The Adventures of Tintin

The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin [lez‿avɑ̃tyʁ də tɛ̃tɛ̃]) is a series of 24 bande dessinée albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé’s birth in 1907,[1] Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies,[2] and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film.

The series first appeared in French on 10 January 1929, in Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth), a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century). The success of the series saw the serialised strips published in Belgium’s leading newspaper Le Soir (The Evening) and spun into a successful Tintin magazine. In 1950, Hergé created Studios Hergé, which produced the canonical versions of eleven Tintin albums.

The series is set during a largely realistic[3] 20th century. Its hero is Tintin, a courageous young Belgian reporter and adventurer. He is aided by his faithful dog Snowy (Milou in the original French edition). Other protagonists include the brash and cynical Captain Haddock and the intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (French: Professeur Tournesol), as well as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (French: Dupont et Dupond) and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore.

The series has been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé’s signature ligne claire (“clear line”) style.[4] Its well-researched[5] plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, action, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories feature slapstick humour, offset by dashes of sophisticated satire and political or cultural commentary.

History

Le Vingtième Siècle: 1929–1939

Georges Prosper Remi, best known under the pen name Hergé, was employed as an illustrator at Le Vingtième Siècle (“The Twentieth Century“), a staunchly Roman Catholic, conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé’s native Brussels. Run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez, the paper described itself as a “Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information” and disseminated a far-right, fascist viewpoint.[7] Wallez appointed Hergé editor of a new Thursday youth supplement, titled Le Petit Vingtième (“The Little Twentieth“).[8] Propagating Wallez’s socio-political views to its young readership, it contained explicitly pro-fascist and anti-Semitic sentiment.[9] In addition to editing the supplement, Hergé illustrated L’extraordinaire aventure de Flup, Nénesse, Poussette et Cochonnet (“The Extraordinary Adventures of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette and Cochonnet“),[10] a comic strip authored by a member of the newspaper’s sport staff. Dissatisfied with this, Hergé wanted to write and draw his own cartoon strip.[11]

He already had experience creating comic strips. From July 1926 he had written a strip about a Boy Scout patrol leader titled Les Aventures de Totor C.P. des Hannetons (“The Adventures of Totor, Scout Leader of the Cockchafers“) for the Scouting newspaper Le Boy Scout Belge (“The Belgian Boy Scout“).[11] Totor was a strong influence on Tintin,[12] with Hergé describing the latter as being like Totor’s younger brother.[6] Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier stated that graphically, Totor and Tintin were “virtually identical” except for the Scout uniform,[13] also noting many similarities between their respective adventures, particularly in the illustration style, the fast pace of the story, and the use of humour.[14] He was fascinated by new techniques in the medium such as the systematic use of speech bubbles—found in such American comics as George McManus‘ Bringing up Father, George Herriman‘s Krazy Kat and Rudolph Dirks‘s Katzenjammer Kids, copies of which had been sent to him from Mexico by the paper’s reporter Léon Degrelle.

Although Hergé wanted to send Tintin to the United States, Wallez ordered him to set his adventure in the Soviet Union, acting as anti-socialist propaganda for children. The result, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was serialised in Le Petit Vingtième from January 1929 to May 1930.[17] Popular in Francophone Belgium, Wallez organised a publicity stunt at the Gare du Nord station, following which he organised the publication of the story in book form.[18] The story’s popularity led to an increase in sales, so Wallez granted Hergé two assistants.[19] At Wallez’s direction, in June he began serialisation of the second story, Tintin in the Congo, designed to encourage colonial sentiment towards the Belgian Congo. Authored in a paternalistic style that depicted the Congolese as childlike idiots, in later decades it was accused of racism, however at the time was un-controversial and popular, and further publicity stunts were held to increase sales.[20]

For the third adventure, Tintin in America, serialised from September 1931 to October 1932, Hergé finally got to deal with a scenario of his own choice, and used the work to push an anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist agenda in keeping with the paper’s ultra-conservative ideology.[21] The Adventures of Tintin had been syndicated to French Catholic magazine Cœurs Vaillants (“Brave Hearts”) since 1930, and Hergé was soon receiving syndication requests from Swiss and Portuguese newspapers too.[22]

Hergé went on to pen a string of Adventures of Tintin, sending his character to real locations such as the Belgian Congo, the United States, Egypt, India, Tibet, China, and the United Kingdom. He also sent Tintin to fictional countries of his own devising, such as the Latin American republic of San Theodoros, the East European kingdom of Syldavia, or the fascist state Borduria—whose leader, Müsstler, was a combination of Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler and Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini.[23]

Le Soir: 1940–1945 

In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium as World War II spread further across Europe. Although Hergé briefly fled to France and considered a self-imposed exile, he ultimately decided to return to his occupied homeland.[24] For political reasons, the Nazi authorities closed down Le Vingtième Siècle, leaving Hergé unemployed.[25] In search of employment, he got a job as an illustrator at Belgium’s leading newspaper, Le Soir (The Evening), which was allowed to continue publication under German management.[26] On 17 October 1940, he was made editor of the children’s supplement, Le Soir Jeunesse, in which he set about producing new Tintin adventures.[27] In this new, more repressive political climate of German-occupied Belgium, Hergé could no longer explore political themes in his Adventures of Tintin lest he be arrested by the Gestapo. As Harry Thompson noted, Tintin’s role as a reporter came to an end, to be replaced by his new role as an explorer.[28]

Le Journal de Tintin: 1946–1983 

In September 1944 the Allies entered Brussels and Hergé’s German employers fled. Le Soir was shut down and The Adventures of Tintin was put on hold.[29] Then in 1946, Hergé accepted an invitation from Belgian comic publisher Raymond Leblanc and his new publishing company Le Lombard to continue The Adventures of Tintin in the new Le journal de Tintin (Tintin magazine).[30] Hergé quickly learned that he no longer had the independence he preferred; he was required to produce two coloured pages a week for Leblanc’s magazine—a tall order.[31]

In 1950, Hergé began to poach the better members of the Tintin magazine staff to work in the large house on Avenue Louise that contained the fledgling Studios Hergé.[32] Bob De Moor (who imitated Hergé’s style and did half the work),[32] Guy Dessicy (colourist), and Marcel DeHaye (secretary) were the nucleus. To this, Hergé added Jacques Martin (imitated Hergé’s style), Roger Leloup (detailed, realistic drawings), Eugène Evany (later chief of the Studios),[30] Michel Demaret (letterer), and Baudouin Van Den Branden (secretary).[33] As Harry Thompson observed, the idea was to turn the process of creating The Adventures of Tintin into a “veritable production line, the artwork passing from person to person, everyone knowing their part, like an artistic orchestra with Hergé conducting.”[34] The Studios produced eight new Tintin albums for Tintin magazine, and coloured and reformatted two old Tintin albums. Studios Hergé continued to release additional publications until Hergé’s death in 1983. In 1986, a twenty-fourth unfinished album was released, the Studios were disbanded, and its assets were transferred to the Hergé Foundation.[35]

Controversy

The earliest stories in The Adventures of Tintin have been criticised[90] for displaying racial stereotypes, animal cruelty, colonialism, violence, and even fascist leanings, including ethnocentric, caricatured portrayals of non-Europeans.[91] While the Hergé Foundation has presented such criticism as naïveté and scholars of Hergé such as Harry Thompson have said that “Hergé did what he was told by the Abbé Wallez”,[92] Hergé himself felt that his background made it impossible to avoid prejudice, stating, “I was fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me.”[52]

In Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the Bolsheviks were presented as villains. Hergé drew on Moscow Unveiled, a work given to him by Wallez and authored by Joseph Douillet, the former Belgian consul in Russia, that is highly critical of the Soviet regime, although Hergé contextualised this by noting that in Belgium, at the time a devout Catholic nation, “Anything Bolshevik was atheist“.[52] In the story, Bolshevik leaders are motivated by personal greed and a desire to deceive the world. Tintin discovers, buried, “the hideout where Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin have collected together wealth stolen from the people”. By 1999, even while Tintin’s politics was the subject of a debate in the French parliament,[93] part of this presentation was noted as far more reasonable, with British weekly newspaper The Economist declaring, “In retrospect, however, the land of hunger and tyranny painted by Hergé was uncannily accurate”.[94]

Tintin in the Congo has been criticised as presenting the Africans as naïve and primitive.[95] In the original work, Tintin is shown at a blackboard addressing a class of African children. “My dear friends,” he says, “I am going to talk to you today about your fatherland: Belgium.”[c] Hergé redrew this in 1946 to show a lesson in mathematics.[96] Hergé later admitted the flaws in the original story, excusing it saying, “I portrayed these Africans according to … this purely paternalistic spirit of the time.”[52] Sue Buswell, who was the editor of Tintin at Methuen, summarised the perceived problems with the book in 1988[97] as “all to do with rubbery lips and heaps of dead animals”,[d] although Thompson noted her quote may have been “taken out of context”.[98]

Drawing on André Maurois‘ Les Silences du colonel Bramble, Hergé presents Tintin as a big-game hunter, accidentally killing fifteen antelope as opposed to the one needed for the evening meal. However, concerns over the number of dead animals led Tintin‘s Scandinavian publishers to request changes. A page of Tintin killing a rhinoceros by drilling a hole in its back and inserting a stick of dynamite was deemed excessive; Hergé replaced the page with one in which the rhino accidentally discharges Tintin’s rifle while he sleeps under a tree.[89] In 2007, the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality called for the book to be pulled from shelves after a complaint, stating, “It beggars belief that in this day and age that any shop would think it acceptable to sell and display Tintin in the Congo.”[99] In August 2007, a Congolese student filed a complaint in Brussels that the book was an insult to the Congolese people. Public prosecutors investigated, and a criminal case was initiated, although the matter was transferred to a civil court.[100] Belgium’s Centre for Equal Opportunities warned against “over-reaction and hyper political correctness“.[101]

Hergé altered some of the early albums in subsequent editions, usually at the demand of publishers. For example, at the instigation of his American publishers, many of the African characters in Tintin in America were re-coloured to make their race Caucasian or ambiguous.[102] The Shooting Star originally had an American villain with the Jewish surname of “Blumenstein”.[103] This proved controversial, as the character exhibited exaggerated, stereotypically Jewish characteristics. “Blumenstein” was changed to an American with a less ethnically specific name, Mr. Bohlwinkel, in later editions and subsequently to a South American of a fictional country—São Rico. Hergé later discovered that ‘Bohlwinkel’ was also a Jewish name.[49] In recent years, even Tintin’s politics of peace have been investigated.

Awards 

On 1 June 2006, the Dalai Lama bestowed the International Campaign for Tibet‘s Light of Truth Award upon the Hergé Foundation, along with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.[69] The award was in recognition of Hergé’s book Tintin in Tibet, Hergé’s most personal adventure,[70] which the Executive Director of ICT Europe Tsering Jampa noted was “for many … their introduction to the awe-inspiring landscape and culture of Tibet”.[71] In 2001, the Hergé Foundation demanded the recall of the Chinese translation of the work, which had been released with the title Tintin in Chinese Tibet. The work was subsequently published with the correct translation of the title.[72] Accepting on behalf of the Hergé Foundation, Hergé’s widow Fanny Rodwell stated, “We never thought that this story of friendship would have a resonance more than 40 years later”.