but I present them here as English translations for the benefit of a non-academic readership. As with Sadoul’s text, these translations are my own unless noted otherwise. Also, with both non-academic and electronic presentation in mind, I have avoided footnotes here, even though my thesis was rather pretentiously littered with them!
Any dates given in the main text usually refer to when a particular story was first begun. The colour Tintin albums with which most readers are familiar, were printed some time after these dates, usually once the stories were completed in the various periodicals in which they first featured. Please consult the Bibliography for the date of their first publication in colour albums by Casterman. I use the following conventions surrounding the ambiguous title Tintin: where it is rendered in normal text it refers to the character himself or as a generic descriptive term (the Tintin universe, a Tintin album etc.); where it is rendered in italics it refers to the magazine which was the home of Tintin’s adventures from 1946.
I recognise it is risky to revisit one's college thesis and publish it decades later, though I should add this is more than that text. To be precise, I have rewritten many passages and added much new material in several places, especially referencing work published since then. Like Hergé’s interviews with Sadoul, in some places I have reworked the text so much, none of the original survives! Since my thesis was written for examiners who I assumed knew nothing about the subject, I have retained that tone in the text and branded this book a primer suitable for introducing new readers to the wider field of Tintin studies. Of course 2011 sees the arrival of a whole new interpretation of Tintin, and with it no doubt an enlarged fanbase. I won’t deny that I am publishing this in order to hopefully pass on some of my meagre insights to those who are only discovering Tintin – and hopefully the larger edifice of European bande dessinée of which Herge’s contribution was something of a foundation stone – as a result.
I will save further comments on the new movie franchise until the Epilogue. The journey that culminates today in a three-dimensional computerised technicolour blockbuster began around eighty years earlier in black and white doodles by a Belgian boy scout from a rather grey world, so that is where we should begin.
2. Beginnings
For a Belgian, Georges Remi is an artist without mentor. By his own admission the protagonist in a rather dull childhood (born in 1907 in an unremarkable suburb of Brussels), the young Georges was easily amused by a pencil and paper. The escapist adventures of his imagination saw the light of day crayoned on scraps of paper and later his school books. Remi had little cartoons all over the margins; there were boy heroes defending the country from the foe (the first World War was not long over), footballers, and caricatures and characters of all types. Influences and inspirations for these early drawings came from all around him; Remi was bright and soaked up information, though at home at least there were very few books. Those early days which he referred to later as ‘a kind of grey’ only started to brighten with the advent of scouting. Not only did Hergé’s recollections begin to colour at this point but thanks to a sketchbook he took with him on various excursions and jamborees we also can see the things that caught his eye and moved him to draw. Equally enlightening are some of his interests and the influences upon Georges during these formative teenage years: there was a deep interest in Native Americans (or Redskins as they were known then) and their noble lifestyle in tune with nature which enriched his outdoor camping exploits; his father’s work as a children’s outfitter continually impressed Georges by his deft skill in sketching clothes and figures; and he likewise had a preference for les sujets vivants, active figures rather than still life (in French aptly called la nature morte) though his hopes of sketching any nude model were well and truly dashed by the strict Catholic morality of pre-war Belgium.
But with scouting came Remi’s first opportunities in graphic design and illustration. A monthly publication of the Catholic scouts called Le Boy-scout was his first experience of seeing his illustrations published. The budding talent adopted various guises: aside from his scouting name Renard Curieux (Curious Fox) his drawing appeared as ‘Georges Remi’, plain ‘Remi’ and even ‘Atelier de la Fleur de Lys’, until finally by inverting his initials he struck upon the name Hergé (being the French pronunciation of the letters RG) which is first known to appear under a banner heading in December 1924. His contribution grew over the ten years he eventually amassed with the periodical until he was not only drawing column headings and regular single- and double-frame gags but had effectively redesigned the magazine. Confined to black and white, here Georges mimicked and created illustrative styles that took advantage of these restrictions. His skills in lettering and an eye for modern design made a humble scouting circular into a stylish and exciting publication.
It was in this publication that Hergé drew his first real ‘cartoon’ character – or moreover his first true héros de la bande dessinée. Christened Totor, Chef de Patrouille des Hannetons, he was a small button nosed scout whose adventures in the Wild West embraced all that Hergé held dear at the time: scouting, Red Indians and filmic adventures. In fact the strip was headed by the banner ‘United Rovers présente un extrasuper film’ and later ‘Hergé Moving Pictures’. One influence at least was quite clear. Whether Georges was interested in anything more than the content of the films he saw at the cinema is uncertain, but it is surely no coincidence that the early forms of comic strips developed alongside the studio storyboard and the very frame-by-frame nature of cine film itself. Alain Resnais, director of films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour, an admirer of Hergé’s work and a great campaigner for the art of BD, thought that the exciting episodic escapades that Hergé introduced to Belgian children through his strips, especially with the appearance of Tintin, paralleled the American week-by-week adventure serials that ran at this time.
Here was home-grown Belgian (also read European) talent to rival any American Flash Gordon or cowboy flick for weekly thrills and spills. Only one thing marked Totor apart from the films and the majority of Hergé later strips: a running narrative under each box. But this was de rigeur at the time and as Hergé later found out when he abandoned this text in creating Tintin, there remained some who believed his strips like foreign films still needed these subtitles!
Concurrent to the illustrations and this early strip that Hergé was submitting to Le Boy-scout, Hergé’s talent was called upon in the service of the Belgian Catholic youth movement L’Action Catholique de la Jeunesse Belge (A.C.J.B.), at that time a prolific lay wing of the church. It is important to note that Georges was not in fact a militant Catholic but more and more profoundly agnostic in his beliefs. Rather it was due to the same key figures in the Federation of Catholic Scouts who knew Remi’s skills and continued to use them (René Weverbergh for one, who had originally encouraged Georges to contribute to Le Boy-scout). Yet in spite of this conflict of belief Hergé continued to produce some fine graphic motifs and illustrations for A.C.J.B. and its subsidiary organisations, often based around vaguely religious themes. In magazine work Remi worked on La Blé qui Lève producing a stylish masthead and other fine typographic tides; numerous logos and insignia led Hergé to create forceful militant brands; and a propagandist pamphlet Mon Avenir saw the one and only performance of two young Brussels lads, Fred and Mile. Similar in appearance and format to Hergé’s later creations Quick and Flupke, these Marollien ketjes were like many of his other caractères sans lendemain with whom the reader instantly feels familiar. In retrospect, maybe it is because, as initiates in the universe of Hergé knowing Quick and Flupke so well, these others seem like their brothers. Nevertheless, in the context of the universality of the Tintin myth, we must consider Hergé’s consistent ability to create characters that we accept so readily. Is it perhaps because they have about them something that reminds us of ourselves, or that they personify our worst traits or our greatest ideals? Such theories come to the fore when we consider the personality of Tintin, and in particular the way that his character has been elevated to the point of sainthood by the Tintin myth. Yet all this seems a far cry from the mundane circumstances that led to the birth of the hero.
The Opportunity
