Picture of the Week - # 3

If you were a kid growing up in France in the 1950's and 60's, you cannot have escaped reading every single Tintin comic strip album. My brother and I owned them all, I think -- when we were teenagers, desperate for cash, we sold our entire collection; my mother actually sold it to a guy who was a collector and who, no doubt, knew that he was getting a very sweet deal. Little by little, I have been rebuilding my collection with more recent reprints of those albums I used to cherish as a child.

The Tintin albums were drawn and written by a Belgian comic strip artist named Hergé (1907-1983 - real name: Georges Rémi -- Hergé are his initials in reverse, R.G., as they would read in French), who also drew and wrote other comic strip albums such as Quick et Flupke and the adventures of Jo, Zette et Jocko. Hergé created Tintin around 1929, when the first episode of the first Tintin story, Tintin au Pays des Soviets was published in a conservative Belgian magazine. Later on, during WWII, Hergé went on to publish in Le Soir, a magazine under German supervision. All of this, to which one can add tinges of racism and ethnic stereotyping in many of his Tintin albums, led some to label him as a reactionary, a fascist, and a borderline Nazi collaborator.

However, Hergé had a huge impact on the world of European bande dessinée (B.D.), and his own studio, which he created in 1950, spawned an entire generation of legendary B.D. artists such as Jacques Martin and Edgar P. Jacobs.

When I was a kid, I greatly admired the clean line drawings of Tintin, and reproduced them incessantly on notebooks. I wanted to become a comic strip artist, which never happened because art school was a big no-no in my family, only sluts went to art school, according to my mother. So, the ounce of talent that I might have had when I was 8 or 10 never got nurtured.

My favorite Tintin album remains Le Sceptre d'Ottokar whose cover you can see below (my second favorite is Tintin en Amérique, I even use some pages of it in My French Civilization class to illustrate stereotyping of Americans by the French.) Most of its plot takes place in an imaginary, vaguely Eastern European country called Sylvania (Hergé even created a Sylvanian language for this album), which Tintin saves from a fascist coup. I remember drawing the image of King Muskar XII (the King of Sylvania), and trying to capture every detail of his royal garb.

Tintin, a young journalist totally devoid of any libido, was always accompanied by his dog and sidekick, Milou ("Snowy" in the English version), and by his friend Le Capitaine Haddock, who drank too much whiskey and swore constantly, although the swear words he used were concocted by Hergé and were pretty mild at that. Tintin had a plethora of recurring characters who became legendary, such as the Dupont/Dupond twins (Thompson/Thomson in English), Professeur Tournesol (Professor Calculus in English), Nestor the butler, and Bianca Castiafore, the famous Opera singer.

Tintin has been published in at least 40 languages.


Le Sceptre d'Ottokar