He did so, he said later, with a "feeling of treachery" towards his old friends. Still, he did not cut off all his old links. A little character of his called Totor continued to lead a pack of cartoon characters in the secular scouting magazine. Wallez encouraged the young man to read, gave him responsibilities and even prodded him in the direction of his strong-willed secretary, Germaine Kieckens.
In , the two were engaged. Things were going well. And there was no doubt where he stood. According to Pierre Assouline, in Belgian ultra-Catholic circles Wallez was the "herald" of an impossible idea: "Platonic fascism". Its enemies, which he did not cease to denounce, were parliamentary democracy, Jews, freemasons, big business, Bolsheviks - all the usual suspects. Assouline believes Tintin owes his popularity and longevity to the fact that he represents "universal and popular values: courage, loyalty and friendship".
Early on, Tintin was able to break out of his small Belgian newspaper - first to be published in France and eventually to be translated into more than 50 languages. Understand that, and Tintin is no longer a cartoon character with skeletons in his cupboard but the creation of man who wanted to sell a cartoon strip. A year-old scout was hired, dressed in mock Russian clothes and given a terrier. Hundreds turned out to welcome him, pushing and shoving and cheering.
The event almost ended in disaster. As the boy emerged from the train, a woman thrust her baby into his arms. She was promptly lost in the crowd.
Wallez was livid - his teenage Catholic creation could hardly be seen to return from the "land of the great lie" carrying a baby. Long minutes passed until the mother reappeared. Tension over. Back to the drawing board. To our eyes, the strip is crude, full of racist caricatures. Happily for them we are there! I am not trying to excuse myself. I admit that my early books were typical of the Belgian bourgeois mentality of the time.
After Congo, and another triumphal return to the station - this time, "Tintin" was flanked by Congolese - the little Belgian was despatched to America, where he was to take on gangsters and witness Red Indians being driven from their land. From then on, the Tintin adventures, published in albums after their completion in the paper, began to follow in quick succession. As well as his reports, Degrelle sent back home Mexican newspapers, which carried imported American cartoon strips. Two years later, Degrelle founded the Belgian fascist party, Rex the name was a contraction of "Christus Rex".
Today, we know where all this was to end. Tintin, meanwhile, had been fighting drugs smugglers in the Cigars Of The Pharaoh. All of a sudden, Tintin appeared to grow up. In China, in the story called Blue Lotus, he begins by defending a rickshaw driver who has had an accident with a westerner, who beats him, shouting, "Dirty little Chinaman! To barge into a white man! The story has Tintin evading the Japanese and, when he sees a boy drowning in a river, jumping in to save him. I thought all white devils were wicked, like those who killed my grandfather and grandmother long ago.
In , Hitler had annexed Austria; in March , he had taken over what remained of Czechoslovakia. In April, Mussolini followed suit with the conquest of Albania. When an exhausted Tintin drops the sceptre that will save King Ottokar, Snowy makes a fateful decision.
He picks up the sceptre and does not dump it in favour of the next bone he finds on the road. Bianca Castafiore, the opera-singing "Milanese nightingale", also makes her first appearance in this book. The only woman of consequence in the whole Tintin series, she always remains a mystery. Her repertoire seems to consist of only one song - from Faust: "Ah, my beauty past compare: these jewels bright I wear! Syldavia is Albania.
An annexation is being planned. In May , German bombs fell on Brussels. The invasion and occupation had begun. On June 22, France capitulated. In October that year, Le Soir featured a picture of a smiling Tintin striding confidently back across the Belgian frontier from France.
Throughout the war, Tintin appeared, too, in the similarly collaborationist Flemish paper, Het Laatste Nieuws. I was not pro-German, I did not have German friends.
The letters are those of a driven man; a man obsessed, perhaps, but obsessed with one thing only: Tintin. The fall of France, for example, knocked out much of the French press.
So, September 5, , saw him writing to Casterman, encouraging the company to "profit from the lack of French competition". In November , he wrote a furious letter to Casterman complaining that two Brussels bookshops had stands for other books, but not his. In December , he wrote to Casterman detailing his assault on the German occupation bureaucracy, and in particular the Propaganda Abteilung, which dealt with publishing.
He tells me, in excellent French, that for everything to do with books he has only 30 thirty! There appears to be no answer to this letter. Not only did he produce some of the Tintin classics, but sales of his albums, despite the restriction of crippling paper shortages, shot up to dizzying heights. From the 34, albums sold in the ten years up to , , were sold between and The strips evolved in a different way during this period.
Tintin began to accumulate a "family" of friends. It is slow, quiet and intimate, and in childhood would be most typically undertaken while lying front down on the floor, the book in front of one, one's legs raised perpendicularly at the knee, ankles crossed; the classic childhood pose of absorption in a text.
The images may contain stories of chase and speed; but the frames can move as slowly as one wishes. No one's face may look like Tintin's, with its rudimentary ellipsis for a head and its dots for eyes, like a teach-yourself-cartooning book's first instructions on how to draw a face "Tintin", incidentally, means "nothing" in French ; but when Tintin is chloroformed on page 35 of The Secret of the Unicorn, his right foot lifts off the ground in just the way yours would, were you too to be chloroformed by a pair of vicious thugs.
Incidentally, look at the strips again: see how many of them have a character whose feet are standing directly on the bottom line of the frame.
A huge number. They are, so to speak, grounded — another subliminal stratum of plausibility, which helps us give our assent to the adventures depicted. Being as familiar as I am with the books in English, I thought I'd better have another look at The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure in French: to slow me down, for my French is not perfect, back to childhood reading speed. This allowed me to appreciate better the art, which, after odd years of reading the books, I had been beginning to take for granted.
Hence I finally noticed the impeccable triumph of comic timing in which the Thomsons, putting their bowler hats back on with the dignity which slapstick always subverts, are about to be brained by the enormous files of bogus genealogy that Haddock has just thrown down the stairs Red Rackham's Treasure, page 4 ; and finally noticed the little joke at the beginning of the first book, in which, in panels four, six and nine of the first page, we see Snowy scratching himself. Because he's at a flea market!
A joke whose corniness is obliterated by the fact that we have to work out the punchline, and even the fact that it is a joke, for ourselves. His grandmother was quickly paired off with the gardener; his subsequent grandfather. McCarthy can give a better account of this, and the subsequent coded resurfacings of this story himself than I can in precis; suffice it to say that his book is one of the few critical works that can truly be called "mind-blowing", and that no adult interpretation and indeed appreciation of the books can now be considered complete without having read it.
For example: I pointed out to McCarthy before we saw the film together that there were an awful lot of beds in the Tintin books. A great deal many more than you would expect in a series carrying the words "The Adventures of …" Tintin has a hospital-like bed in his flat at 26 Labrador Road; we see him in it while Snowy brings him the phone.
The Bird brothers, the real villains of the story not the originally innocent Sakharine, who is the film's baddie , may be nasty pieces of work, but they are considerate enough to provide Tintin with a nicely made-up set of sheets and blankets in which he can recover consciousness; Calculus has made himself a bed in a lifeboat in Red Rackham's Treasure character and story completely jettisoned from film ; and in The Seven Crystal Balls , the next book to be ravished and broken by Spielberg and his cronies, there are beds galore, in which the cursed professors writhe with tormented nightmares.
And so on and so on: make your own list of the beds in Tintin. It's fun. But is everyone a Tintin fan? Is everyone that familiar with the quixotic idealism, richly absurd characters, and unique humour of these great comic books? I think I can mediate between enemies and fans of the film because I only discovered Tintin recently. I can easily imagine the perspective of someone who has no particular knowledge of the original books, indeed who finds them a bit baffling, because I was that person most of my life.
Somehow the books didn't become part of my reading as a child. I preferred Willard Price and Dr Who novelisations. When I did come across Tintin, his world seemed mystifyingly alien. Who was this grumpy boozer Captain Haddock? Tintin fans, in short, may be overestimating how dearly these classics are held in the common heart.
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