Hergé, son of Tintin /

Why should readers consider another book on Georges Remi (Herge), the creator of Tintin? Because this one was written by a comics writer himself, a man who knows the medium from both its theory and practice, who interviewed Herge and those close to him, and who had access to a trove of vital letters, papers, and notebooks. The book neither condemns nor worships Herge; Peeters presents Herge's anti-Semitism and fascist sentiments along with his campaigns against war, oil magnates, and economic crises. Peeters looks at all periods of Herge's life, capturing his long bouts of depression and indecision, work habits, extra-marital affairs, friendships, and successes and emphasizing the "rapport between an author's work and his life," all set in economic, political, and cultural context. For the most part, the book, with its abundance of anecdotes, quotes, and bits of gossip, is interesting reading. However, more careful translation and editing would have eliminated errors such as one on page 135: "Of the seventy thousand Jews living in Belgium in 1940, around thirty-two million were executed." Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, professionals, general readers. J. A. Lent independent scholar

Georges Remi emerges in three dimensions from behind his famous comic books. CARTOONISTS are a peculiar breed of artist. For one thing, they're hesitant about the use of the A-word. Their craft - now that's better - also comes with great constraints. Because the work appears in newspapers and comic books, it must strike a commercial chord quickly: there isn't much time for it to "find an audience." The field doesn't boast many lonely geniuses whose work is discovered posthumously. The demands of reproduction put limits on complexity, and the panel format - those squares and rectangles - erects graphic walls. For successful cartoonists, producing every day on someone else's schedule, the grind is relentless. Cartoonists tend not to be boulevardiers; their way of life is sedentary and often solitary, and their days are spent in the company of invented characters in an invented world. Life and work can merge in curious ways. I happen to be the son of a cartoonist - a happy and well-adjusted cartoonist - and collaborated with him on "Prince Valiant," but it was clear to all of us in the family that our situation was not quite normal. Or, thinking back to the moment when an electrician came into my father's studio and found him posing - on his back, wearing a wig and a skirt, holding a garbage can lid as a shield and using a plunger on a rubber tube to snap a Polaroid - it may just have been that we had a different sense of what "normal" was. One thing cartoonists generally haven't done is take themselves very seriously. That's a job best left to the professionals. Comics and comic strips have been a major focus of academic research for at least half a century. Semioticians, literary critics, anthropologists, historians, existentialists, Freudians, Lacanians - the quest for meaning engages them all. One of the main targets has been "The Adventures of Tintin," the classic series introduced some 80 years ago by Georges Remi, better known as Hergé. More than a hundred specialty books have been published about the Tintin series; entire journals and conferences are devoted to it. So when I saw that a new study of Remi was being published by a man described as "one of the most highly regarded Tintinologists in the world" - and a biographer of Jacques Derrida to boot - I thought I knew what to expect, and braced myself accordingly. Well, Blistering Barnacles!, as Captain Haddock would say. The great merit of "Hergé, Son of Tintin," by Benoît Peeters, translated from the French by Tina A. Kover, is that Georges Remi is allowed to emerge in three dimensions as what he in fact was: not an intellectual, not an activist, not a saint, but an ordinary man of his times. To encounter him is something of a surprise, because so much else about Tintin is extraordinary. Leave aside the new Spielberg blockbuster, which incorporates elements of three Tintin adventures ("The Crab With the Golden Claws," "The Secret of the Unicorn" and "Red Rackham's Treasure") and seems destined to create a durable movie franchise. The 24 books in the series have sold about 350 million copies and been translated into roughly 80 languages. The Belgium into which Georges Remi was born, in 1907, was not exactly a colossus among nations, but it was a commercial dynamo and a colonial power, enriched by rubber and ivory from the Congo (which King Leopold II referred to as "a precious milch cow"). That sense of possibility, along with the retrograde attitudes bound up with it, formed Remi's terroir. Georges began drawing at an early age. The oldest surviving sketch - made when he was 4 - is an uncanny preview of future cartoon panels. "Scribbled on the back of a postcard," Peeters writes, "it shows a train passing in front of a stopped car, under the watch of a crossing keeper." Anyone familiar with Tintin will not be surprised that Remi's favorite books as a boy included "Roughing It," by Mark Twain; "Three Men in a Boat," by Jerome K. Jerome; and "The Three Musketeers," by Alexandre Dumas. The blended sensibilities of these books - swashbuckling, funny, observant, picaresque, charming - amount to a recipe for the Tintin saga. Remi created his first Tintin cartoons, in black and white, as a weekly insert for the rightist Roman Catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, in 1929. He published them under the name Hergé, which is what the letters RG (Remi's initials, reversed) sound like in French (AIR-zhay). Tintin proved an immediate hit. Eventually the stories would be collected in books and reproduced in color. The characters began to accrue. First the boy reporter Tintin, with his plus fours and unflappable tuft of hair; and his dog, Snowy (Milou in French, the nickname of a former girlfriend of Remi's). And then the rest of the cast: the mercurial and sozzled but stalwart Captain Haddock, the brilliant (but hard of hearing) Professor Calculus, the archfiend Roberto Rastapopoulos and others. Even as a child, Hergé had been a skilled mimic, and that talent animates his creations. At the same time, the characters are oddly detached: except for Captain Haddock, no one has much of a back story. Tintin has none at all, and although he is a reporter, we see him write only one article in the course of the entire canon. What's most distinctive about Tintin is the artwork. Hergé's trademark ligne claire style, which developed gradually, dispensed with shading and relied on inked lines of uniform weight. To accentuate that line - "the true backbone," Hergé would insist - colors were restricted to a range of relatively soft tones. Although the characters were cartoon figures, the backgrounds were realistic, even elegant Hergé did a vast amount of research into cars, ships, airplanes, animals. His pacing and composition owed much to movies. Benoît Peeters knew Hergé and interviewed him on several occasions toward the end of his life. (He died in 1983.) Peeters also interviewed many of Hergé's friends and associates, and both of his wives. At one point, Peeters was allowed to explore the drawers and filing cabinets at Hergé Studios, in Brussels. "He had a lot of talent but also a lot of luck," Hergé's first wife, Germaine, told Peeters. "Let's not make a Michelangelo out of him!" Hergé's writing and drawing evolved mainly through trial and error. He suffered from chronic depression, which worsened as he grew older, but his capacity for work was always prodigious, and at times he thought of little else. He was a pioneer in merchandising and promotion, though an overture to Walt Disney was rebuffed. Like most cartoonists, he was alert to the technique of others, past and present; he especially admired the way George McManus ("Bringing Up Father") handled noses. As cartoonists often do, Hergé worked his life and preoccupations into his stories. His father and uncle - twins who dressed identically - inspired the hapless detectives Dupont and Dupond (in English, Thomson and Thompson). Tintin himself was modeled on Hergé's younger brother, Paul. Strangely, Hergé had no particular fondness for children (and had none of his own). Tintin was his progeny, and rarely out of mind. He continually jotted notes to himself on scraps of paper: Camera hidden in a watch: a photo of Tintin is transmitted to all of the accomplices. Tintin wants to pursue X. Airfield. A plane is ready to take off. Tintin boards. Some passages in "Hergé, Son of Tintin" seem directed at the cognoscenti. The excursions into prewar Belgian politics are not for everyone, even Belgians, and passing references to arcane debates among Tintinologists will mystify many. The biographer of Derrida cannot avoid the occasional nod to "orality" and "sublimation." Yet Peeters squarely faces two issues that hang over Hergé's career: his resort to ethnic and racial stereotypes, mainly in the early stories, and his record of accommodation in German-occupied Belgium. The issues can't be avoided. In both word and picture, the depiction of Africans in "Tintin in the Congo" makes your jaw drop. ("It's very nice of these blacks to bear us triumphantly to our hotel!") The villainous financier in "The Shooting Star" has a hooked nose and has been given the name Blumenstein. Some of this work was later revised, imperfectly. And "Tintin in the Congo" has been gingerly treated by publishers and libraries. As for accommodation, Hergé published "Tintin" throughout the war in the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir. Peeters doesn't excuse any of this (who would?), though he does try to put it in context. He observes that Hergé's prejudices were those of his time and place, and notes that the cartoonist, as he matured, acquired a more enlightened sensibility. In "The Blue Lotus," Chinese ideograms on signs in the background say things like "Abolish unfair treaties!" and "Down with imperialism!" (These were drawn by an influential assistant, a French-speaking native of Shanghai named Zhang Chong Ren.) Hergé was not in essence a political man, publishing in Le Soir because collaborationist newspapers were the only ones allowed to exist. At best, he was naïve. More likely, in Peeters's telling, he just didn't care about the most consequential moral conflict of the century: it had left him alone. After the liberation, Hergé maintained he had done nothing wrong but seems to have struggled privately with shame and guilt. He was spared the fate of others in Belgium whose records were no different from his - the authorities proved, as Peeters puts it, "overridingly indulgent." Hergé was protected by nothing less than Tintin's popularity. And that, in the end, is Peeters's larger point. In many ways Georges Remi vanished into the work of Hergé. "What if I told you that I put my whole life into Tintin?" he asked Peeters shortly before his death. That seems to be exactly what he did. A flawed and not terribly happy man grew a modest talent into something vastly greater than himself. I don't know what a semiotician would make of that A layman might call it art. 'Let's not make a Michelangelo oat of him,' Hergé's first wife told his biographer. Cullen Murphy, editor at large of Vanity Fair, wrote the comic strip "Prince Valiant" for 25 years. His new book, "God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World," has just been published.