Midcentury Media

“Tintin is me… I believe I’m the only one who can animate him, who can give him a soul”

Tintin, with his boy-scout charm and playful quiff, is someone who is loved and recognised the world over, but how many of us know about his creator? George Remi (aka Hergé) said in an interview in 1989, “Tintin is me… I believe I’m the only one who can animate him, who can give him a soul”, and it was Hergé’s own heart and soul that went into producing this extraordinary 20th century icon.

While most of Belgium suffered the effects of the Second World War, Hergé thrived during the occupation, but at a cost to his reputation. He was a workaholic and never turned down an opportunity – even working for the less patriotic newspapers, namely the ‘stolen’ Le Soir, which saw him outcast after the war and in danger of forever being labelled an ‘incivique’ or collaborator. Hergé said: “I worked, period; that’s all…While everyone found it normal that a mechanic made trains run, they thought that people of the press were supposedly traitors.”

Saved by former resistance fighter and publisher Raymond Leblanc, Hergé was offered the position of Artistic Director on a new publication that saw Tintin and his crew firmly at the helm. While Hergé may have deemed it a ‘necessary’ project rather than a labour of love, it paved the way for the rest of his career and resulted in some of the finest examples of his work.

© Hergé-Moulinsart 2011

With Leblanc’s perseverance and risk-taking, and Hergé’s desire to work, the first issue of Le Journal de Tintin was published in September 1946. While Le Journal de Tintin went down a storm in terms of sales (in just three days all 60,000 copies printed had sold out), other publications once faithful to Hergé launched a series of attacks on the new magazine. Leblanc had worked hard to clear Hergé’s name through obtaining a ‘certificate of good citizenship’, yet many remained unconvinced. La Cité nouvelle, while not naming Hergé, said in 1946: “An incivique and a traitor, this individual can just pick up his pencil and commercially relaunch his little ‘Hitlerjungend’ brigade.”

While these sorts of comments did not dampen the spirit of Tintin loyalists, Hergé was seriously shaken by the way his country had turned on him. He suffered from depression for over a decade, but it was during this time that he set up Studio Hergé in 1950 and produced some of his best works, culminating in his much-loved tale of friendship: Tintin in Tibet.

In The Comics Journal, writer Kim Thompson in 2003 called Tintin in Tibet, “an achingly pure story of friendship and heroism that is widely considered one of the series’ peaks”. It tells the story of how, after hearing of his friend Chang’s involvement in a plane crash in Nepal, Tintin embarks on a quest through the snowy mountains to find him, eventually rescuing Chang from an ‘abominable snowman’, a yeti, who it turns out had actually been taking care of him.

It seems that while Hergé was haunted by what he termed ‘white nightmares’, in which he dreamt he was trapped in a featureless white landscape, he transformed his struggle with life’s moral dilemmas into a beautiful piece of art. Unlike any of his other tales, Tibet is not about villains, chases and savages, but a quest for amity. It was by no means an easy feat though and he almost gave up half way through. Turning to Jung disciple Professor Franz Ricklin to interpret his nightmares, he is advised to stop work on Tibet to face his crisis. This was exactly the provocation Hergé needed. Conjuring up his own boy-scout spirit once more, he returned to work immediately – he would never give up on Tintin, just as Tintin never gives up on Chang.

Hergé was also wracked with a moral dilemma at this time. Involved in an affair, he finally took the decision to leave his wife of 28 years for Fanny Vlamynck, a young colourist at Studios Hergé. He commented on this period: “Simply, things happened: I met Fanny, I left Germaine. C’est la vie! It was the time of Tintin in Tibet, which is the perfect reflection of this moral crisis: friendship, loyalty, purity”. Hergé realised that he had to complete the book in order to come to terms with himself, and probably based the character of the misunderstood abominable snowman on himself. The book was published in 1960.

But it wasn’t just the wholesome storyline of Tibet that made it so successful, visually it was also a thing of

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Midcentury

Autumn/Winter 2011 Midcentury Media

© Hergé-Moulinsart 2011

© Atelier de Portzamparc 2011

Midcentury

© Atelier de Portzamparc 2011

Autumn/Winter 2011

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