Last year was the centennial of the birth of Georges Remi, who is better known around the world as Hergé, the creator of The Adventures of Tintin. These 23 graphic novels chronicle the adventures of an intrepid teenage reporter around the globe (and even on the moon!). Beloved worldwide, Tintin is less well-known in the United States, although that will change when Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s forthcoming Tintin movie trilogy commences.
Right now, though, English-speaking fans of Tintin, or newcomers who want to find about him, can read two new books by Great Britain’s leading “Tintinologist,” Michael Farr: The Adventures of Hergé and Tintin & Co., both vividly illustrated with Hergé artwork. Last Gasp publishes the U.S. editions of both books this month.
There have already been well over 70 books written about Hergé and Tintin, many in French, including Pierre Assouline’s Hergé (1996). Presumably seeking a different approach for what he calls his “biographical portrait,” Farr organizes his book into seven chapters, each founded on a different theme from Hergé’s life.
This strategy might work well for readers who are already familiar with Hergé and Tintin. But what about readers who aren’t, like the majority of the American comics audience, some of whom might be looking for an introduction to Hergé’s work? Such newcomers might understandably be puzzled that Farr begins his book with “The Death of an Artist,” a chapter covering Hergé’s death, its coverage by the European press, then Hergé’s world travels late in life, and then, as if circling back to the chapter’s beginning, his final physical decline.
Chapter two, “A Passion for Art,” might have made a better beginning, as it traces Hergé’s development as an artist from the age of four. Hergé first saw comic strips in American newspapers in the 1920s, and he was a pioneer of this comics format in Europe. The book leaves the impression that Farr has little knowledge of comics apart from Tintin. Was Hergé been influenced by specific American comics, such as Roy Crane’s pioneering adventure strip Wash Tubbs, about a boy hero and his adult ally, a captain? Such questions do not arise in this book.
Farr examines Hergé’s interest in fine art, ranging from Vermeer to Warhol, and his frustrated ambition to become an abstract painter. Writing about Hergé’s admiration for the Italian Futurists, Farr, through illustrations, demonstrates how Hergé incorporated their influence into Tintin. If only Farr had gone further. Was Hergé’s interest in fine art divorced from his cartooning, or can other connections be found between them?
A former reporter himself, Farr insists in his third chapter that Hergé was “a journalist at heart.” Yet though Tintin is nominally a reporter, as Farr shows, in practice he is more of a detective and explorer, who does not even take notes when we see him conduct an interview. In calling Hergé a journalist, Farr is actually praising this cartoonist’s extensive and scrupulous research into the subjects and locales of the Tintin adventures.
Chapter four, about Hergé’s passion for the cinema, suffers from the same flaw as the chapter on art: only a paltry few illustrations demonstrate how Hergé adapted visual techniques from one medium to another (as in a “widescreen” shot of mountains from Tintin in Tibet). It’s interesting to learn that Hergé borrowed plot elements from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, and it would be worthwhile to know if he was influenced by its visual storytelling methods as well.
Chapter five is purportedly about how Hergé’s membership in the Boy Scouts shaped his and Tintin’s personalities. But Farr delves into a much more promising subject: Hergé’s attacks in the Tintin books on racism, capitalist exploitation and dictatorship, and his empathy with Native Americans.
Similarly, chapter six recounts the affecting story of how Hergé discovered Chinese culture through his friendship with a young Chinese artist, Chang Ching-chen, whom he turned into a character in The Blue Lotus. Political upheavals separated the two real-life friends for 40 years, until they were reunited shortly before Hergé’s death. Although Farr asserts that their friendship was mostly “intellectual,” this is belied by the deep feeling that Hergé put into Tintin in Tibet, the tale of Tintin’s quest to find his lost friend Chang: Farr notes that doing this story helped Hergé recover from clinical depression.
Starting out discussing Hergé’s sense of humor, the final chapter centers on Hergé’s disillusioning experiences during and after World War II. Farr recounts how Hergé was unjustly accused of collaboration with the Nazis for continuing to produce Tintin during the occupation of Belgium. As a result, Farr asserts, Hergé became more like Tintin’s co-star, Captain Haddock, who “could be moody, morose, and even depressive.”
In Tintin & Co., Farr further expounds his thesis that Tintin and Haddock embody different sides of their creator: his heroic aspirations versus his human weaknesses. This book provides a delightful introduction to the world of Tintin, providing extended profiles of the series’ colorful cast of recurring characters while exploring Hergé’s sources for each of them.
Yet the one character who remains an enigma in Farr’s books is Hergé. Farr depicts him as kind and modest but also embittered; a world-renowned cartoonist who failed in his dream to become a successful abstract artist; a man who labored intensely over his work who would also irresponsibly disappear; a romantic who was married twice but virtually excluded women from his books; a man of great humor who nearly suffered a nervous breakdown. It’s as if we see all these aspects of Hergé’s personality from the outside in Farr’s books, but we never get a sense of the man that would link all of them into a whole portrait. How Tintin and Captain Haddock can be the same man in real life remains a mystery.
