The Graphic Mythology of Tintin - a Primer
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About this ebook
When Georges Remi, under his nom de plume Hergé, sent the crudely drawn hero on his maiden voyage to Communist Russia, little did he know that they were both embarking on a lifelong journey - or in the case of the perpetually youthful Tintin, an eternal mythic quest.
Though regarded as mere children's comic books by some, the stories reflect the momentous changes of the twentieth century through the globe-trotting adventures of the young reporter and his companions. They also tell a larger tale - about the author's and our inner world.
This book gives an overview of the canon of Tintin adventures for new readers, giving insights into the graphic language of the stories, as well introducing the wider field of Tintinology to non-academic readers. It concludes by assessing the recent adaptation from the page to the screen by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.
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The Graphic Mythology of Tintin - a Primer - Tim Mountford
review.
1. Prologue
The graphic work of the Belgian artist Georges Remi, better known by his nom de plume Hergé, ranks as one of the richest and most influential in the history of European comic strip art. Regarded as a father figure in the history of bande dessinée (the French term means literally ‘drawn strip’ and is commonly abbreviated to BD), he didn't invent the format per se, but made an immense contribution to its development, maturity and above all its public acceptance. The enormous quantity of work he produced during some six decades of the twentieth century testifies to an artist and storyteller of considerable skill and sensitivity, and demonstrates how the medium of the comic strip has evolved to become a language as capable of literary expression as mere prose.
In truth it is of course one creation that has marked out Hergé for worldwide acclaim: that of the perpetually youthful reporter Tintin. Unknown to many, Hergé’s other work contains the same rich vein of graphic originality, style and wit; from his early adolescent sketches, through the illustrations and graphic motifs that he created for newspapers, magazines, books and advertisements, to the numerous story strips for which he is virtually deified by ranks of European BD artists, we can see in them all a creative talent, honed and perfected at the hands of an industrious and expressive artist. In the French-speaking world Tintin has no equal. His many admirers and imitators may adopt the plastic language of his world (the fluid accuracy of Ia ligne claire – the clear line – and the muted palette which typifies I’école belge – the Belgian school of BD) yet few have equalled Hergé’s impact on global culture.
This book, while focused on Hergé's Les Aventures de Tintin, takes into account Hergé’s oeuvre as a whole, considering some of the influences that motivated it, and how this eventually gave rise to Tintin and the canon of his adventures. Aside from simply reading these tales, I think we can understand them better by looking more closely at their idiosyncrasies, their stylistic innovations, their rhythms, their visual language. Comic strips often have a reputation for being something to amuse young minds before growing up and reading ‘proper’ literature. I think this is mistaken. The apparently straightforwardness of the Tintin adventures is riddled with themes and symbols of a surprisingly profound nature. It is an adventure in itself to learn to discover them.
A sizeable chunk of the original research and writing in this book was undertaken for a thesis written nearly twenty years ago for a degree in graphic design. Since then it has sat unread on an old floppy disk and (I am led to believe) a microfiche held in the archives of the London Institute. Reading Tintin books was a childhood obsession of mine and being able to write about their visual language academically was the happy culmination of years of poring over their pages. Needless to say, when an artist is no longer alive to contribute further to a body of work, reading what someone has written about them two decades ago is unlikely to be any less pertinent than what is written last week. Art endures, and ideas sparked by that art are part of the reason why it does.
Some things have changed in that time. The internet for one has made exchanging ideas easier and more democratic than ever. We no longer need defer to appointed authorities for opinions, or wait on a protracted publication schedule to read their ideas. Nor do we need to visit specialist bookstores to track down hard-to-find foreign tomes, as I did when originally researching this work. (It helped that at the time I arranged one of my student work placements to be in Brussels.) For those who remain fascinated by Hergé and especially his creation Tintin, there are now informative community sites such as tintinologist.org where like minds can meet virtually, regardless of geographical distance. And websites such as the prodigious Amazon not only bring the ability to buy the world’s publications to your web browser, but now offer unpublished authors like me the chance to share ideas with new readers.
Yet for those same lovers of Tintin, there are things that haven’t changed. The visual material that Hergé created in his life is still carefully marketed and controlled by his estate. As the late Harry Thompson intimated back 1991 in his book Tintin: Herge and his Creation, the ability to reproduce Hergé’s work in the context of critical analysis was already being restricted to officially sanctioned works. Thompson’s book wasn't one such, so to find a suitable cover illustration his publisher ingeniously approached the Belgian Post Office who held the copyright on an illustration which Hergé had drawn for a commemorative stamp in 1979, Tintin’s fiftieth anniversary. I have essentially the same problem as Thompson; ebooks are perfectly capable of containing illustrations but only if one has the rights of reproduction. My thesis of twenty years ago – being only three laser-printed copies, privately produced – had nearly thirty carefully chosen visual quotations from Hergé’s work to illustrate the text. Unfortunately doing the same for this version is simply an unfeasible legal negotiation for an independent author. This is frustrating as some of the visuals were from a variety of more obscure sources and old editions. In this new presentation of the text I try instead to describe visuals as adequately as I can.
I am surprised to see that, 20 years on, Numa Sadoul’s insightful interviews with Hergé first published in 1976 by Casterman – the publishers of Tintin albums – remain unavailable as a whole in an English translation. I, like all writers about Hergé, refer to these valuable conversations numerous times and the English renderings given here are my own. It’s perhaps also worth noting here that the interviews as published were meticulously edited and re-edited before being released for public consumption by Hergé who was somewhat wary of being too candid.
Also untranslated into English are numerous biographical writings about Remi; Thierry Smolderen and Pierre Sterckx's 1988 biography of Hergé for Casterman – which Thompson consulted for his pioneering English biography, as did I for my thesis in 1992 – being a good example out of many. It has apparently taken the arrival of a major Hollywood adaptation to coerce anglophone publishers to see the potential revenue in English texts about Hergé. Besides the movie tie-in books, I've noticed fresh 2011 editions of at least three biographical works about Hergé in English. I wait to see what Raphael Taylor’s new biography for Icon Books (unpublished at the time of writing) will bring that Pierre Assouline’s didn’t already supply, since Assouline was given unfettered access to Hergé’s archives and private papers. Assouline’s 1996 French work, in its Oxford University 2009 translation, also gets a reprint this year. Renowned French BD author and Tintin specialist Benoît Peeters’ book Hergé, Son of Tintin from 2002 has a new English translation from an impressive American academic publisher (John Hopkins University Press) in time for the stateside release of the film. Until this marketing-inspired tidal wave, there have really only been a handful of notable works of so-called Tintinology published in English. It’s interesting to see anglophone university publishers catching on to works that have been staples in French academia for some time. Many excellent books about the world of Tintin remain the province of francophones, which is a shame given that Tintin stories are read and loved throughout the world. I still hope some of the ideas from the ‘ivory towers’ can reach that wider popular audience.
In my opinion, Thompson’s book still remains some of the best writing about Hergé and Tintin in English and is now available in electronic format. If you have bought this ebook, you really should download his too. Yet, much as I respect and admire this text, in the penultimate chapter entitled ‘Post Mortem’ Thompson dismissed an aspect of the study of Hergé’s work which I found, indeed still find enlightening. Passing judgment on some of the critical writing published by the officially approved channels, he derided what he called ‘pseudo-academic nonsense’ written about Hergé. In particular he quoted a passage of highfalutin gallic interpretation from the book Hergé and Tintin, Reporters by Philippe Goddin. (Goddin at that time was the general secretary of La Fondation Hergé, originally established by Fanny Remi, Georges’ widow, to control the licensing rights to Hergé’s work.) In fact, the passage was not by Goddin but from an essay featured in that book by