Tintin in America America"). The dog Snowy was given a diminished role in "Tintin in America", which contained the last instance in the "Adventures" in which Tintin and Snowy have a conversation where they are able to understand each other. In the banquet scene, a reference is made to a famous actress named Mary Pikefort, an allusion to the real-life actress Mary Pickford. That same scene also featured a prototype for the character of Rastapopoulos, who was properly introduced in the following "Cigars of the Pharaoh" story. The strip's serialisation coincided with the publication of another of Hergé's comics set in the United
Tintin in the Congo the final scene. Literary critic Tom McCarthy concurred that Tintin represented the Belgian state, but also suggested that he acted as a Christian missionary, even being "a kind of god" akin to the character of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1899). McCarthy compared the scene where Tintin exposes Muganga as a fraud to that in which the character of Prospero exposes the magician in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest". In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, several campaigners and writers characterised "Tintin in the Congo" as racist due to its portrayal of the Congolese as infantile and stupid.