having a dog as his company in investigating and catching bad guys, his company is a girl. The setting is being made believe to be as Indonesian as possible, but really, it’s a copy cat of Tin-tin.
It’s like a cookie taken from the same mold, not with the same ingredients and they added some other stuff here and there, and of course, the taste is not even half as good. Besides, I’ve already lost my respect. No imitation shines as good as the original one, and you just simply can’t argue with it.
There’s even an imitation of Doctor Calculus and my beloved Captain Haddock, only his vocabulary of cussing and swearing is not that impressive. As a big fan of Tin-tin, I am terribly offended!
Furiously, I flipped over the pages to look of any ‘disclaimer’, or better, any ‘acknowledgement’ for their efforts of imitating the famous Tin-tin, or anything stating, “We have got the permission from Herge blablabla” or whatever, that would probably justify it a little bit.
Instead, I found some reviews from some supposedly top dogs, bragging about it being the breakthrough in the comic world of Indonesia, ladies and gentlemen… very original, very Indonesia…local comic that deserves to be put alongside the world class ones…BLAH!!! Shed me some light here, am I the only one here who knows TINTIN??? Get out of it!
However, I still wanted to compromise. It might be different in content, I thought, so I started to read it. I only could do it til page 10, and then I tossed away that book in resentment, imagining Herge rolling restless in his tomb if only he knows about it.
Being objective, the illustration is not bad. Pretty good actually, which makes me even sadder. What a wasted, misused talent. Why not trying to make something of your own (you can do it if you try!), why committing plagiarism and forcing people to ‘praise’ it. Isn’t it enough that all our TV series are but copycats of some foreign dramas?