Tintin is the most
worldly and down-to-earth of juvenile adventure tales. Created by the Belgian artist
Georges Rémi, who was known as Hergé from the French version of his initials
reversed, the Tintin comic books encapsulated in 62 pages–each page an
installment in the sequential 62-week-long serials run by the weekly magazine Tintin (“for young people from 7 to 77,”
as the slogan went)–robust adventures in which the intrepid young “reporter”
who reports to no newspaper and never files a story sets off with his loyal dog
Milou (“Snowy” in English) for new horizons, the more exotic the better. After
the jingoism and silliness of the first adventures of the 1920s and ‘30s—Tintin in the Congo, Tintin in America—the
series acquires a cosmopolitan authority greater than that of many novels and
certainly greater than any other comic strip I know of. The characters are
spoofs, but endearing and recognizable, and always deftly drawn. The miracle of
Hergé is that in his stylized caricatures he managed somehow to create a cast
of characters more vivid and enduring than those in most novels; he is more Dickens
than Disney. Personally, I identified with Captain Haddock, the boozy old
sea-dog who, in Red Rackham’s Treasure,
found a fortune and spent it wisely on malt whisky, a country manor called Moulinsart (“Marlinspike” in
English), and a cream-colored 1939 Lincoln Zephyr convertible. But there is
also Professor Tournesol (anglice:
"Calculus"), hard of hearing and irascible; a pair of twin Inspector
Clouseaus, Dupont and Dupond the
detectives ("Thomson and Thompson"); Bianca Castafiore the buxom yet
sexless diva; the evil Greek tycoon Rastapopoulos; etc. A grand parade of human
grandeur and misery.
Word has it that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are
teaming up to make a double-feature based on The Secret of the Unicorn and Red
Rackham's Treasure. I'm not sure how we Tintinophiles should take this.
It's not as if the series needs the imprimatur of Hollywood; the illustrations themselves
elevate the series to the level of art. Each panel shows buildings, airplanes,
uniforms, cars and other details of everyday life rendered with near-obsessive
accuracy–especially the cars. Hergé never gets them wrong. Let's hope Steven
Spielberg and Peter Jackson follow that example.
