TINTIN
HERGÉ’S ANNIVERSARY OF
WORDS // DYLAN RUSSELL
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B
listering barnacles, Belgium’s quiff-toting
adventurer Tintin has just turned 85
years old. Yet the iconic cartoon character’s
lifetime of controversy is showing no sign of
letting up.
Calls for the books to be banned are as vocal
as ever, despite (or maybe even because of)
more than 2million new copies being sold
each year. And the legend continues to grow.
Steven Spielberg gambled £85million on
his 2011 Tintin movie. After almost 30
years in the making, critics panned it. But
fans loved it and the film earned three times
that amount at the box office alone in the first
few months after its release.
Now Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson
is taking up the baton with a soon-to-be-
released sequel that will doubtless divide
opinions as bitterly as everything that has
gone before.
Tintin’s creator Georges Remi, better
known by his pen-name Hergé, frequently
wove politics into his stories, taking barely-
concealed digs at world leaders and casting
Americans as the bad guys.
Hergé also revelled in frequent digs at big
business, drawing attention to their unethical
exploitation of ethnic minorities and
meddling in international politics.
He had to deal with accusations of
animal cruelty, sexism,
racism and antisemitism in
the books right up to his
death in 1983. An event
that sparked a period
of mourning in his native
Belgium, summed up by the
headline “Tintin est mort” in
Liberation.
After the war
Hergé was even
branded a Nazi
collaborator.
His cause was
not helped by
working for Le Soir newspaper – which acted
as an apologist for the German occupiers.
He was interrogated and barred from
working until his friend, the publisher and
former resistance fighter, Raymond Leblanc
helped to clear his name.
Hergé summed up his regrets in a 1973
interview: “I myself believed that the future
of the West could depend on the New
Order…In light of everything which has
happened, it is of course a huge error to
All images © Hergé-Moulinsart 2014
