I never met the late Harry Thompson. Wish I had.
TINTIN: HERGÉ & HIS CREATION
Harry Thompson
(Hodder & Stoughton, 218pp, £15.00)
The relationship between the great comic-book characters and their creators is not always a happy or comfortable one. Everybody in the world has at least heard of Superman, but only comics buffs and historians could name Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who invented and launched The Man Of Steel for National Periodical Publications in 1938, were persuaded to part with all rights and revenues not long afterwards and who only received a settlement in 1988 as a face-saving measure for the publishers during the character’s fiftieth anniversary. Certainly it is next to impossible to consider Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck as other than inseparable from Walt Disney, but Disney the cartoonist dropped out of the picture comparatively early on, and it is Disney the entrepreneur (and finally Disney the corporation) that we remember: the most memorable adventures of Uncle Walt’s menagerie were produced by others.
Those comics characters not actually created by committee thus tend to get absorbed by them and become corporate, rather than individual, assets: the company generally retains ownership and copyright, and farms out the actual writing and drawing to freelances. Even when there was a distinct personal vision involved at the earliest stages, it is a rare comics creator who not only reaps the financial benefit from his (rarely her) brainchildren, but manages to retain the creative helm. George Rémi (alias Hergé, a pseudonym derived from the phonetic representation of his reversed initials) was one of this rarest of all comics breeds and his creation Tintin remained his, for better or for worse, from 1929 to 1986. Even the trumpeting announcer of the animated TV incarnation of the famous boy reporter specifies “Her-jjay’s Advenn-tures Of Tinn-Tinn!”
The appropriately named Harry Thompson has essayed a ‘dual biography’ of both creator and creation, and made an excellent fist of it, too. Presumably, his efforts have met with less than total approval from Methuen, Hergé’s British publishers, since the book is completely innocent of so much as a single frame from any of the 24 Tintin graphic novels that represent Hergé’s life’s work. This is a flaw, but not a crippling one, since all of Tintin’s adventures remain in print, which is more than can be claimed by any of those Americans with the Schwarzenegger physiques and the John Major approach to underwear.
Hergé grew up between the wars in Belgium, then an even more numbingly boring a place than it is now, and it is not surprising that the young cartoonist’s vaulting imagination sent his young creator all around the world, into feverishly mythologised versions of the planet’s more exotic locations. Tintin made his debut in the magazine Petite Vingtième under the auspices of its editor Abbé Norbert Wallez, whose political views can be deduced from the autographed portrait of Mussolini that he kept on his desk. It is therefore not surprising that some of Tintin’s earlier adventures, particularly Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets and Tintin In The Congo make fairly uncomfortable reading now for anyone to the left of the good Abbé. Thompson is excellent on Hergé’s political troubles, especially during World War II when the cartoonist stayed at his desk during the Occupation, but he is equally strong on two other crucial points: Hergé’s artistic impact (his ‘clear-line’ technique is still the greatest single influence on European cartooning) and on his increasingly vexed relationship with his ever-youthful protagonist.
Tintin’s continued popularity is easily explicable. For all their political dodginess, these adventures are fast-moving, gorgeous-looking, packed with both slapstick and suspense, and absorbing despite their repetitiousness. The character, too, continues to appeal. Tintin is indeed a child – and remained one for over half a century – but he is nevertheless kinder, braver, cleverer and more resourceful than the adults by whom he is surrounded. Captain Haddock forever expostulates, chases endless bottles of whisky and bumps his head on every conceivable obstacle; Professor Calculus can whip up the most amazing gadget virtually without notice but is utterly unable to function in the ‘real world’; the indefatigable detectives Thompson and Thomson are imbeciles. It is Tintin, therefore, who takes charge: what better wish-fulfilment fantasy could there be for any child than the notion that it is the adults who depend on him, rather than vice versa? The only adult who Tintin ever let down was the one who invented him, and whom he held helpless in an ambiguous embrace for more than half of this century.
Literary Review, 1992
