A stunning blend of simplicity and complexity

Reading Tintin when I was a child, in Britain in the 1970s, I always assumed Georges Remi’s creation was just a harmless bit of fun. However, when I went to Belgium I discovered, to my amazement, that over there they take him very seriously indeed (this year, a single Tintin picture sold for €2.5 million in Brussels). In Britain, the fearless reporter in the plus fours is a quaint juvenile amusement. In his native Belgium he’s seen as high art, and his creator Hergé (Georges Remi’s initials, backwards) is revered.

The late Harry Thompson wrote a brilliant book about Tintin from the British perspective. It was informed and affectionate, but stopped short of adulation. Pierre Sterckx’s bulkier book belongs in the Continental camp. It’s designed to sit alongside proper monographs, not children’s comics. It’s no surprise that Sterckx’s credits include a book about Vermeer.

To be fair, Sterckx knows his stuff, and his sources could hardly be better: he was close friends with Hergé from 1965 until his death in 1983. A curator and art historian, he taught Hergé about fine art (the chapter on Hergé’s art collection is particularly interesting — I never knew he collected Lichtenstein).

Sterckx clearly knows Hergé inside out, so why does his scholarly prose feel so detached? There are some intriguing insights into the origins of Hergé’s style, his use of monochrome and his debt to Chinese brushwork, but I yearned for more personal revelations. His two marriages, his depressions, his difficulties during (and after) the second world war — all these fascinating incidents are dismissed with frustrating brevity. Sterckx must have enough first-hand info to write a fine memoir about this elusive, enigmatic man, but his lavish tome is more primer than proper biography, which is a pity.