The secret world of Tintin

My favourite work of Tintinology is Tintin and the Secret of Literature by Tom McCarthy. Here we are asked, ‘Is Tintin literature?’ And the answer to that is no, it is not literature, but it is like literature.

What could the author mean by that? McCarthy shows us how the comic book is hidden with clues and puzzles that as readers, we must decode in order to see the extraordinary thing Tintin is. Whoever knew there was so much to Tintin, or could have guessed there was so much going on inside those comics?

There was a comic-swapping ritual when I was growing up that had its own unwritten rules and one of them was: one Tintin comic book equalled a whole bound-book of comics. That’s the leveraging power Tintin had: using just one comic, you could trade it in for a whole set of Phantom or Mandrake or Marvel comics. And long after it became more fashionable to prefer Asterix, I stuck with Tintin.

But I was unaware — as most readers of Tintin at that time were — of the various controversies surrounding its reclusive Belgian creator, Herge. As an adult, I discovered that the comics are tinged with crude ethnic caricatures and racist stereotypes, and that Herge (real name Georges Remi) was a right winger, who worked briefly for a Nazi collaborationist newspaper.

Some Tintin albums (as they are called by fans) like Tintin in Congo and Tintin in Sovietland had to be revised by Herge for the simplistic way he had depicted Africans in one instance, and in the other, portrayed Communists as villains. Herge explained later that he had come under the influence of Father Norbert Wallez, an ultra conservative Catholic, who had indoctrinated him early with the notion of colonialism as a benevolent force and the supremacy of European/Christian culture.

None of this has stopped fans, scholars and filmmakers from exploring the world of Tintin. It’s now officially known as Tintinology. In the last couple of years, there have been several books on Tintin and Herge. Now a biography of Tintin’s creator is finally here: Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline (translated from the French). Another classic work of scholarship, also recently translated from the French, is the 1984 study by Jean-Marie Apostolidès called The Metamorphoses of Tintin.

Assouline’s book exposes the cracks in Georges Remi’s life, but still remains sympathetic to his subject. Herge, we learn here, moved away from his earlier prejudices, and in his later Tintin albums, shifted his plots from political concerns to psychological themes to avoid further controversy.

Concerning those dark years during the war, Herge offered this explanation: “I worked, period; that’s all. Just like a miner works, or a streetcar ticket taker, or a baker. While everyone found it normal that a mechanic made trains run, they thought that people of the press were supposedly traitors.”

However, later in his life, he became depressed with his success, especially since it came at the cost of drawing and writing the Tintin comic strip for the Nazi collaborationist paper Le Soir.

The Metamorphoses of Tintin was the first critical work of scholarship to study the comic book in depth. Here, too, after revelations of Herge’s misogyny, racism and anti-Semitism, Apostolidès demonstrates how the Belgian artist’s obsession in the later comics turned to championing the underdog.

Herge was able to move beyond his early prejudices. Michael Farr is another leading Tintinologist who delves deep into the life and work of Herge and Tintin, to produce a series of books: Tintin & Co goes beyond its hero to investigating the other major recurring characters in the comic: Captain Haddock, Snowy, and the Thomson and Thompson Twins; Tintin: The Complete Companion and The Adventures of Herge.

The Adventures of Tintin consists of 23 volumes published from 1929 to 1976. Apparently, every 10 seconds, somewhere in the world a Tintin album is sold. The best albums are said to be The Calculus Affair, The Red Sea Sharks, The Castafiore Emerald, though my favourite is also Herge’s fave: Tintin in Tibet. A Tintin museum opened recently. And one of the largest comic strips in the world is a Tintin strip on display in Brussels.

Apostolidès’ sees the Tintin comics as containing a fully realised fictional world that encloses a reader completely, and how true this is we (whose childhood was immersed in the exploits of this boy detective with his comma-shaped hair and his trusty dog Snowy) know only too well.