The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not So Clear

By Joe Sutliff Sanders

Contributions by Jônathas Miranda de Araújo, Guillaume de Syon, Hugo Frey, Kenan Koçak, Andrei Molotiu, Annick Pellegrin, Benjamin Picado, Vanessa Meikle Schulman, Matthew Screech, and Gwen Athene Tarbox

As the creator of Tintin, Hergé (1907–1983) remains one of the most important and influential figures in the history of comics. When Hergé, born Georges Prosper Remi in Belgium, emerged from the controversy surrounding his actions after World War II, his most famous work leapt to international fame and set the standard for European comics. While his style popularized what became known as the “clear line” in cartooning, this edited volume shows how his life and art turned out much more complicated than his method.

The book opens with Hergé’s aesthetic techniques, including analyses of his efforts to comprehend and represent absence and the rhythm of mundaneness between panels of action. Broad views of his career describe how Hergé navigated changing ideas of air travel, while precise accounts of his life during Nazi occupation explain how the demands of the occupied press transformed his understanding of what a comics page could do. The next section considers a subject with which Hergé was himself consumed: the fraught lines between high and low art. By reading the late masterpieces of the Tintin series, these chapters situate his artistic legacy. A final section considers how the clear line style has been reinterpreted around the world, from contemporary Francophone writers to a Chinese American cartoonist and on to Turkey, where Tintin has been reinvented into something meaningful to an audience Hergé probably never anticipated.

Despite the attention already devoted to Hergé, no multi-author critical treatment of his work exists in English, the majority of the scholarship being in French. With contributors from five continents drawing on a variety of critical methods, this volume’s range will shape the study of Hergé for many years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jul 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496807274

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Joe Sutliff Sanders

TINTIN, CLEAR LINE … AND HERGÉ, TOO

How big is Tintin?

Guy Delisle, the Quebecois cartoonist and journalist, tells a story of teaching a series of introductory workshops on comics in the Holy Land. The humor of these scenes comes from various problems: the absurdity of offering a course on comics to people who have no familiarity with the form, the challenges of teaching comics to students who are forbidden to draw images of people, and so on. At each workshop he asks his grown students to name artists and comics with which the students are already familiar, and at one workshop the answer is especially disheartening. Frustrated and amazed, he confides to the reader, Only two have ever heard of Tintin! (218).

That’s how big Tintin is. He’s so big that it’s almost reasonable for a Quebecois cartoonist to expect a room full of adults in a war-torn country, adults who barely understand what comics are, to know Tintin. In his introduction to a special issue of European Comic Art, Matthew Screech comments that although Tintin first appeared more than eighty years earlier, he still bestrides the world of Francophone comics like a colossus in plus fours. "Without The Adventures of Tintin, Screech concludes, the bande dessinée would not exist as we know it and neither, very probably, would European Comic Art" (v). Tintin’s face is iconic, and his influence extends far beyond his native Belgium.

And the man who created Tintin, Hergé, has become in recent years almost as familiar. In the weeks following Brussels’s liberation from its German occupiers, Hergé was obscure enough that vigilante patriots could list him as a wanted person twice: once as Hergé, and once more under his given name, Georges Remi (Assouline, Hergé 106). But today, books and essays about Hergé are a major industry in both the scholarly and popular presses, obviously in his native Belgium, certainly throughout the Francophone world, and even beyond.

When Screech writes that following the conclusion of the Tintin series, the Franco-Belgian cultural landscape would never look the same again (Masters of the Ninth Art 51), he is making an argument not just about the market saturation of Hergé’s signature creation, but also about an approach to cartooning that has become deeply identified with Hergé, although its elements all existed before Hergé rose to prominence. Clear line (or, more accurately, klare lijn, the Dutch phrase that has since been translated as ligne claire in French and clear line in English) was first used to describe Hergé’s style after his death.¹ Subsequent studies of clear line or the Brussels school take great pains to point out differences between its most famous practitioners, but some consistencies do stand out. Screech defines the style as characterized by carefully selected, meticulously researched and scrupulously copied details drawn in precise, well-defined lines, emphasized by a lack of shadow (Introduction vi). Bruno Lecigne explains the Hergéan aesthetic as identified by readability, efficient lines, and semi-realism (34). Pierre Sterckx sums up the common opinion that clear line has either no shadows or shadows compressed into the outlines of characters and objects to the extent that they seem to disappear therein (52).² Analysis of clear line as a style routinely abandons methodical readings of visual style and turns to psychoanalytic or political analysis (Lecigne’s book on clear line is the most obvious example of this tendency), which can be frustrating for someone new to Hergé looking for a simple definition. But Sterckx provides a reading of clear line that manages to be both poetic and insightful: Ligne claire is a logical typography of the visible, a drawing without shadows, the enemy of chiaroscuro, in a word, a detective art, the art of making everything clear, of eschewing mystery (L’Avènement, 53).³ The lack of shadows that surfaces in so many definitions is indicative of a deeper philosophy of clear line: it is a visual style that allows realistic, detailed drawings, but only in the background, as a testament to the solidity of the setting imagined by Hergé and the other masters of the style; the characters, themselves drawn with only enough detail to make them instantly distinct from one another, move in simple, uncomplicated actions across that meticulously mimetic backdrop. Thus, when Lecigne calls clear line a style of semi-realism, he points to how in the works of Hergé and others the principles of design articulate a realistic world populated by characters exactly realistic enough to be recognizable, and no more.

The influence of clear line has been enormous. Pierre Assouline has argued that historians and critics are too quick to link artists to the clear line style, and he mockingly cites the hergémony that results (Hergé 167), but such sarcasm has hardly stemmed enthusiasm for associating artists with Hergé’s style. Other scholars produce an impressive list of creators whose work borrows from the Brussels school: Ted Benoît, Bob de Moor, Jean-Claude Floc’h, Edgar Pierre Jacobs, Jacques Martin, Joost Swarte, and Willy Vandersteen (B. Beaty, ‘Patrimoine’ 74; McKinney xiv; Screech, Introduction vi). In Charles Hatfield’s classic study of alternative press comics, he notes that clear line was so familiar to comics creators in both Europe and America that they used it to set up powerful moments of irony (60–61), an achievement possible only with a style that has become instantly recognizable. The beautifully clear lines of Hergé’s comics have resonated powerfully across continents, languages, and decades.⁴

Those same lines, however, are sometimes also profoundly unclear. When those Belgian patriots went hunting for Hergé—or Remi—it was not the sharpness of his pen they wanted to discuss. Rather, they were interested in the profits he earned during the Occupation, helping to sell copies of a newspaper that delivered glowing reports of fascism (the June 26, 1940, issue dedicated a full spread to pictures of Mussolini, dictator and citizen) and condemnations of the enemies of the Reich (editorial cartoons on the front page of the February 15–16, 1941, and August 13, 1941, issues mocked England with scenes of maritime disaster under the English heading Britannia Rules the Waves.). After the war, Hergé was forbidden to produce new work until he had been investigated, and when the investigation stalled, it was only the involvement of a national war hero—one who had a financial interest in Hergé’s ability to produce new work—that broke the impasse (Peeters, Hergé 165). In later years, and in spite of his early dedication to a very conservative brand of Catholicism, Hergé entered into romantic relationships with women other than his wife (see, for example, Peeters, Hergé 193), finally divorcing her after a long period of separation, and marrying a woman who first met Hergé when she was one of his employees. Still later, controversy over his representation of Africans, specifically in his second Tintin story, Tintin in the Congo (first published serially from 1930 to 1932), in which Tintin rescues the bumbling, superstitious Congolese while explaining to them the respect due to Belgium, their fatherland. This last controversy has proved especially tenacious, as became clear in 2012 following a suit, filed by a Congolese national in Brussels, alleging racism. The suit was condemned in the Guardian (Vrielink), but the general approval with which the suit’s failure was met was condemned in equally strong terms (Miéville). The lines may be clear, but the ideas between them are very messy indeed.

HERGÉ’S LIFE

The boy who would become the man who would sketch those lines was born Georges Prosper Remi on May 22, 1907, at the home of his parents, in Etterbeek, a municipality of Brussels. Georges was the son of Alexis Remi and Élizabeth Dufour Remi, and many of the characters and even plots with which Hergé’s fans would one day become familiar found their origin in those parents. Élizabeth was the daughter of Antoinette Dufour, who grew up in the Marolles district of Brussels, and it was through these women that Hergé heard the Marollian dialect that would later inform the languages of the countries Hergé invented for Tintin to visit. Alexis was a twin who, with his brother Léon, favored bowler hats and walking canes, perhaps planting the seeds of the Thom(p)sons in the mind of young Georges (Peeters, Hergé 6). But a deep mystery came with the identity of the biological father of Alexis and Léon. When the boys were born, in 1882, their mother, Léonie Dewigne, was unmarried. Although Philippe Remi, Léonie’s cousin and, as of 1893, husband, claimed the boys, he was only eleven at the time of their birth (Peeters, Hergé 3). Léonie died before Georges was born, but the mystery of her lover—rumored to be royalty—would linger in family lore for years to come, would be hinted at in the Tintin stories, and would come to the fore again after Hergé’s death.

Georges showed a passion for sketching early on, and by the time he was a young man, he had already begun developing a career for himself. He published an illustrated essay on lassos in the May 1922 issue of Le Boy-Scout, thus bringing together his love of illustration with his love of scouting (Peeters, Hergé 16), and it was in this paper in 1924 that he first published under his reversed initials, which, when pronounced in French, produce the sound Hergé (Assouline, Hergé 9). Le Boy-Scout, the official (and heavily Catholic) publication of the boy scouting movement in Belgium, also provided in 1926 the venue for The Adventures of Totor, Patrol Chief of the June Bugs. The characters who would become Tintin and his trusted dog Snowy (known in French as Milou) first emerged here, as did some of Hergé’s later techniques, including the placement of word bubbles within the illustrations, which was still innovative in a Brussels newspaper scene in which comic strips tended to feature illustrations with captions below them (Assouline, Hergé 9). In the fall of 1925, barely eighteen, he began work at the (again Catholic) Vingtième Siècle (Twentieth Century), and by 1928 he was in charge of the new children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtième (Farr, Adventures 7). It was here that Tintin got its start, with the first panels of the story that would become Tintin in the Land of the Soviets appearing on January 10, 1929.

Hergé’s artistic production was not limited to Tintin. In 1930 he launched another comic strip, Quick & Flupke, and 1935 saw the creation of The Adventures of Jo, Zette, and Jocko. Hergé also considered himself a graphic designer, and he illustrated pamphlets, posters, and books, some of them to his later shame. But out of all of this productivity, it was The Adventures of Tintin that defined his career, and today more than 200 million copies of the books have been sold around the world (Farr, Adventures 4).

He married Germaine Kieckens in 1932, with Father Norbet Wallez presiding. Wallez had a significant impact on Hergé’s life and career: he was the editor of Le Vingtième Siècle and a firm believer in Hergé’s potential. Through Wallez, the first Tintin albums appeared, and through the broader Catholic network, Hergé was able to reach into the Francophone market outside of Belgium, publishing his cartoons in the Catholic magazine Cœurs Vaillants. Also in 1932 Hergé moved the publication of his albums from the Catholic press to Casterman, the Belgian company that would remain his publisher for the rest of his life. Hergé’s world expanded in other ways, too, during these years, as he met Chang Chong-Chen (also transliterated as Chang Chong-Jen), a Chinese art student studying in Brussels, in 1934. Chang became a close friend to Hergé and a mentor in art techniques that would inform the development of the clear line style.

But his personal and professional success would be deeply challenged by the arrival of the Nazis in 1940 and the recriminations and accusations that would follow their departure in 1944. Hergé had continued to publish Tintin in Le Petit Vingtième until occupation, and when Le Vingtième closed its doors, Hergé accepted an invitation from Le Soir, the largest daily Francophone newspaper in Belgium, to headline a new supplement, Le Soir Jeunesse. Hergé launched a new Tintin story there on October 17, 1940, and during Occupation, he would publish many of the story arcs that have remained his most popular. Brussels was liberated at the beginning of September 1944, and Hergé was blacklisted for two years while accusations of collaboration worked their way through the judicial system. Finally, thanks in large part to the intercession of Raymond Leblanc, a hero with impeccable Resistance credentials, the case against Hergé was dropped (Peeters, Hergé 165).

Together, Leblanc and Hergé launched Tintin Magazine on September 26, 1946, and despite public reservations about Hergé’s private politics, it was an immediate success. Peeters reports that the press ran forty thousand copies of the first issue in French and another twenty thousand in Dutch (Hergé 173). For the rest of his career, Hergé published Tintin first here, then again in album form with Casterman. To manage this output and the expanding requests for licensing, Hergé founded Hergé Studios in 1950, and it was around this studio and this magazine that the so-called Brussels school, whose work became synonymous with clear line, coalesced. Bob De Moor, Edgar P. Jacobs, Jacques Martin, and Jacques Van Melkebeke worked closely with Hergé during these years (and, especially in the case of Jacobs, during the immediately preceding years), and as they influenced one another and Hergé, a house style emerged that was closely overseen by Hergé himself.

In 1955 the studios hired a new colorist, Fanny Vlamynck, then only twenty years old. The next year she began an affair with Hergé, and although he remained married to Germaine for many more years, it was Fanny who quickly became the love of his life. Hergé felt, according to Peeters, great guilt over the affair, but he continued to see Fanny more or less continuously all the same. In 1960 he separated from Germaine, finally divorcing her in 1977, whereupon he married Fanny in the same year. Hergé continued to work in the final years of his life, publishing Tintin and the Picaros, the twenty-third volume of Tintin’s adventures, in album form in 1976. He reconnected, too, with his old friend Chang in 1981 in a highly publicized reunion, but by then Hergé’s health was failing, and he died on March 3, 1983. He left everything to Fanny but insisted that no one continue writing Tintin comics after his death. Tintin and Alph-Art, published incomplete and posthumously in 1986, was the twenty-fourth and final volume in the series that began more than a half century earlier in Le Petit Vingtième.

HERGÉ AND THE CRITICAL CONVERSATION

Analysis of Hergé’s work began long before Hergé was finished producing it. Pol Vandromme published Le Monde de Tintin, the first monograph on Hergé, in 1959, and although Jean-Marie Apostolidès would later complain that Vandromme was both suspicious of and frankly hostile to academic jargon (Metamorphoses xii), this book set the tone for future works on Hergé. First, it gave the place of primacy to Tintin over other works by Hergé, and second, it demonstrated a delight in the details of the series. Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, who would make significant contributions to Tintinology for decades to come, made Hergé and other practitioners central to the study of bandes dessinées in his 1972 book-length study, and the importance of Hergé to the field of comics was set.

What has followed is a critical field too voluminous to summarize, but there have been some specific trends in Hergé scholarship whose influence can still be felt today. Roland Barthes, for example, has proved especially useful, surfacing in Pierre Sterckx’s Tintin et les médias (15) and more extensively in Benoît Peeters’s Lire Tintin (2007). Peeters, one of the most prolific writers about Hergé, was a student of Barthes’s, and Lire Tintin borrows and adapts the strategy Barthes made famous in S/Z. Peeters takes one of the later volumes, The Castafiore Emerald, and enumerates 43 different segments to understand the rhythm, unity, symbolism, and humor of the story.

Indeed, The Castafiore Emerald is itself a major feature of Hergé criticism. Peeters calls it certainly the densest Francophone comic book (Lire Tintin 12). That density has supported criticism of varying lengths since just about the beginning. Michel Serres wrote about Castafiore in an essay in 1972 (and then revised that essay for his book Hergé mon ami in 2000), and Jean-Michel Adam contributed another essay in 1976. Since then, Serge Tisseron’s Tintin chez le psychanalyste (1985) and Jan Baetens’s Hergé écrivain (1989) have singled it out for rigorous analysis. Much more recently, Tom McCarthy dedicates a chapter to this album in Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2008), and Rod Cooke (2010) takes the singular brilliance of the book for granted in order to argue that the subsequent two volumes, Flight 714 and Tintin and the Picaros, have been unjustly overshadowed by Castafiore.⁵

Castafiore is the main text to which scholarship returns again and again, but the modes of analysis have changed dramatically. Psychoanalysis, for example, provides the theoretical model for the works of Serge Tisseron, an early and prolific critic of Hergé. Tintin chez le psychanalyste (1985) looks at the psychologically productive distance, closeness, and tension between adults and children in Hergé, his readership (Tisseron highlights the adventure of an adult seeking the child within himself that takes place while reading Tintin, 18), and his most famous creation. It also pays close attention to several of the leading characters, considering them as facets of a complete personality that can be understood—aesthetically or psychically—only when they are thought of as part of a whole person. Tisseron’s Tintin et les secrets de famille (1990) insists on circling multiple readings of the series back to the mystery of Hergé’s (biological) paternal grandfather, again through psychoanalysis. If these readings sometimes feel forced or dated to a scholarly audience increasingly unfriendly to psychoanalysis, Tintin et les secrets de famille remains nonetheless especially valuable as one of the few full studies to give lengthy analysis to Bianca Castafiore. Making the presence of women and/or gender a stable target of discussion in Hergé is a real challenge, so Tisseron’s attention to the most important woman of the series is a valuable contribution. Tintin et le secret d’Hergé (1993) returns again to the secret of Hergé’s grandfather (chapter 2 gives an overview of facts and theories about his identity), but its real point is that whatever else may be good about the series, it is mystery that is the most attractive element. Such mysteries include of course those Tintin himself pursues, but also the oddly blank history around young Tintin himself, the unexplained similarity between the Thom(p)sons, questions about Bianca Castafiore and Haddock (21–22), and even the mysteries of how to interpret images (141–22).

Although psychoanalytic theory does not today, in Francophone or Anglophone circles, enjoy the status it once did, there is extensive material available for such readings because of the enormous industry in biographical information about Hergé. Such works continue to appear in the popular press in Francophone regions (including 2013’s Un Oncle nommé Hergé, by Georges Remi, Jr., the son of Hergé’s brother), and two especially good biographies have been translated into English. Pierre Assouline’s Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin (published in French in 1996 and in English in 2009) is a deliberate, almost dispassionate report on a figure about whom emotions inevitably run high. Drawing on extensive and rare access to decades worth of notes, letters, journal entries, and other archival documents, Assouline’s book is an authoritative and comprehensive tour of the facts and dates of Hergé’s life. Benoît Peeters’ Hergé, Son of Tintin (published in French in 2002 and in English in 2012) is written without the benefit of the same access to archives, but Peeters’s personal familiarity with Hergé and deep immersion in the world of Francophone comics allow him to tease out nuance, as in his analysis of the subtle differences in the occupied governments of Vichy France and Hergé’s Belgium (115). An excellent supplement to these two biographies is Numa Sadoul’s Tintin et moi: Entretiens avec Hergé (1975). Sadoul’s interviews with Hergé, however, must be read especially skeptically: Hergé held on to the manuscript for three years, tinkering, rewording, revising, and eliminating until the book showed him as he wished to be seen. Further, Assouline explains that on the advice of his publisher, Hergé attenuated his agnosticism and cut the passages about family life, as he was in the process of a divorce, as well as those revealing his politics, which came across as reactionary (208). Nonetheless, the Hergé so carefully presented in the interviews is reflective and thoughtful about his artistic process, and when cross-referenced with Assouline’s and Peeters’ more honest accounts, the interviews paint an intricate picture of the artist in his final years.

Michael Farr has produced two books similarly bursting with insights and similarly flawed. These books, The Adventures of Hergé, Creator of Tintin (2007) and Tintin: The Complete Companion (2002, 2011), are controversial in part because they straddle the two worlds of Tintinology. On the one hand, they are the work of an unapologetic fan. Indeed, on any of Hergé’s most sensitive subjects, Farr is disdainful of criticism, openly admiring Hergé rather than thinking hard about mistakes to which Hergé himself admitted. On the other hand, Farr’s work is a treasure trove of trivia and personal anecdotes. The close, warm relationship he once enjoyed with Hergé and has since enjoyed with the Hergé estate has given him extraordinary access to minor documents from across Hergé’s career, and his cataloguing of the materials, people, and movements that inspired ideas and even individual panels in Hergé’s body of work is tremendously useful. That relationship has also put Farr in position to publish gorgeous books filled with reproductions of personal photographs and details from the comics—both in draft and final form—something that scholars more critical of Hergé have found increasingly difficult to achieve.

The field has also been blessed, though, with more nuanced readings of Hergé’s work through biography. Huibrecht Van Opstal’s Tracé RG: Le phénomène Hergé, published first in Dutch (1994) and then in French (1998), falls between the proper biographies and Farr’s work: one hundred miniature essays, labeled A1–A100, move through Hergé’s life chronologically, and the following sixty-two mini-essays, labeled B1–B62, pay special attention to the years 1907–30, which Van Opstal sees as a period of crucial evolution for Hergé (8). The primary focus is methodical biography, but the primary means is through the presentation of minutiae: sketches, magazine covers, and photographs of characters both major and minor in the life and work of Hergé. Similarly rich but more invested in sustained analysis is Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2008). The book is engagingly, even conversationally written, and it steps deftly from Barthes to Freud and back to Barthes again, pursuing broad arguments about Tintin (for example, that the young hero’s real strength is his ability to read things correctly, to interpret what stumps everyone else) by examining examples scattered throughout the series rather than reading them chronologically. Despite his comfort with theory, some of the most compelling arguments are biographical. For example, he reads the moon duology, Destination Moon (1953) and Explorers on the Moon (1954), as Hergé tangling with his own wartime position, spun out into a post-war environment. To McCarthy, the characters of Calculus, who works almost coincidentally within national, political or military frameworks and Wolff, who, blackmailed by a rival power, hands over secrets and smuggles a deadly stowaway onto the moon rocket, embody the argument Hergé would make throughout his later years that his decision to work for the occupied press came from nothing but reluctant pragmatism in addition to, as McCarthy puts it, the spectre of betrayal and inexpungeable guilt that his argument attempted to obscure (42).

Scholars interested in reading the comics closely rather than reading them primarily through psychoanalysis or biography have many good models to follow. Peeters’s Lire la bande dessinée (2003) is a book about how to appreciate the artistry of comics (indeed, it cites Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and follows very much in that vein), and more than a dozen of the individual examples throughout the book come from Hergé. These examples focus