Hergé

Personal

Actual name Georges Remi; born May 22, 1907, in Etterbeek, Belgium; died of leukemia March 3, 1983, in Brussels, Belgium; son of Alexis and Lisa Remi; married Germaine Kieckens, 1932 (divorced, 1975); married Fanny Vlaminck, 1977.

Career

Boy Scout Belge, Brussels, Belgium, cartoonist, 1923-26, author of comic strip, "The Adventures of Totor, Troop Leader," 1926; Vingtieme Siecle (newspaper), Brussels, creator of comic strip "Tintin" for weekly supplement Petit Vingtieme, 1929-41; "Tintin" was syndicated in newspapers throughout the world. Also creator of comic strips "Jo, Zette et Jocko" and "Quick et Flupke." Military service: Belgian First Infantry Regiment, 1926-27; attained rank of sergeant.

Awards, Honors

St-Michel Grand Prize (Brussels), 1973, for lifetime achievement; Prix Ardenne, 1975; Ruby Medal of City of Angouleme, 1977; Officer Grade, Belgian Order of the Crown, 1978; Mickey Award, Walt Disney Co., 1979; planetoid named "Hergé" in his honor by Belgian Society of Astronomy, 1982.

Writings

CARTOON BOOKS

Tintin au pays des Soviets, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1930, translation published as The Adventures of Tintin, Reporter for "Le Petit Vingtieme," in the Land of the Soviets, Last Gasp (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

Tintin au congo, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1931, published as Les aventures de Tintin, reporter du petit "Vingtieme" au Congo, 1982, translation published as The Adventures of Tintin, Reporter for "Le Petit Vingtieme," in the Congo, Last Gasp (San Francisco, CA)2002.

Tintin en Amérique, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1932, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Tintin in America, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1979.

Les cigares du pharaon, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1934, translation by Lonsdale-Cooper and Turner published as The Cigars of the Pharaoh, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Le lotus bleu, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1936, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Blue Lotus, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1984.

L'oreille cassée, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1937, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Tintin and the Broken Ear, Methuen (London, England), 1975, published as The Broken Ear, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978.

L'ile noire, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1938, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Black Island, Methuen (London, England), 1966, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Le sceptre d'Ottokar, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1939, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as King Ottokar's Sceptre, Methuen (London, England), 1958.

Le crabe aux pinces d'or, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1941, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Crab with the Golden Claws, Methuen (London, England), 1958, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1974.

L'etoile mysterieuse, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1942, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Shooting Star, Methuen (London, England), 1961, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978.

Le secret de la licorne, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1943, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Secret of the Unicorn, Methuen (London, England), 1959, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1974.

Le tresor de Rackham le Rouge, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1945, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Red Rackham's Treasure, Methuen (London, England), 1959.

Les sept boules de Cristal, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1948, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Seven Crystal Balls, Methuen (London, England), 1963, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Le temple du soleil, two volumes, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1949, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Prisoners of the Sun, Methuen (London, England), 1962, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Tintin au pays de l'or noir, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1951, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Land of Black Gold, Methuen (London, England), 1972, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Objectif lune, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1953, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Destination Moon, Methuen (London, England), 1959, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

On a marche sur la lune, two volumes, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1954, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Explorers on the Moon, Methuen (London, England), 1959, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

L'affaire tournesol, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1956, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Calculus Affair, Methuen (London, England), 1960, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

Les exploits de Quick et Flupke, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1956, reprinted, 1982.

Coke en stock, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1958, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Red Sea Sharks, Methuen (London, England), 1960.

Tintin au Tibet, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1960, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Tintin in Tibet, Methuen (London, England), 1962, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Les bijoux de la Castafiore, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1963, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as The Castafiore Emerald, Methuen (London, England), 1963, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Tintin and the Golden Fleece, Methuen (London, England), 1965.

Vol 714 pour Sydney, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1968, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Flight 714, Methuen (London, England), 1968, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Popol out West, Methuen (London, England), 1969.

Destination New York, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1971.

Tintin et le lac aux requins (also see below; based on Hergé's screenplay of the same title), Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1973, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Tintin and the Lake of Sharks, Methuen (London, England), 1973.

Tintin et les picaros, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1976, translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published as Tintin and the Picaros, Methuen (London, England), 1976, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978.

Archives Hergé (contains Totor, C. P. des Hannetons, Tintin au pays des Soviets, Tintin au Congo, Tintin en Amérique, L'ile noire, Le sceptre d'Ottokar, and Le crabe aux pinces d'or), Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1980.

The Making of Tintin (contains The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham's Treasure), Methuen Children's Books (London, England), 1983.

Special Hergé: Vive Tintin! Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1983.

L'oeuvre integrale de Hergé, Rombaldi, 1984—.

Le musée imaginaire de Tintin, Chateau (Angillon, France), 1984.

The Making of Tintin in the World of the Incas (contains Prisoners of the Sun and The Seven Crystal Balls), Methuen Children's Books (London, England), 1984.

(Illustrator) Ils ont marche sur la lune, de la fiction a la realite: Exposition au Centre Wallonie Bruxelles a Paris, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1985.

Tintin et l'Alph-Art, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1986.

The Valley of the Cobras, Methuen (London, England), 1986.

The Tintin Games Book, translated from the French by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner, Methuen (London, England), 1986.

OTHER

(With Jacques Van Melkebeke) Tintin aux Indes: le mystere du diamant bleu (three-act play), first produced in Brussels, Belgium, 1941.

(With Jacques Van Melkebeke) M. Boullock à disparu (three-act play), first produced in Brussels, Belgium, 1941.

Also author of Popol et Virginie au pays des lapinos.

Adaptations

The Crab with the Golden Claws wasmadeintoan animated puppet feature, 1947; segments of the radio series Les aventures de Tintin, with Claude Vincent as the voice of Tintin, were broadcast on Radio-Luxembourg, 1950, 1955, 1958; Les aventures de Tintin (animated cartoon series) was produced in Belgium by Belvision, 1956-57; Les aventures de Tintin (radio series), with Maurice Sarfati as the voice of Tintin, was broadcast on RTF, 1959 and on Europe 1 Radio, 1964; Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece, based on an original story, was adapted as a movie starring Jean-Pierre Talbot as Tintin, 1961; Tintin and the Blue Oranges, based on an original story, was adapted as a movie starring Jean-Pierre Tabot as Tintin, 1964; Prisoners of the Sun was adapted as Tintin and the Temple of the Sun (animated cartoon), Belvision, 1969; Tintin and the Lake of Sharks (animated cartoon), based on an original story, was produced by Belvision, 1972; Moi, Tintin (film) was produced by Elan Films, 1976; Tintin's GreatAmerican Adventure (play based on Hergé's character), was produced at the Arts Theater, London, 1977; Adventures of Tintin (animated cartoon series), HBO/Ellipse Productions/Nelvana Animations, 1992.

Sidelights

"Tintin is a young man known by the flaxen mop that comes to a point on the top of his bubble head," noted Washington Post columnist Charles Trueheart. "As a cartoon hero, he is as familiar to Europeans as Superman is to Americans, and he shares his pluck and invincibility." For over fifty years cartoonist Georges Remi—better known under his pseudonym of Hergé (pronounced "air-JAY," the French pronunciation of his initials reversed)—chronicled the far-flung adventures of the boy reporter, his trusty dog Milou—or Snowy as it is known in questionable translation—and their companions Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and the twin detectives Thomson and Thompson. The never-aging Tintin made Hergé "the most influential cartoonist" of the twentieth century, Martin Spence reported in the London Times. Tintin's twenty-four adventures have been translated into over fifty languages, including Chinese, Welsh, Icelandic, Indonesian, Basque, Hebrew, Esperanto, and five Indian dialects. Some 300 million people are said to have followed the saga worldwide.

Tintin is "an ambassador of Europe in the world," wrote Pierre Assouline, Hergé's biographer. "He represents universal values: friendship, loyalty, kindness, generosity, courage. He never shoots a gun, yet he never fails to put the bad guy out of commission." Indeed Tintin has terrific staying power, continuing to sell well in facsimile editions more than seven decades after the strip was conceived and long after the death of its creator in 1983. This is all the more amazing considering the fact that Hergé conceived of the Tintin character in five minutes—as he often enjoyed telling interviewers— having to meet a deadline for the youth supplement of the Catholic newspaper he was working for in 1929. Hergé was only twenty-one at the time. "Initially a young man's lark," wrote Tobi Tobias in the Los Angeles Times, "the [Tintin] oeuvre—there's no more appropriate word for it—grew in technical aplomb, visual and intellectual complexity, emotion and even philosophic sophistication. Blessedly, it never lost its rare blend of poetic vision and down-to-earth comedy. The humor, rooted equally in personalities and pratfalls, is an acknowledgment of—perhaps a hymn to—life's perpetual absurdity." Yet Tintin and Hergé have their critics, as well, those who point to the crude propaganda of the first title, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, or to the paternalistic colonialism, if not downright racism, inherent in the second, Tintin in the Congo. Hergé was also blacklisted after World War II for supposed collaboration with the German occupiers of Belgium. But through it all, both Hergé and his boy scout alter ego, Tintin, prevailed, becoming one of the best-known cartoon figures in the world. As Patricia Brennan noted in the Washington Post, French leader Charles DeGaulle was once heard to remark, "My only international rival is Tintin." And Hergé's illustrations have become collectors items in themselves, "popular art of the highest order," in the estimation of Tobias.

Georges Remi, Boy Scout

Born in 1907 to Alexis and Elisabeth Remi, the future Hergé grew up in a middle-class district of Brussels, Belgium. From his earliest days he could only be pacified with crayons and some paper, and was a constant sketcher by the time he reached grade school. As a young boy during World War I his country was occupied by Germans, and during the occupation, Hergé doodled at the bottom of school papers, creating cartoons of a little man fighting the Germans. From the age of eleven, Hergé was also an active member of the boy scouts, a training that shaped his entire life. In an interview with Numa Sadoul in Comics Journal, the cartoonist commented, "Boy scouts are not very popular these days and I understand why: The scout movement is somewhat irrelevant, somewhat childish, and certainly out of fashion. At least it has been an excellent school of life for me." According to Hergé in the same interview, Tintin "behaves in life, a little bit like a scout."

Hergé was largely self-taught as an artist. As he told Sadoul, "I never really formally studied drawing. At school I would never get anything higher than a 'C' in this discipline." Attempting to attend the Catholic-run Saint Luc art school, Hergé quit after one class, forced to draw a classical column all night long. "I had no interest in plaster," he told Sadoul, "I wanted to draw people, to draw living things! But at the time, this Catholic milieu, it was totally out of the question that I study live models: the nude was Satan, Beelzebub, et al." While still a high school student, Hergé began his first comic strip, "The Adventures of Totor," featuring a heroic boy scout, for the magazine Boy Scout Belge. This strip was, according to Kim Thompson, writing in Comics Journal, "crudely drawn." It also used a descriptive text at the bottom of the frame, as in Hal Foster's popular strip "Prince Valiant," rather than more modern word balloons. In spite of these deficiencies, "the series is a clear precursor to 'Tintin,' including its spunky, round-faced hero," according to Thompson.

Graduating from secondary school in 1925, Hergé joined the staff of the Catholic daily Vingtieme Siecle ("Twentieth Century"), working in the subscription department. Meanwhile, he continued doing the "Totor" strip, even during the year he served in the military. Returning from his military training to his job at the Catholic magazine in 1927, Hergé was soon taken under the wing of its director, Abbe Norbert Wallez, who encouraged the young man to further his reading and artistic pursuits, having him work as a cartoonist, photographer, layout artist, and general illustrator. The following year the newspaper began publishing a supplement for young readers, Petit Vingtieme, and Wallez commissioned Hergé to illustrate a strip created by a sports writer for the newspaper, a comic called "Les aventures de Flup, Nenesse, Poussette et Cochonnet," a "mercifully short-lived illustrated story," according to Thompson. During this time, Hergé also made two important discoveries that would further his own development. One was the work of Alain Saint-Ogan with his strip "Zig et Puce," and the other was the work of American comic-strip artists such as Geo. McManus and his "Bringing up Father," as well as other strips such as "Krazy Kat" and "The Katzenjammer Kids." The freewheeling humor of these strips was appealing to Hergé, as was their use of speech balloons instead of narrative text.

Tintin to the Rescue

With the encouragement of Wallez, Hergé transformed an early gag strip he had worked on, which featured a boy and a dog, and came up with "Tintin," a comic strip that began in the January 19, 1929, issue of Petit Vingtieme. Many of Hergé's boy scout values were reflected in his character Tintin, a young boy reporter who battled gun runners, smugglers, corrupt politicians, and pirates in the course of covering a story. Tintin has a tuft of yellow hair sticking from the top of his head, a round, naive face, perpetually raised eyebrows, and is dressed in slightly ridiculous-looking baggy pants. His white fox terrier Milou accompanies him on all of his adventures, providing companionship and comic relief. Snowy is able to speak, although only the reader can understand him, and he enjoys making snide comments on the story's development. Tintin's friend Captain Haddock, who comes on board later in the series, is a gruff, tough, and salty fellow who swears colorful oaths in original and yet ultimately acceptable language, while the brilliant Professor Calculus, another mid-course addition, is absentminded, gentle, and a bit deaf. The bumbling twin detectives Thomson and Thompson, indistinguishable save for a slight difference in the twirl of their moustaches, rounded out the team. The only female character of ongoing importance is Bianca Castafiore, a very emotional opera singer who seems to know only one tune. Another minor, repeating character, is Nestor, the Butler at Haddock's estate, Marlinspike Hall. Together, the group solves mysteries and pursues adventure in such exotic locales as Tibet, Arabia, India, and even on the moon. Most of the plots revolved around such staples as hidden treasure, stolen jewels, and nefarious criminal plots.

The first book-length Tintin adventure, Tintin au pays des Soviets, appeared in 1930 and took the intrepid boy reporter to the Soviet Union. A sixty-four-page, black-and-white, over-sized volume, this first adventure reprinted a year's worth of the comic strip. Tintin au pays des Soviets is bitterly anti-communist, with Tintin explaining that the Soviet Union is a "stinking cesspool" and claiming that communist leaders Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin are "amassing the treasures stolen from the people." The book's anti-Communist propagandizing prompted Hergé not to reissue the book for several decades. As Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier noted in their book The Pocket Essential Tintin, "in the immediate post-war years, when most of Western Europe had substantial pro-Communist sympathies.…Hergé had learned to becareful." Hergé was, the authors concluded, "afraid of confronting the European left of the 1950s and 1960s, and so he partially disowned Tintin in the Land of the Soviets." The story tells of reporter Tintin traveling to Moscow to report on conditions in the Soviet Union. After first being arrested by the Russian secret police, Tintin escapes and, in disguise, joins the Red Army. Exposed, he then must head out into the frozen waste of the Russian heartland where he discovers a secret vault in which the Communist leadership have stashed away gold and treasure for themselves. Trusty Milou saves him, and Tintin returns to Belgium in triumph. Over the course of the production of this first story, Hergé came into his own as an artist and scripter, the final pages much more indicative of his "clear line" drawing style—with its absence of shading and emphasis on clean delineation—than the early pages. By the end of the story, Hergé had also attracted a legion of young fans to his creation. So popular had the strip become that at its conclusion, Wallez staged a promotional campaign, hiring a young actor to play Tintin, and greeting him with a huge crowd of fans at the Brussels train station when he "returned" from the Soviet Union.

This initial Tintin offering was published in English for the first time in 1989 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Tintin enterprise. At that time, a reviewer for the Economist found that there was not much "to enthuse about" in this early work. "Clearly everything that made the later stories so popular had yet to gel in the fledgling cartoonist's mind." The same reviewer missed the detail of the later drawings as well as the sidekicks that came to the series later. However this critic did note that "at least the plot runs true to form, and Tintin's chaotic journey through communist Russia is infected with the same gung-ho spirit as subsequent stories about Arab drug-dealers and Cold War spies." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly had kinder words for a 2002 printing of this early effort, calling it an "enthralling look at the early work of one of the greatest cartoonists of all time," and also noting that if Hergé's "clear-line drawing style" is absent from this freshman work, his "ability to tell a good story is well developed." Already Hergé had hit on his winning formula: "Tintin rockets form one death-defying scrape to another in a whirlwind of chase scenes," the Publishers Weekly contributor further noted.

Later Tintin books followed the same format and approach. Controversy greeted Tintin's second adventure, Tintin au Congo, this time for alleged racism and colonialism; Hergé portrayed the story's African natives as dull-witted, comic figures. This work, however, was done at the instigation of Wallez, who wanted to promote colonialism. Tintin au Congo suffered the fate of the first title: for many years it was banned from the Hergé oeuvre because of its outmoded political views, which were, in later editions, toned down. The story tells of Tintin visiting the Belgian Congo and encountering a mysterious stowaway who tries to kill him, even going so far as to foster war between two rival tribes. After the stowaway is finally chased into a river and drowns, Tintin learns that the man was a gangster associate of Al Capone, who has been trying to corner the diamond market. Capone appears as a character in the third book in the series, Tintin en Amérique (translated as Tintin in America), which was called anti-American because of its portrayal of violent Chicago gangsters during Prohibition. But such criticism did not hurt sales. And Hergé brushed aside the objections: "The Left has said I'm Right, and the Right has said I'm Left. I don't like to contradict either." Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post noted that "Tintin was accused at various times of being racist, fascist and even homosexual.… His true ethos was that of the boy scout who never grew up." "Tintin," Aidan Chambers explained in Children's Book News, "is an upholder of all things traditional, established, and legal."

Tintin in the War Years

After "Tintin," Hergé created other strips, such as "Quick and Flupke," but these were short-lived and he always came back to his Tintin. Subsequent adventures took the youthful hero to Egypt and on to China in The Blue Lotus. With the latter, however, Hergé found a new sophistication in his cultural and political views, inspired in part by a letter from a Catholic priest encouraging him not to play on Chinese stereotypes. Hergé was introduced to a young Chinese art student in Brussels, and got an insight into this culture that came through in the subsequent book, The Blue Lotus. As a tribute to this Chinese friend, he created the character Chang in that book. According to Thompson, The Blue Lotus "marks a huge leap in the 'Tintin' saga."

Quickly Hergé developed a schedule for his books: the strips were published in the pages of Petit Vingtieme, then collected and published by the Belgian firm Casterman. He produced a volume per year, gaining new fans with each title. With each successive volume, Hergé also made progress as artist and writer. His political awareness is especially seen in King Ottokar's Sceptre, which in many features mimic the real-life events surrounding the Anschluss or forced unification of Austria with Germany in 1938. The Land of the Black Gold, which should have been the ninth "Tintin" adventure, was left in mid-production with the advent of World War II, largely because of its anti-fascist sentiments. It was finally published in 1948.

The war years brought several important changes to the creation of "Tintin." With new restrictions on supplies of paper, Hergé had to find a way to compress the action, a process that made each frame more telling and filled with detail. To hold the tension not just on each page, but in each strip, he used more gags and more cliffhangers. In return, Casterman began publishing his albums of collected strips in color. Additionally, the Nazi occupiers demanded that there be no political content to his strip. This resulted in more escapist fare, and, ironically, prompted creation of some of the best-loved stories, such as The Crab with the Golden Claws, about counterfeiters in Morocco, The Shooting Star, about a meteor, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, about treasure hunts, and tales of an Inca curse in The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. Hergé also introduced the hard-drinking Captain Haddock and the absent-minded Professor Calculus during these years. Beginning in 1943, Hergé additionally collaborated on some of his comics with Edgar Pierre Jacobs, and a further change came in the daily publication of Hergé's strips. When Vingtieme Siecle went out of business, Hergé became chief editor at Soir Jeunesse, the youth supplement to Le Soir, a Brussels daily run by the occupation forces. Tintin was published in that supplement throughout the war years.

Following the end of the war, however, Hergé was accused of collaborating with the Nazis because of his work on Le Soir and because of his earlier leanings to right wing politics. Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier explained that during the war years, Hergé "tried to remain neutral as best he could. But to be neutral in times like those, living inside an occupied country, was not an easy task." Arrested four different times, he was ultimately exonerated, but was blacklisted for a time in Belgium, as were most of his associates from Le Soir. He continued with the reworking of his earlier black-and-white books into color format, working with Jacobs and Alice Devos. This internal exile ended in 1945 when well-known resistance fighter Raymond Leblanc approached Hergé with an idea for a new magazine. Tintin the magazine appeared in September of 1946, with a new adventure about the intrepid, perpetually young reporter. Circulation of the new magazine soon reached 100,000 copies per week.

Personal Difficulties

As the "Tintin" saga unfolded in the postwar years, the strip became noted for its keen mysteries, gentle humor, and outstanding graphic achievement. Adults as well as children were fans. Brigitte Bardot, Charles de Gaulle, and Madame Chiang Kaishek counted themselves among Tintin's admirers. "The world of Tintin offers satisfactions to the most sophisticated adult," as John Rodenbeck remarked in Children's Literature. A reviewer for Junior Bookshelf claimed that "there are no other strip-cartoons in this class. Tintin enjoys the benefit of meticulous drawing, excellent colour-printing, tireless invention, enormous humour, a gallery of memorable characters.…The catalogue might be extended indefinitely." Nicholas Pease commented in Lion and the Unicorn that "while no claims can (or should) be made for the series as serious literature, [the Tintin saga] uniquely demonstrates that comic book comedy need not be incompatible with the tastes of those who take literature seriously."

In 1954 Hergé released Explorers on the Moon, in which Tintin and his group of friends ride a nuclear-powered spaceship to the moon. The journey includes a space walk that nearly kills Captain Haddock, an exploration of the moon's surface in a tank vehicle, and the discovery that there is ice just beneath the moon's surface. But there is also a stow-away and an enemy agent who must be handled, and the return journey to earth runs low on precious oxygen. Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier believed that Explorers on the Moon "is a triumphant achievement on virtually every level.…The book has withstood the test of time better then most other proto-space exploration novels.… Explorers on the Moon is a true epic of the human imagination."

But all was not well on Hergé's home front. Overwork brought on two breakdowns, and by 1950 Hergé had established Hergé Studios, employing up to a dozen artists to help in the preparation of the strips. Added detail in titles such as Explorers on the Moon and The Calculus Affair are in part a result of this new studio system in which colorists added background as well as detail. By the late 1950s, more private troubles beset Hergé when he and Fanny Vlaminck, one of the artists at Hergé Studios, fell in love. Hergé, an orderly man whose life was lived by the boy scout code, could not forgive himself for betraying his wife of nearly thirty years, Germaine Kieckens. Childless, the couple separated in 1960, but did not divorce until 1975, and two years later Hergé and Fanny married. Yet the affair and his work took their toll: Hergé began to have nightmares of vast whiteness, a mourning of lost purity, perhaps. He saw a psychoanalyst, but finally what cured him was work itself and confronting the whiteness in Tintin in Tibet, a snow-covered adventure that takes Tintin from the Alps to the Himalayas in search of his old friend, Chang.

Hergé continued to turn out his Tintin albums throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but no longer at the rate of one a year. The Castafiore Emerald, a sort of English manor house mystery, appeared in 1963, and Flight 714, about an airplane hijacking, came out five years later. His last full story, Tintin and the Picaros did not come out until 1976. Tintin and Alph-Art, the twenty-fourth title in the series, was in progress when Hergé died in 1983.

The Critical Heritage

As graphic art, Hergé's drawings are among the finest examples to be found in the comic strip genre. Although finding the early strips less competent, Peter Mikelbank of the Washington Post described Hergé's later work as "vibrant imagery" comparable to that of "pioneer American cartoon artist Windsor McCay. Like a cross between the work of Walt Disney and Roy Lichtenstein, Hergé's later strips, rich in texture, pop color definition, and mythology, weave detailed tapestries around their familiar, clean-lined characters." To Sherwin D. Smith of the New York Times Book Review, "the most striking thing about the Tintin books is their art work.… People and animals are drawn very simply, flatly, little more than a firm outline.…Machines—especially airplanes and ships—are done with … precise detail and loving care.… Suddenly, there will be a set piece—a full-page pastiche of a Persian miniature, a 17th-century sea battle, a parrot-filled jungle, a Transylvanian town, an aerial panorama, an under-seascape. The shifts are dramatically and esthetically effective, and, I think, unique." After recounting the many virtues of the Tintin strip, a Times Literary Supplement reviewer remarked that "even considered just as illustration this is among the most interesting work being done today.… Hergé has justified an interesting and immensely popular medium, made it vastly more entertaining and turned it into an art."

Hergé's artwork borrowed much from the cinema, incorporating close-ups, sight gags, and the same narrative pace and sequences found in films. "One does not drop a Tintin any more than one walks out in the middle of a good film," Olivier Todd explained in the Listener. Hergé's work had a tremendous influence on other cartoonists, creating what was called a "Brussels school" of comic strip artists, named after Hergé's hometown in Belgium. The art of this school stresses an attention to realistic detail, a meticulous rendering of color tones, and a controlled, sustained narrative pace.

Several critics pointed out that the strip's enduring appeal, especially for children, was its ever-present humor. Hergé often said that he tried to fit as many "gags" into his stories as possible, and the number of comic scenes, and their variety, was undeniable. "On any given page," Pease recounted, "[Hergé] may give us sparkling wit, low farce, ingenious situation comedy, or whatever other curiosities he wishes to pull from his ragbag of humor." Much of the humor came from the interplay of the strip's characters. Crusty Captain Haddock was known for exclaiming complex, alliterative, but pure oaths when roused to anger, such as "Billions of blistering blue barnacles!" Haddock also had a sailor's weakness for the liquor bottle, and periodic scenes exploited the comic potentials of his tipsiness. Thomson and Thompson "symbolize bureaucratic inefficiency and stupidity," according to Todd, and their futile attempts to solve the mystery at hand provided many comic opportunities.

Tintin's popularity was always phenomenal, particularly in the French-speaking countries. In France and Belgium alone, the "Tintin" books sold some 70 million copies. Tintin also appeared in several films over the years, in two series of cartoons, and even in a London stage play. A measure of the character's enormous appeal can be seen from the reaction at the time of Hergé's death in 1983 from leukemia. Dobbs reported that in Paris, the event was treated "with the solemnity normally reserved for the passing of a great national hero or statesman. Newspapers have come out with black borders, cabinet ministers have been asked to make statements, and philosophers have been pondering the question of how Tintin changed their lives." The Belgian minister of finance, when questioned about Hergé's death and the importance of Tintin, claimed that he had always identified more with Snowy, Tintin's terrier, because "I, too, lead the life of a dog." In the years since Hergé's death a statue of Tintin has been erected in Belgium, and the Centre du Bande Dessine, a comic-strip museum housed in a former luxury hotel and featuring Hergé's original artwork, has been opened in Brussels. In addition, as Mikel-bank noted, more than two dozen books have been published "discussing Tintin in terms of cartoon psychoanalysis, literary criticism, astrological and numerological appreciation. There are Tintin dictionaries, Tintin quizzes, and a coffee-table-sized treatment documenting the strip's influence on contemporary filmmakers and graphic artists." Le kiki, a Tintin-style haircut popular among young Europeans, was also inspired by the comic strip.

Since Hergé's death the Tintin oeuvre has been managed by Moulinsart in Belgium. Moulinsart handles the reprinting of Hergé's many books, and it oversees the marketing and merchandising of the strip's characters. The various Tintin products still enjoy millions of dollars in sales annually. Despite the continuing popularity of Hergé's character, no new artist has been allowed to continue the Tintin comic strip. Hergé insisted that Tintin should die with him, and the Moulinsart has respected his wish. As Dobbs reported, Hergé explained his reason for ending the strip in these words: "Tintin, c'est moi." In the end, nobody was as surprised as Hergé about the phenomenal success of his creation. As he mentioned to Sadoul, "I don't think I've done anything very important. On the contrary, I've always been astonished, and for a long time, by 'Tintin''s success. I would love to know why. Yes, why? Why do the Swedes like it? And why, at the other end of Europe, do the Spaniards like it too?"

If you enjoy the works of Hergé, you might want to check out:

The work of cartoonist Alain Saint-Ogan (1895-1974), creator of the Zig et Puce strip.

Geo. McManus (1884-1954), creator and cartoonist for the strip Bringing Up Father, which began in 1913.

Edgar Pierre Jacobs (1904-1987), who created the cartoon strip Blake & Mortimer.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Algoud, Albert, Tintinolatrie, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1987.

Assouline, Pierre, Hergé: biographie, Plon (Paris, France), 1996.

Baetens, Jan, Hergé Ecrivain, Labor, 1989.

Bonfand, Alain, and Jean-Luc Marion, Hergé, Hachette (Paris, France), 1996.

Butler, Francelia, editor, Children's Literature, Volume 1, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1972.

Children's Literature Review, Volume 6, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Couperie, Pierre, Maurice C. Horn, and others, A History of the Comic Strip, Crown (New York, NY), 1967.

Dayez, Hugues, Tintin et les heritiers, Felin, 2000.

Farr, Michael, Tintin: The Complete Companion, John Murray (London, England), 2001.

Farr, Michael, Le reve et la realite, Moulinsart, 2001.

Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre, Hergé ou le secret de l'image, Moulinsart, 1999.

Goddin, Philippe, L'aventure du journal Tintin, Lonbard, 1986.

Goddin, Philippe, Hergé et Tintin, reporters du petit vingtieme au journal Tintin, du Lombard, 1986.

Goddin, Philippe, Les debuts d'Hergé: Du dessin a la bande dessinee, Moulinsart, 1999.

Goddin, Philippe, Hergé: chronologie d'une oeuvre, two volumes, Moulinsart, 2000-2001.

Hurlimann, Bettina, Three Centuries of Children's Books in Europe, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1967.

Lerman, Alain, Histoire du journal Tintin, Glenat, 1979.

Lofficier, Randy, and Jean-Marc Lofficier, The Pocket Essential Tintin, Pocket Essentials (Harpenden, England), 2002.

Peeters, Benoit, editor, The Making of Tintin, three volumes, translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, Methuen (London, England), 1983-89.

Peeters, Benoit, Hergé, 1922-1932: Les Debuts d'un Illustrateur, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1987.

Peeters, Benoit, Tintin and the World of Hergé: An Illustrated History, Methuen (London, England), 1989, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1992.

Sadoul, Numa, Tintin et moi: entretiens avec Hergé, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1989.

Serres, Michel, Hergé mon ami, Moulinsart, 2000.

Serres, Michel, Tintin, Grand Voyageur du Siecle, Moulinsart, 2001.

Smolderen, Thierry, and Pierre Sterckx, Hergé: Portrait Biographique, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1988.

Steemans, Stephane, Tout Hergé: Itineraire d'un collectionneur Chanceux, Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1991.

Thompson, Harry, Tintin: Hergé and His Creation, Hodder and Stoughton (London, England), 1991.

Tisseron, Serge, Hergé, Seghers (Paris, France), 1987.

Tisseron, Serge, Tintin chez le psychanalyste, Aubier, 1999.

Tisseron, Serge, Tintin et le secret d'Hergé, Presses de la Cité, 1993.

Vandrome, Paul, Le monde de Tintin, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1959, revised edition, 1994.

Van Opstal, H., Trace RG: le phenomene Hergé, Claude Lefrancq, 1999.

PERIODICALS

Children's Book News, January-February, 1969.

Choice, October, 1974.

Comics Journal, February, 2003, Kim Thompson, "Hergé: His Life and Work," pp. 176-179, Numa Sadoul, "The Hergé Interview," pp. 180-205.

Economist, August 26, 1989, review of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, p. 74; January 30, 1999, "Great Blistering Barnacles," p. 79.

Guardian, October 29, 1976.

Horn Book, April, 1984, Dorothea Hayward Scott, "The Tintin Saga: A Tribute to Hergé," pp. 230-241; January-February, 1995, review of The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 3.

Junior Bookshelf, October, 1958; July, 1959.

Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 1, number 1, 1977.

Listener, October 3, 1957.

Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1992, Tobi Tobias, "Tintin to the Rescue: Review of Tintin and the World of Hergé, "p.3.

New York Times, January 8, 1999, Norimitsu Onishi, "Tintin at 70: Colonialism's Comic-Book Puppet?," p. 4.

New York Times Book Review, August 11, 1974.

Observer (London, England), August 8, 1993, Peter Avis, "Drop the Dead Dinosaur; The World Still Belongs to Tintin," p. 13.

Publishers Weekly, May 4, 1992, review of Explorers on the Moon: A Pop-up Book, p. 56; November 25, 2002, review of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, p. 45.

Romantic Review, January, 1996, Phillipe Met, "Of Men and Animals: Hergé's 'Tintin au Congo,' a Study of Primitivism," pp. 131-144.

Studio International, October, 1974.

Time, December 23, 1974.

Time International, January 18, 1999, "An All-Purpose Hero: As Tintin the Boy Reporter Hits 70, the French Debate His Political Leanings—and His Creator's," p. 56.

Times (London, England), December 4, 1986.

Times Literary Supplement, December 5, 1958; May 19, 1966; October 3, 1968; December 4, 1969; October 22, 1971; December 8, 1972.

Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1999, John Carreyrou, French Comic-Book Takeover Plan Irks Belgians, p. B9.

Washington Post, March 7, 1983, December 28, 1987; January 12, 1992, Patricia Brennan, "Tintin: Can a Belgian Cartoon Make It in America?" p. 38; January 2, 1999, Charles Trueheart, "Tintin to the Rescue; Could a 70-Year-Old Cartoon Symbolize the New Europe?," p. C1.

Washington Post Book World, May 19, 1974.

ONLINE

Discover Tintin,http://wwwtintin.qc.ca/ (April 8, 2003).

Marlinspike Hall,http://www.remick.net/tintin/ (May 29, 2003).

Moulinsart (official Tintin Web site), http://www.tintin.com/ (May 29, 2003).

Tintin 58 Languages,http://home.planet.nl/~graaffje/ (May 29, 2003).

Tintin Webring Web site,http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/adw/tintin/ring/ (May 29, 2003).

Wikipedia,http://www.wikipedia.org/ (April 8, 2003).

Obituaries

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1983.

New York Times, March 5, 1983.

Time, March 14, 1983.

Times (London, England), March 5, 1983.

Washington Post, March 5, 1983.^*