The Hindu : Tintin's new saga

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 28, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Tintin's new saga

HISTORY IS FULL of literary creations which eclipsed their creators. Today, very few will associate Sherlock Holmes with the man who brought him to life, Arthur Conan Doyle. Similarly, Perry Mason continues to be the hero of gripping courtroom drama, not quite his inventor, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Miss Marple and Monsieur Poirot have left miles behind the woman who conceived and conceptualised them through her English manor-house mysteries, Dame Agatha Christie. The Belgian comic book hero, Tintin, is yet another typical example: will the thought of the man who animated him, Georges Remi, even cross the minds of those flipping through the strips of adventures. Which began at a railway station in Brussels on a cold January morning in 1929, when Tintin and his white dog, Snowy, boarded a train to Moscow. Remi, who was popularly known as Herge, made his protagonist into a reporter with baggy trousers and a celebrated hairstyle. Herge might not have sported these, but he shared Tontine's passion for investigation, and had always nursed a secret desire to be a journalist himself. But his talent to draw lines had a greater pep than the one to bang words, and when Tintin first appeared in the French magazine, Petit Vingtieme, it was a virtual sellout.

There were many reasons for this. Tintin was enormously interesting because it was informative. For instance, readers, both young and old, knew of Inca art forms, how Peruvian villages looked and the organisation of a Tibetan Lama's monastery. The 24 adventures were no mere illustrated travails of a motley group of characters that included Captain Haddock, Cuthbert Calculus, Bianca Castafiore and Rastapopoulos, all sharply drawn, all quivering with life. Rather, they were detailed analyses of the times, and they firmly established a few things. Herge's heroes hardly ever played in Brussels: they were truly "citizens of the world", and they were so much before this term was even coined. If the narrative was seldom bound by time and place, his jokes were sophisticated in a period when slapstick ruled, and his satire was never contrived. With his famous pencil line style, Herge pushed the humble humorous form into an enduring art, and Tintin has been translated into tens of languages, and millions of copies have hopped across shop counters.

It is not surprising that Tintin has now caught the eye of a reputed director like Steven Spielberg, who plans to take our Belgian sleuth onto another turf, cinema. Although, Tintin stories have been told on television, Spielberg is negotiating with a couple of studios to frame Tintin in a live-action feature. Undoubtedly a courageous move, for the innumerable fans of Tintin are known to love the boy/man in the comic version he was first conjured. Will Spielberg be admired for what will certainly be a departure from the past, when, for example, an Asterix has been adapted on the screen but in an animated edition. Or, will the auteur be upbraided for separating Tintin from the lines that Herge enslaved him in? We can never say, but since film is a such a spirited medium, open to a multitude of ideas, it may well give Tintin not just a new avatar, but a fresh breath of life. Herge may approve. He can be even happy about Tintin stepping into another realm, given the illustrator's penchant for fictional escapades. And, who knows Tintin could take the celluloid world by storm, of the kind he created in once-upon-a-time Europe.

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