From seven to 70-year-olds, Belgium to Tibet, and comic books to the silver screen, the swashbuckling reporter Tintin has left an indelible mark on the world—and through his iconic stature lives on the talent and charm of his creator, Georges Remi, or as he was better known, Hergé.
By Bhuvan Lall
On April 15, 1941, many parts of Europe were in flames. Nazi Germany had wreaked havoc across the continent. France and Belgium were under Nazi occupation. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had walked through the bombed sites in Bristol devastated by the Luftwaffe. It was noted that tears filled the tough-minded British Prime Minister’s eyes. For Churchill and Britain, it was not so much a battle for survival but a struggle to survive. Across the Atlantic, President Roosevelt made a speech promising aid to the British and their allies in their war against the fascists “until total victory has been won”.
On that April afternoon, in the middle of the World War, a 33-year-old Belgian comic book creator, artist, and writer, Georges Remi, was at the Théâtre Royal des Galeries, Brussels to attend the performance of a play penned by him. Born on May 22, 1907, in the Etterbeek district of Brussels, Remi drew and wrote under the name Hergé (his initials G. R. transposed and pronounced air-zhay). With his artistic hand and creative storytelling, he gave life to the perpetual adolescent hero, Tintin.
(Photos courtesy: Tintin/Facebook)
The first-ever Tintin comic appeared in black and white in the French-language newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle on 10 January 1929. It was an instant hit. Right from the beginning, Tintin the teenaged snub-nosed Belgian reporter with his trademark quiff of hair, accompanied by Snowy, his faithful fluffy white fox terrier, embarked on voyages and swashbuckling adventures around the world. Tintin, whose cause was just and whose heart was pure, personified courage and loyalty by fighting for the oppressed. Each episode was a page-turner sprinkled with slapstick comedy, sophisticated satire, and political comment. Hergé once admitted Tintin was a projection of his inner self, stating, “I am Tintin… I am no hero. But like all 15-year-old boys, I have dreamed about being one. And I never stopped dreaming.”
Hergé dispatched his hero to Russia to denounce communism, teach African children in Congo, sail to America to take on gangsters, and witness Native Americans being driven from their land. Subsequently, Tintin chased drug smugglers through Indian jungles in the Kingdom of Gaipajama, dealt with spies and drug smugglers in China, headed off to the deep forests in Latin America in search of a statue, pursued a gang of counterfeiters across Scotland, and even saved the Balkan state of Syldavia from annexation by its neighbor Borduria, whose leaders had been plotting with a fictional character ‘Musstler’ (a contraction of Mussolini and Hitler and a great anti-fascist statement).
With his artistic hand and creative storytelling, Georges Remi gave life to the perpetual adolescent hero, Tintin. (Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)
Then 12 years after Tintin first arrived, in the spring of 1940, the Nazis landed on his doorstep in his hometown as the occupational force. It was a difficult year for artists and writers in Belgium. The Nazi regime turned significantly more repressive and the persecution of the Belgian Jews escalated. On orders from the Nazis, Le Petit Vingtième, the publisher of Tintin, was shuttered, never to reopen, and Hergé was forced to transfer the adventures of the journalist from The Daily Reporter to one of Belgium’s main dailies Le Soir, which was a known Nazi collaborator.
Working in the stifling climate of censorship, Hergé was disturbed by the constant sirens, bombardments, and noisy air raids. Yet he continued to contribute to the popularisation of comics in Europe. In April 1941, Hergé watched Jeanne Rubens perform the lead role in Tintin aux Indes – Le Mystère du Diamant Bleu (Tintin in India – The Mystery of the Blue Diamond) on the stage in Brussels. It was a three-act theatre piece set in distant India, co-written by Hergé with Jacques Van Melkebeke.
In the play, the intrepid Belgian comic book hero solves a mystery about a stolen blue diamond in the fictional state of Padakhore. The play concluded with the relentless do-gooder catching the thief in the medieval hall of the Chateau of Syldavia. Directed by Paul Riga, Tintin aux Indes received a positive response from the Belgians, and to Hergé’s satisfaction, it had three more outings.
Tintin in Tibet was voted the greatest French-language graphic novel of all time and was said to be Hergé’s favorite. (Photos courtesy: Flickr)
Surviving through the war years, Tintin, the world traveler from the small European nation, continued to raise Belgian spirits and became an indisputable national hero. However, in the post-war period, Hergé was shockingly detained for questioning four times on unsubstantiated charges of collaboration with the Nazis. The members of the resistance who loved Tintin came to his rescue. Then due to the occasional appalling language, narrow ethnic jokes, stereotypical caricatures of non-European characters, crude propaganda, and colonial tints in some of the comics, Hergé faced accusations of racism, resulting in multiple revisions of his works. Hergé touched up, redrew, and recolored the old stories and soon his creation evolved into Belgium’s most celebrated exports.
Over the next decades, the young Belgian, imbibed with high moral standing through his 23-plus-one half-finished comic book adventures, captivated millions of fans, cutting across age and nationality. Hergé surrounded his protagonist with over 228 zany and eccentric characters including the vast of the brain, hard of hearing, absent-minded scientist-inventor Professor Calculus, the yowling shrill-voiced Milanese nightingale Bianca Castafiore, the irritating chatterbox insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg, the overworked butler Nestor, the bumbling hapless bushy-mustached bowler-hatted detectives from Interpol – Thomson and Thompson twins, and his gruff sidekick, a quick-tempered alcoholic bearded sailor Captain Archibald Haddock, who screams “Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles” and has a collection of more than 220 insulting epithets like “Bashi-bazouks”, “Ectoplasms”, and “Sea-gherkins”. In his comic, the mild-mannered Hergé also made the Hitchcockian appearance and was seen discreetly attending ceremonies, taking notes, or interviewing Tintin as a reporter himself.
In the pre-social media, Internet, and television era, countless people, from seven to 77-year-olds, followed Tintin as he traveled beyond his home at the Marlinspike Hall to new countries, cultures, landscapes, and natural phenomena that were still relatively unheard of. In the 62-page comic books, the footloose allrounder hero with his usual squadron of supporting characters and crazy villains covered continents on foot, horses, carts, hand rickshaws, camels, elephants, cycles, motorbikes, cars, trucks, buses, tanks, trains, boats, rafts, ships, submarines, helicopters, light aircraft, fighter planes, airliners, private jets, spaceships, and even a flying saucer.
Tintin took his fans to lands as far afield from the perilous seas, rainforests, snow-clad mountains, and burning deserts to a meteorite and even outer space. It is rumored that when Neil Armstrong finally landed on the moon in July 1969, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire reminded President Richard Nixon that it was Tintin – the one-time visitor to Congo – who had reached the moon first. In 1954, Tintin wearing an orange space suit made the trip through space in a red and white chequered rocket and landed on the moon in the double comic books, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.
Tibetan spiritual leader The Dalai Lama with a copy of 'Tintin in Tibet'. (Photo courtesy: Tintin/Facebook)
Tintin’s enduring appeal made him an iconic character and a friend to millions of children worldwide. With fans even as far as India, Hergé had once claimed, “I receive… a lot of mail from India. Here, in the office, are two letters from Calcutta. Now, what can there be in common between a boy in Calcutta and myself?” In 1934, his hero crash-landed in an Indian jungle in his fourth adventure, The Cigars of the Pharaoh. Besides the clichéd fakirs, fortune tellers, tigers, cows, snake charmers, and cobras, Tintin met with some British residents of the colonial era and in the end joined his host, the Maharaja of Gaipajama, on a bejeweled elephant, in a victory procession.
Later from September 1958 to November 1959, Studios Hergé serialized the twentieth volume of the comic series, Tintin in Tibet. The comic book’s release coincided with His Holiness Dalai Lama’s successful escape from Lhasa to India. Worked out after extensive research, it told the story of Tintin’s search for his friend Chang, who goes missing in the Himalayas after a plane crash. Desperate to find him, Tintin and Haddock land at the Willingdon Airport in Delhi as a brief stopover on their way to Kathmandu. In the afternoon they visit the Red Fort and Qutub Minar and take a trip through a typical Indian bazaar. Lost in the Himalayas, they seek refuge in a Buddhist monastery inhabited by a levitating monk. Eventually battling blizzards, Tintin retrieves his friend from the snow-bound heights and also encounters a very emotional Yeti. Tintin in Tibet was voted the greatest French-language graphic novel of all time and was said to be Hergé’s favorite. By the 1970s Hergé became interested in eastern philosophy and Tintin took to yoga in Tintin and the Picaros.
Hergé with his talent for pacing, intrigue, and action, elevated comic book storytelling to almost the thrill of watching movies. On December 6, 1961, Tintin et le Mystere de la Toison d’Or, the first of the two Tintin original feature films starring Jean-Pierre Talbot as Tintin and Georges Wilson as Haddock, was released to mixed results followed by a similar outcome with the second live-action film, Tintin et les Oranges Blues in 1964. Hergé’s little masterpieces had been adapted for the radio, stage, puppet shows, musicals, animation, television, movies, and even BBC programs, but Tintin could not cross over to America and Hollywood perhaps because he was not a superhero. Interestingly on the 44th page of Tintin in America, the victorious reporter is surrounded by the American press in Chicago, and a Hollywood agent in a suit shouts: “Paranoid Productions are starring you in their new billion-dollar movie spectacular!”
By a strange quirk of fate, in 1983, Hollywood’s most successful filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, while reading the French language reviews of his blockbuster hit, Raiders of the Lost Ark, came across repeated references to Tintin. He got hold of a Tintin adventure Prisoners of the Sun and was immediately smitten, accepting, “Every single panel told a story in cinematic terms, including color pallet, composition, figures in action… that was I think the genius of Hergé. It was a movie”. A call was organized in the middle of February 1983 with Hergé and it turned out the artist was a fan of Spielberg, having loved his first film, Duel, in 1971.
Spielberg, who decades later in 2011 directed and produced The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, later revealed that Hergé had told him, “You are the only director I feel who can do justice to my book”. After the call, a meeting between Hergé and Spielberg was arranged first in London and then in Brussels but it did not materialize. The health of 75-year-old Hergé was failing and on February 25, 1983, he was rushed in an ambulance to the Saint-Luc Clinic in Brussels. Seven days later on March 3, as the clock hit ten in the evening, Georges Remi, one of the greatest comic book artists of the 20th century, passed away. The adventures of Hergé ended that night and his death was front-page news in the Francophone world. A headline ran, “Tintin est mort”. Everyone realized that there would be no Tintin without Hergé.
Hollywood’s most successful filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, directed and produced 'The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn' in 2011. (Photo courtesy: amazon.in)
Over the years, with more than 200 million copies in more than 80 languages, including Tibetan and Esperanto, sold worldwide, the simplicity and complexity of Hergé’s comics resulted in Tintin attaining superstardom and a global following. General de Gaulle had famously declared that Tintin was his only international rival while Hugh Grant professed his love for Tintin’s King Ottokar’s Sceptre. Andy Warhol who met Hergé was a big fan, and so was Roy Lichtenstein.
The French philosopher Michel Serres declared that Hergé was the author who has had the “most impact on contemporary French life.” In 1999, following a survey by Le Monde, Tintin’s The Blue Lotus was ranked 18th amongst books that left their mark on the 20th century. On 1 June 2006, the Dalai Lama bestowed the Light of Truth award posthumously to Georges Remi and the Hergé Foundation for producing Tintin in Tibet and making a significant contribution to the public’s understanding of Tibet. Tsering Jampa, representing the International Campaign for Tibet, stated, “For many, Hergé’s depiction of Tibet was their introduction to the awe-inspiring landscape and culture of Tibet”.
Hergé’s instantly recognizable style of sketching has acquired a name, ligne claire, and Tintin was the first comic strip to enter the modern art collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. There are Tintin stamps, coins, shops, museums, and a bronze statue of Tintin and Snowy stands in a square in Brussels. Also on January 14, 2021, a Tintin drawing by Hergé, originally illustrated as a cover for The Blue Lotus in 1936, was sold in Paris for 2.6 million euros ($3.1 million), breaking the record for the most expensive comic book art in history. A planet in outer space has been named Hergé in his honor.
Ninety-two years after making his debut, Tintin the unbeatable hero of many adventures is a global phenomenon with over two million comic books sold every year. Countless Tintinologists believe that the eternally youthful and indefatigable reporter with two dots for eyes, a little nose, and a distinctive tuft hairstyle is still out there doing good somewhere in the world with Snowy chasing a butterfly next to him. Numerous fans retain a bit of Tintin within them from childhood onwards. And for millions, Tintin is forever.
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(The writer is an author, filmmaker, scriptwriter, speaker, and entrepreneur. He can be reached at [email protected])
