Hergé and his image of Tintin.
As an active journalist, I was terrified to write The Adventures of Tintin. After all, in this comic book for more than half a century, the protagonist Tintin has long been a world-renowned predecessor.
I don't know if the mundane words that are being printed in the magazine at this moment can match the magnificence of his adventures of one percent— fighting gangsters in Chicago, hunting down international drug gangs in Egypt, fighting opium crime in the far East, fighting opium in the Arctic Ocean
Looking for the fallen stars, he landed on the moon even 15 years before Armstrong.
This character has almost all the good sentiments of human beings. Full of a sense of justice and a spirit of adventure, he dared to fight against all kinds of evil forces, repeatedly risking his life to rescue others; although he was small, he was good at fighting, and in the struggle against all kinds of bad people, he used his bravery and wit to overcome dangers and finally defeat the enemy. Tintin was also a pacifist, stopping war at all costs and treating defeated opponents with tolerance and humanity.
In the summer of 2021, the world's largest Tintin-themed exhibition came to China, where more than 200 characters who appeared in The Adventures of Tintin were brought together in vivid scenes and original comics. At the opening, the exhibition hall was crowded with people, and the surrounding products were swept away. At the scene, I met mike Farr, a former ace journalist.
At the age of 4, Pharr was inspired by the Adventures of Tintin and later became a journalist, and today he calls himself a Tintinologist and is "the most knowledgeable man in Britain". Farr traveled extensively, gave tireless lectures on Tintin, and wrote more than a dozen books about Tintin.
I asked Farr, "Why do you and these people love Tintin so much?" He said, "There's no one who doesn't love Tintin unless you haven't opened The Adventures of Tintin." ”
The "Curious Fox" and the birth of Tintin
Tintin was born in Belgium, a country with three official languages – Dutch, French and German. People there are more accustomed to communicating with images than between different languages. Belgium saw the emergence of illustrations in the 19th century, followed by comic magazines and professional comic book publishers. In Brussels, Tintin is on a par with the Smurfs and is a comic footnote to the city.
Born on 10 January 1929 in the town of Ertpic in Brussels, George Remy, alias Hergé, created the original image of Tintin. The character has simple lines and looks like a graffiti drawn by a young creator. He had no mouth, his eyes were just two small black spots, and his hair was not cocked, but went down against his forehead. From the outside, Tintin seems to be at a vague age, which can be an adult or a child.
There have always been two theories about Tintin's archetype: Hergé's younger brother Paul, who was 5 years younger than Hergé and an officer, known as Tintin the Great in Belgium; and Hergé's 100-part series le Boy-Scout, "Toto the Rogue Patrol," in which the protagonist was an adventurous scout and considered Tintin's predecessor.
As a child, Hergé was an avid sketcher and loved to draw villains, and figures like "Toto" were created when he went on an expedition with the Scout squad. At that time, he already had a sense of composition, scenery and coloring. Because Hergé was always perceiving, exploring, and curious about everything, he was called the "Curious Fox" when he was in the Boy Scouts.
Looking at the large number of black and white originals in the early days, as well as the half-colored and half-finished manuscripts with blank dialog boxes, Hergé's most seminal technique in The Adventures of Tintin is undoubtedly the invention of the dialogue bubble. Before Hergé, the dialogue of the characters in the picture book was set at the bottom of the page, separate from the picture.
Hergé chose to place the dialogue in a bubble around the character's mouth, allowing the reader to have a more immersive reading experience. This invention redefined the form of comics. At the same time, Hergé also absorbed the various special techniques in the novel and the unique things in the language of the film into his own techniques, and used these techniques to create unique works. The perfect combination of words and patterns led to the birth of Tintin.
Tintin and his partner
Tintin was on the road, and the first stop was the Soviet Union. On page 8 of Tintin in the USSR, Tintin, driving a convertible, has his hair blown up by the wind in order to escape the pursuit, which makes Hergé feel that Tintin has become "human". So he let Tintin always have a strand of hair above his forehead, and the iconic image was determined.
Tintin's friends joined in the course of serialization. Milu, a white puppy, somewhat mischievous, was Tintin's most loyal companion. Today, the pair's "worth" has soared to 3.2 million euros – on January 14 this year, a tintin manuscript fetched 3.2 million euros at an auction at the Artcurial auction house in Paris, setting a new record for the auction of comic book art.
Captain Adok had all sorts of peculiar curses, such as "rice noodles", "rotten cucumbers", and the phrase "put you thousands of cannons" that is still fresh in my mind today. This alcoholic uncle did not bring bad children, but brought a wealth of jokes because of his fiery temper and slightly reckless behavior.
In addition, there is Professor Sunflower, who is always confused in life, but far more technological than Einstein; and the Dupont and Dupont brothers, who first appeared and wanted to arrest Tintin and later became Tintin's best friends. According to the principle of "washing white and weak three points", the two brothers have always played the role of "pig teammate". Other characters such as female singer, art dealer, knife acrobat, big-nosed bandit, alien creature, cult leader and other characters can imagine Tintin's adventures from the name alone.
In the 1980s, when Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" set off a global treasure hunt, the French, who had always had a sense of self-superiority, did not think anything of it - "Oh! It's just a movie version of 'Tintin'. This attitude aroused Spielberg's curiosity and became an opportunity for him to make Tintin films later.
Returning to the painting itself, Hergé undoubtedly pushed comic strips to an unparalleled artistic peak. Some of his pencil sketches, their complexity and skillful outlining, precise tones, are reminiscent of the styles of Dürer, Holbein, da Vinci and Ingres, who were the masters of painting whom Hergé admired. While painting different landscapes of countries and people, the "curious fox" George Remy gradually became the "father of European comic strip" Hergé.
China in The Adventures of Tintin.
Successes and storms in war
Farr told me that although Tintin's footprints were in the East, Africa, and many fictional kingdoms, Hergé himself had never been to these places.
Unlike the 20th-century comics that became famous after the war, Tintin rose to fame during the war. Hergé created the image of Tintin in Brussels with only his love of foreign cultures and ancient civilizations. Thus, Hergé insisted that Tintin needed a free soul to transcend nations, history, and war, not even the family—much like Hergé, who rarely discussed parents and had two wives without children.
Bruno Jans, consul general of the Belgian Consulate General in Shanghai, also sees Hergé as a symbol of openness. "Although he [Hergé] traveled rarely, he was inspired by so many different civilizations that his Tintin was undoubtedly a spokesman for international cooperation and friendly people-to-people relations with great diplomatic skills."
This desire for freedom is reflected in the comics, and it is Tintin's mastery of all kinds of transportation. Jeeps, classic cars, armored cars, submarines, airplanes, the gifted Tintin was born, and these vehicles were always painted to life by Hergé, and even professional car collectors were fascinated.
Farr said the vehicles were inspired by Hergé's drawing on the Autoworld Museum in Brussels. The same example is Tintin's encounter in Africa, where the leopard man, canoe and statue of Alembaia he encountered in the Congo have prototypes.
The details of reality are thus embedded in the fantasy comics along with Hergé's life.
In the late 1930s, Hergé's work concealed some veiled critiques of fascist regimes in Europe. In The Scepter of King Ottoka, Tintin travels to the fictional country of Sildavia, where Tintin battles the gangster Musstler (a mixture of dictators Mussolini and Hitler) and ultimately stops his plot to annex neighboring countries.
World War II was a period of hergé's ups and downs and successes, and the Adventures of Tintin, published by Castelmann Press in Belgium, reached an unprecedented number.
At the urging of the publisher, Hergé finally accepted the publication of the color edition of The Mysterious Meteor, but always maintained his original simple and clear style, and adopted uniform pastel tones, without shadows and color gradients. For the first time, the address of Tintin's apartment, 26 Labrador Street, is a concrete place that symbolizes the nudity of reality.
One night, during a night walk, Tintin observed an extra star in the constellation Ursa Major, so he went to the observatory to ask the director what had happened, and was told that the end of the world was coming. Correspondingly, hergé in reality during this period also suffered a crisis.
In 1940, after German troops occupied Belgium, the Germans closed their newspapers in Hergé. The cartoonist resigned himself to his fate and made a living at a newspaper engaged in Nazi propaganda. In September 1944, after Belgium was liberated by the Allies, the newspaper was shut down and all employees were accused of nazi comrades. Hergé himself was arrested several times and later banned from practicing for two years.
No one doesn't like The Adventures of Tintin, and if you don't, it's because you haven't seen it yet.
Go to the moon!
The Adventures of Tintin was even more influential after the war. In the early 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle was asked at a press conference, "What books are on the bedside at night?" De Gaulle replied, "Tintin." Readers from the age of 7 to 77 are captivated by it, and Tintin's brilliance is evident.
After the war, there was nothing to be done, but Hergé intended to send Tintin to the moon. In pursuit of credibility, Hergé did a lot of research work, which took 6-8 years. He asked experts in the field of aerospace about the structure of the lunar rocket cabin, and then asked the studio's assistants to draw pictures according to the confirmed rocket model.
On the sign next to the window of the Tintin-themed exhibition is a quote from Hergé: "Mankind makes dreams a reality because it believes in dreams." The phrase comes from the inscription of a cartoon by Hergé. It was done by Hergé in tribute to Armstrong, in which Tintin, Captain Adok, and Professor Sunflower welcome Armstrong on the moon.
In his later years, Hergé developed a keen interest in contemporary art, gradually shifting from comics to avant-garde art, and had a deep friendship with and others of the same period, experimenting with different genres of painting and collecting many works. In Tintin and the Art of the Alphabet, Captain Adock ends the story as an art collector and chooses to live in seclusion.
Tintin's adventures also stopped at this moment. In March 1983, Hergé died of leukemia, and in accordance with his will, Tintin was no longer serialized.
Tintin and the Art of the Alphabet is the last unfinished work of The Adventures of Tintin. The cover of The French newspaper Liberation that month was a cartoon about Tintin, in which Tintin fell to the ground, with Milu saying "Tintin is dead" – a cartoon published in memory of Hergé.