COMICS: Why I Love... Hergé

Steven Spielberg is currently working on a new Tintin film, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, adapted from the book of the same name. Jamie Bell will play the boy reporter and Andy Serkis Captain Haddock. It’s going to be a motion-capture film, with a CGI Snowy, Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) having apparently convinced Spielberg that live-action would be rubbish. And it would of course. Has anyone ever made a good Tintin film? In short, no, because while the narrative might translate well enough, any style of film making is going to do a disservice to the original artwork of Hergé and so surely leave the whole project floundering like The Thom(p)sons.

Like many kids, I grew up with Tintin and Asterix as my two graphic touchstones. We read the Beano too, of course, but it was categorically inferior to these continental comic books, actual books with long, complex stories and the most beautiful drawings. Asterix was illustrated by Alberto Underzo and his style was quite ‘fast’, with loose lines and caricatures for figures. I always felt a little disappointed that Dogmatix didn’t actually look much like a real dog. Tintin’s white terrier, Snowy, on the other hand, was dog incarnate: admirably doggish in all his ways from his unfailing loyalty to his unfailing greed. Here was a dog I could believe in and, in keeping with Hergé's other characters, he was rendered with the surest graphic touch.

The visual style of the Tintin books is one that looks enormously simple: it is rather muted in colour; the black lines are neat and constant. The predominant tones are those of the up-market paint company Farrow & Ball and dominated by gentle browns, yellows, blues and greens. Most frames restrict their colour spectrum to just two or three different tones and. unlike some other comic styles, much importance is given to empty space, meaning Hergé is happy to offer a blank sky or wall as a backdrop to a small detail of action or expression. Not for Tintin the graphic pyrotechnics of Marvel Comics; our Belgian boy hero operates against a tranquil canvas of meticulous order.

It is hard to imagine Spielberg’s CGI doing justice to Snowy. His character, by turns jaunty, sceptical, sour or giddy, is the essential counterpoint to Tintin’s almost boundless optimism and good cheer. Snowy will sniff out a ne’er-do-well while Tintin is still shaking his hand and, though he shares with Captain Haddock a weakness for whisky, well, it just adds character to both of them. Without Snowy around, Tintin might himself seem quite insufferable: he is after all weirdly confident, competent and probably a bit smug. He’s a little too perfect. He needs those around him to bring him down a little and luckily he is surrounded by fools, from Haddock to Caluclus and the Thom(p)son detectives. Occasionally his companions are heroes themselves, like the Chinese boy, Chang, who appears in Tintin in Tibet (known in China as Tintin in China’s Tibet). Chang was based on Hergé’s real Chinese friend, Tchong-Jen, a student at art school in Brussels who was instrumental in encouraging the development of the Tintin strip into well researched, in-depth stories.

Chang aside, however, Hergé's treatment of foreigners is an area of dispute. There have been campaigns in Belgium to have Tintin in The Congo banned on grounds of racism and in this country it is apparently sold with a wrapper around the cover and a warning, like a porn mag. Only an idiot could dispute that the depictions of Africans seem offensive today. I have never read this book: it doesn't seem to have been available here when I was growing up and I suspect I can live without it now. I guess it falls into the same category as work like Little Black Sambo – a reflection of its time, probably not meant to be offensive in the way it seems today, but still uncomfortable reading. Hergé may have got in wrong with The Congo, and indeed in later life he admitted as much, but he was right on other occasions, predicting a world in thrall to the strategic importance of oil reserves in Land of Black Gold and sending his men to the moon well before Neil Armstrong got there. Throughout the books he proves himself to be resolutely anti-corruption and anti-totalitarianism, a writer concerned with the nefarious intentions of governments and determined to bring them down with the help of a young lad and his dog.

As well as the thrilling escapades and glorious artwork, another enduring pleasure of the Tintin books of my childhood was, for some reason, to look in the front of the book at the list of languages into which they had been translated. Basque! Welsh! Picard! Bengali! This still pleases me. I was also especially proud, being a nationalistic young thing, that Hergé had chosen Scotland as the setting for one book. The Black Island is not his best, sadly, but I enjoyed seeing Tintin in a kilt. On the other hand, I could never, ever forgive the decision to dress him in flares for Tintin and the Picaros, even if it was published in 1976, nearly fifty years since his traditional plus fours took their first outing. Bear that in mind, Spielberg, bear that in mind...

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