The Adventures of Tintin

Les Aventures de Tintin the series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist Georges Remi (pen name of Hergé) first appeared in French in Le Petit Vingtième, a children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le XXe Siècle (the 20th century) on 10 January 1929. The success of the series saw the serialised strips published in Belgium's leading newspaper Le Soir, collected into a series of twenty-four albums and then a  magazine. Adaptations for film, radio, television and theatre followed over the next, nearly, ninety years. I'm of the generation for whom the cry of "Herge's Adventures of Tintin," was as much a part of the tea time cultural landscape as the Banana Splits, Robinson Crusoe or Belle and Sebastian (the French series with the annoying kid you wanted to punch, not the Scottish indie band).  The books have now sold something like 200 million copies in over fifty countries.

Remi was very much a product and victim of his time. The editor of Le XXe Siecle was Norbert Wallez, a complex but ultra conservative (small c) former priest who told Remi how  and what to write. Le XXe Siecle was actually a Catholic newspaper, something which a century later seems so other worldly, and Wallez was himself a disciple of Charles Maurras, the ultra-conservative, monarchist and anti-parliamentarian who believed that "ones country should come before everything," Wallez and Maurras were also both admirers of Mussolini.  It's worth, in my view, pointing this out because their is a direct lineage between the theories of Maurras and the early stories of Tintin, or at least the influence played by Wallez in them.

Two of the early Tintin stories: Tintin in the Land of Soviets and Tintin in The Congo have been the subject of much revisionist twaddle over the years but it's worth remembering that Remi himself was subject to abuse at the time of publication for what he called the affects of his bourgeois surroundings on his writing. The first of the two stories, still available in print although only in black and white, is very much the polar opposite of the agitprop films and cartoons that were so popular in the Soviet Union at the time. Whilst the Soviet propaganda machine was keen to portray 'Mother Russia' as the provider of everything, Remi portrayed the landscape as bleak and the Soviet leadership as corrupt thieves, as he later stated this was simply because in Belgium at the time if you weren't a Catholic and you were a Bolshevik you were considered Atheist and of course not a good person. He did also add that the storylines were partly the result of the naivety of youth. Of course what he didn't appreciate at the time was that his portrayal of a leadership that was self serving whilst its population was starving was very accurate.

The silliness surrounding the Congo story probably reached its peak in 2007 when the Commission for Racial Equality called for the book to be banned, the book does now contain warnings about possibly offending potential readers, something which I'm not aware has happened to either Shakespeare or Joseph Conrad who were also very much products of their time and prone to racial slurs and stereotyes.

Until fairly recently the ginger haired wunderkind was barely noticeable on this side of the Channel, even now on e-bay the original magazines are going for very cheap prices and the books are available in collected editions for less than a tenner through the nations favourite online retailer. On the continent though he was and still is much bigger in terms of sales and merchandising. There is a small shop in the St German de Pres area of Paris where all the Tintin related collectables are kept in glass cases with prices that make your eyes water. Even in the UK the resin models can fetch up to £600 which seems astonishing.  I have a small model of Tintin on my desk (about 7 cm high) purchased from the Paris shop which I think cost around £12, the Tintin/Snowy motorcycle combo was about £50 and I declined to purchase that.

It's good to see the popularity of one of Belgium's most famous sons enduring some ninety years after his first public appearance and that successive generations can lose themselves in the stories, whatever medium they experience them in.

Oh and by the way, the two detectives were called Thomson and Thompson and so were never twins!