Lofficier Jean-Marc - Tintin

In the end, you know, my only international rival is Tintin! Were both little guys who dont let the big guys walk all over them. You dont see it because of my height.

Charles de Gaulle (18901970)

The silhouette of Tintin a young man wearing golf pants running with a white fox terrier by his side is easily one of the most recognisable visual icons of the modern world, as much as Mickey Mouses ears or Snoopy playing World War One ace on his doghouse.

Tintin was born or made his first public appearance in Belgium on 10 January 1929. Some sociologists argue that the twentieth century really began only after World War One, and that would indeed make Tintin a child of the last century. His putative birth occurred mere months before the Great Depression, and a decade before World War Two, two of the twentiethth centurys defining events.

To put this into the context of comics history, Tintin was created the same year that American cartoonist Elzie Segar created the spinach-chewing Popeye, and artist Dick Calkins drew the adventures of Buck Rogers, adapted by Phil Nowlan from his own science fiction story. The notion that Tintin is, in fact, nine years older than Superman and ten years older than Batman usually causes mild cultural shock on both sides of the Atlantic, even among the most educated comics fans, who somehow regard the character as timeless.

It is that very timelessness that makes Tintin the perfect symbol of the twentieth century, a true witness to our era, spotlighting with astonishing 20/20 clarity all the high points of our recent history: Tintin was a Western European coloniser in Africa in the 1930s; he battled bootleggers in Chicago during Prohibition and fought alongside the Chinese against the Japanese; he walked on the moon; and in the 1970s he sided with South American guerrillas. Tintin always fitted in; anywhere, anywhen. And more so, he always made us aware that there were two sides to every story and did it with a smile.

When we read Tintin, we simultaneously hold two images in our minds: the image we see and Hergs amazingly symbolic vision. Apollo XII and Professor Calculus red & white chequered rocket become inseparable from each other in our collective photo album. The story of Tintin is the story of our times.

When symbols pass away, the outpouring of grief is out of proportion with the actual event, because people do not mourn the person who died but the part of themselves that is floating away on the river of time. On 3 May 1983, when Tintins creator, Herg, passed away at age 76, for many it was Tintin who died that day. It symbolised to all who had shared in the young reporters adventures that a portion of their lives had suddenly come to an end.

The leading French and Belgian newspapers devoted their front pages to the news, illustrating it with the by-then famous panel culled from Tintin In Tibet showing Tintin shedding a tear over the seeming death of his friend Tchang, or the one where Snowy stands over his masters unconscious body. Tintin mourned his father; fans mourned Herg.

Never had the passing of a cartoonist other than perhaps that of Walt Disney generated as much public grief and news stories, a vibrant testimony to the deep and everlasting importance of Tintin in French-speaking culture.

When one first looks at Tintin , there may be a tendency to dismiss it as being simplistic. It is, after all, supposed to be a story for children. But as one begins reading, the clarity and expressiveness of the design is revealed, almost like a blurred image slowly coming into focus. Very few artists ever had Hergs ability to blend coherent storytelling, depth of characterisation and outstanding expression of emotion in such a fashion.

Contemporary comics scholars like to point at the progress made by comics in becoming more adult (whatever that means) in the recent past by rightly singling out the works of writers such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman or Los Brothers Hernandez. But in fact, the Tintin comics were the first to have gone adult. As early as 1934, encouraged by his friend, Chinese student Tchang Tchong-Jen, Herg had plunged his hero into the midst of the Japanese invasion of China. The publication of The Blue Lotus in the pages of a Belgian newspaper provoked the ire of Japanese officials and several personalities protested the alleged harm done by Herg to Nippo-Belgian relations. Conversely, the artist was invited to China by Tchang Kai-Cheks wife. No comic since then has ever provoked so much interest or controversy from the adult world, or has been treated as seriously as The Blue Lotus was in 1934.

And no comics writer or artist has been called before a tribunal to explain and justify his work, as Herg was after the war, when the authorities of a newly-liberated Belgium questioned his book The Shooting Star. Drawn in Nazi-occupied Belgium for a Nazi-sympathetic newspaper, the book happened to give all the good roles to the pro-Axis and neutral states, while making America into a villain.

For good and bad, Herg blazed a trail his comics were not only adult, they were the product of adult choices, reflected adult concerns, were read by adults and ultimately judged by adults. Can that be said about any other comic works or creators?

Artistically, Tintin was the first comic ever to offer its reader a fully self-contained, totally coherent fantasy universe. Long before the intricate universes of Marvel Comics and its rivals, Herg had built a rich and complex world centred around a simple hero, a teenage reporter not unlike Clark Kent flanked by his faithful pet and which included a gallery of wonderful supporting characters. The humanity of Haddock, the eccentricities of Calculus, the goofiness of the Thompsons, the mercurial nature of the Castafiore and the obnoxiousness of Jolyon Wagg become more familiar to us than the antics of our own relatives. The Tintin Family forms a Human Comedy that rivals that of Balzac.