TintinThe Complete Companion

Moving on to another author-illustrator, we come to a protagonist whose province is a good deal wider than Mr. McGregor’s garden; I speak, of course, of Tintin, the globe-trotting boy reporter who stands with Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix as one of the two great early heroes of the French bande dessinee.

Tintin and his fox terrier companion Milou (Snowy to you Anglophones) were the creation of the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who, reversing his initials, came up with the pseudonym Herge. Tintin, after a brief stutter of an existence as the Boy Scout Totor, appeared in propria persona in 1929 in his first adventure, Tintin au pays des Soviets (Tintin in the Lands of the Soviets), and kept on adventuring through twenty-three completed titles, one unfinished story, and over four decades, with a Balzacian expanding cast of recurring characters.

Under the editorial hand of Father Walles, a conservative Catholic priest, a couple of Tintin’s early adventures smelled so distinctly right-wing that Herge later disowned them and tried to prevent their being reprinted; they have surfaced again, cemented into the Tintin canon, and the second, Tintin au Congo (Tintin in the Congo) is currently being banned by the Congolese government, who are understandably underwhelmed with Herge’s 1930s petit-maitre-blanc approach to race relations. And when the German army occupied Brussels in 1940 Herge, in a combined moment of patriotism and Wodehousean naivete, stayed on and allowed Tintin to be published in what became a collaborationist newspaper. All this clouded Herge’s reputation so deeply that for years I’ve avoided reading about him—I didn’t want to know the worst. But having recently been given Michael Farr’s TINTIN: THE COMPLETE COMPANION (San Francisco, Last Gasp, 2001) the worst, it turns out, is not so terrible: Herge seems to have been largely on the side of the kindly and good.

Indeed, as Anthony Lane has pointed out in a canny and sensible New Yorker essay (“A Boy’s World,” May 28, 2007), Herge’s artistic love of accuracy and realism shifted into a love of emotional accuracy and truth which pushed him past his earlier and narrower views. It’s documenting those forms of accuracy which makes Michael Farr’s book so splendidly amusing and absorbing. Herge kept an enormous archive of photographic reference material, so that cars, planes, boats, weapons—even furniture and clothing—largely sprang from verifiable models. He consulted specialists, scientists and historians, so a good deal that you might assume merely cartoonish or imagined is instead precise and grounded. And for the political background, Herge’s stories turn out to have some fairly pointed satire in amidst the heroics and hair’s-breadth escapes.

Farr gets into all this with a digging-for-gold enthusiasm and a wonderfully thorough eye. An old man getting into his car (in The Broken Ear), we find out, is from a photo of Octave Mirbeau; details like the one-man shark-submarine (in Red Rackham’s Treasure) or the costumes of the Jolly Follies (in Tintin and the Picaros) are closer to life than you could easily believe. Farr’s best discovery, a photograph of two mustachioed, bowler-hatted, black-coated, umbrella- toting French policeman who are Thomson and Thompson to a T, just might make you whoop out loud with laughter. (It did me, at least.) The whole book is one delightful discovery after another—a deserved tribute to pleasures we might just have been taking all too lightly.