Why do I still like Tintin

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Belgian draftsman Georges Remy (1907-1983) died 40 years ago of leukemia at the age of 76. His stage name is Hergé. His characters: Tintin and Struppi. To date, over a quarter of a billion albums have been published in 133 languages ​​and dialects.

In 1957 Hergé’s glory days seem to be numbered. Journalist Paul Vandromme is planning the first biography. Hergé is afraid that his “black years” (1940–1944) will be discussed. Because while the years of German occupation became a nightmare for most Belgians, for Hergé the “golden years” began. Many artists abandoned the Nazis, “ils cassent leur plumes” (they break their feathers). Hergé replaces them all and earns a lot of money.

After the war, Hergé is put on trial for collaborating with the Nazis. He is disenfranchised and banned from working, but only spends a few days behind bars: “too big to fail.”

In 1959, the biography Le monde de Tintin appears in bookstores. Paul Vandromme writes that Hergé has entered the “literary Olympus” and compares the albums with the works of Hemingway, Hitchcock and Jules Verne. He lays the foundation for the creation of the Belgian national monument.

Four years after Hergé’s death, his second wife, Fanny Vlaminck, closed the Hergé studios and established a foundation. This pushes up merchandising and raises memorabilia prices. In 2021, the original title photo of the Blue Lotus volume was sold at the Paris auction house Artcurial for 3.2 million euros.

Hergé did great things, but as a person he was far from perfect. However, for me, comic book albums are memories of my cousins ​​from the Jurassic period. In childhood we were not interested in the author, and in adulthood we love most of all those adventures that we absorbed then. Because only they revive the memory.

Anyone with Tintin albums in their Kindle library will receive constant “upgrades”: adaptations to the ever-changing zeitgeist, until children finally believe that Captain Haddock was politically correct in cursing and that the time after the end of the war was just as humorless, intolerant and stuffy as it was a presence.

Claude Cueny (67) is a writer based in Basel. He writes to Blick every second Friday. In the adventure novel Waiting for Hergé, he wrote a tribute to Tintin. Most recently, the thriller Dirty Talk was released.

Source: Blick