Joe Sutliff Sanders - The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not So Clear

THE COMICS OF HERG

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO COMICS ARTISTS
David Ball, Series Editor

THE COMICS OF
HERG

WHEN THE LINES ARE NOT SO CLEAR

Edited by Joe Sutliff Sanders

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright 2016 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2016

Names: Sanders, Joe Sutliff, editor.

Title: The comics of Herg : when the lines are not so clear / edited by Joe Sutliff Sanders.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2016. | Series: Critical approaches to comics artists | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000661 (print) | LCCN 2016001379 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496807267 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496807274 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496807281 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496807298 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496807304 (pdf institutional)

Subjects: LCSH: Herg, 19071983Criticism and interpretation. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Comics & Graphic Novels. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture.

Classification: LCC NC1559.H47 C66 2016 (print) | LCC NC1559.H47 (ebook) | DDC 741.5/9493dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000661

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

TINTIN was a world traveler, but Belgium was always his home, and it is a country that I have come to think of as my own second home. Therefore, this book is dedicated to Tintins home, especially the three cities that welcomed me so warmly: Brussels, Gent, and Leuven. The people I love there are too many to number.

CONTENTS

Joe Sutliff Sanders

CHAPTER ONE
Signifying Nothing: Tintin in Tibet

Jim Casey

CHAPTER TWO
Actions, Disjunctions, and Passions in Graphic Narratives: Narrative Virtualities in The Adventures of Tintin

Benjamim Picado and Jnathas Miranda de Arajo

CHAPTER THREE
The Shape of the Jewel: Polyphony, Polyrhythms, and Musical Structure in The Castafiore Emerald

Andrei Molotiu

CHAPTER FOUR
Alph-Art, B-Movies, Cast Corpses: Death-by-Sculpture and Hergs Middle Ground

Vanessa Meikle Schulman

CHAPTER FIVE
Continuing Clear Line 19832013

Matthew Screech

CHAPTER SIX
Modernizing Tintin: From Myth to New Stylizations

Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Flying Dialogues: Hergs Use of Aviation from Quick & Flupke to Tintin

Guillaume de Syon

CHAPTER EIGHT
Hergs Occupations: How the Creator of Tintin Made a Deal with the Devil and Became a Better Cartoonist

Joe Sutliff Sanders

CHAPTER NINE
Violence and the Tableau Vivant Effect in the Clear Line Comics of Herg and Gene Luen Yang

Gwen Athene Tarbox

CHAPTER TEN
An Unspeakable Filiation: Spirou and the Three Unicorns

Annick Pellegrin

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tintins Journey in Turkey

Kenan Kocak

TINTIN CHRONOLOGY

Books are listed in the order in which they should be read for story continuity.

THE COMICS OF HERG

INTRODUCTION

Joe Sutliff Sanders

TINTIN, CLEAR LINE AND HERG, 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).

Thats how big Tintin is. Hes so big that its 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 dessine would not exist as we know it and neither, very probably, would European Comic Art (v). Tintins face is iconic, and his influence extends far beyond his native Belgium.

And the man who created Tintin, Herg, has become in recent years almost as familiar. In the weeks following Brusselss liberation from its German occupiers, Herg was obscure enough that vigilante patriots could list him as a wanted person twice: once as Herg, and once more under his given name, Georges Remi (Assouline, Herg 106). But today, books and essays about Herg 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