TINTIN
Georges Remi, alias Herge, shared a blessing and a curse with Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He created a popular fictional character and spent most of his adult life filling the demand for additional stories. As Michael Farr makes clear in “Tintin: The Complete Companion”, Herge lavished great creativity and attention to detail on the stories of Tintin, his adventurous young reporter, but the workload threatened at times to crush him. Tintin fans are the beneficiaries of his dedication.
“Tintin: The Complete Companion” opens with a short introduction on Herge before recounting the creation of each of the 24 cartoon adventures, beginning with the rather primitive “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets in 1929 and ending with “Tintin and Alph-Art”, left incomplete at Herge’s death in 1983. Farr identifies the background of each story, especially the meticulous research into person and place that produced such richly detailed art and plot.
Farr also notes the progression of the cartoon itself, as Herge masters his craft and his character. This progession includes the growth of Tintin’s unofficial family over time: his faithful dog Snowy, his seafaring friend Captain Haddock, the bumbling detectives Thompson and Thomson, and the hilariously deaf Professor Calculus. Farr documents the recurring characters, especially the villainous Rastapopoulus and his henchman Allan Thompson, but including the opera singer Castafiore.
Inevitably, when writing over such a huge swath of the 20th century, some storylines become archaic or politically incorrect. Farr documents the changes as stories were edited and redrawn when republished over the years. The improvements are generally for the good. The first three adventures featuring Tintin in the Soviet Union, the Congo, and 1930’s America contained the most stereotypes. Many later stories contain allusions to the Second World War or the Cold War that may be less apparent to the modern reader.
Behind the stories is Herge himself, who suffered the misfortune of living in twice-occupied Belgium, and of being the target of critics over the years for various real and imagined faults in the Tintin adventures. Nevertheless, the stories have held up well and continue to be popular among fans of all ages. “Tintin” The Complete Companion” is highly recommended to those fans.
“This text explains the sources in reality of all the Tintin stories, which still sell four million copies a year worldwide. Politics, people, events and objects are all covered,;Tintin, the extraordinary reporter with his immediately recognizable coif and his dog Snowy, has been a publishing phenomenon since he first appeared in 1928. Herge, Tintin’s creator, based the stories on actual events in his world, reflecting the political tensions of the 1930s and postwar events. The Anschluss and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the race to the moon, our Western fascination with the Abominable Snowman, the spying activities of Buster Crabbe, the revolutionary activities of Regis Bebray in South America, are just a few of the people, events and phenomena to crop up, inimitably satirized, in Herge’s stories. He also drew on real objects: the aircraft, ships, guns, cars, clothes, buildings and so forth, that appear in his stories are scrupulously correct, and were often updated in subsequent editions.;This book explains the sources, of whatever kind, of all the stories. It also shows how Herge subtly adjusted the stories in new editions, adapting them to changing times and ideas, and downplaying their originally local, Belgian origins.”