The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not So Clear ed. by Joe Sutliff Sanders (review)

American readers tend to think of Hergé’s Tintin comics, if at all, only as minor curiosities—as insubstantial, if entertaining, works that have little to do with larger traditions of children’s literature. Steven Spielberg’s 2011 movie The Adventures of Tintin had box office success and won a Golden Globe but did little to change Tintin’s marginal status in North American culture. Moreover, most American readers are unaware of any larger cultural or critical contexts into which Tintin fits. In much of the world, however, Tintin is far more important than Superman. Tintin is widely considered the greatest French-language comic, the centerpiece of the canon of Francophone comics (a.k.a. bandes dessinées or BD). The Clear Line style of Hergé and collaborators like Edgar-Pierre Jacobs and Jacques Martin is one of the standard stylistic traditions of French comics. In Europe, Tintin is viewed not only as a great work for children but as an object of serious adult study, and has inspired an entire critical industry.

Yet Hergé’s artistic and critical legacy is mostly invisible in North America. Despite recent efforts by publishers such as IDW, Fantagraphics, and Cinebook, the vast majority of French-language comics are unavailable in English translation. Similarly, although the University Press of Mississippi (UPM) and Leuven University Press have translated some French-language scholarly works on comics, most French-language comics scholarship remains untranslated. Joe Sutliff Sanders’s The Comics of Hergé, a volume in UPM’s Critical Approaches to Comics Artists series, makes an admirable effort to remedy the invisibility of Hergé’s cultural and critical legacy in the North American cultural scene. However, that very invisibility also impairs the accessibility of Sanders’s book for readers not already familiar with French comics.

The Comics of Hergé brings together scholars from multiple distinct scholarly communities, including American children’s literature, American comics studies, and European comics studies. It represents a “pointedly international set of voices wielding a decidedly divergent range of approaches” (16) and admittedly lacks a “specific theme or focus” (15). Rather than offering comprehensive accounts of the Tintin series, it provides in-depth examinations of particular Tintin albums or aspects of Tintin’s history. The chapters devoted to close reading are often impressively deep. Andrei Molotiu draws together two distinct art forms by showing how The Castafiore Emerald, Hergé’s most complicated work, adopts structural principles from music. Sanders tracks how Tintin albums evolved from their initial newspaper publication to their later album-format reprints, showing impressive attention to materiality and format. Annick Pellegrin analyzes how The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure serve as intertexts for three recent Spirou and Fantasio albums.

Of the chapters devoted to Tintin’s reception and cultural history, the most revelatory is Kenan Koçak’s analysis of Tintin’s history in Turkey, where nine unauthorized new Tintin albums were published after the supply of original material ran out. Koçak demonstrates how an icon from one culture was adapted into a very different culture. Vanessa Meikle Schulman draws a surprising connection between the unfinished final Tintin album, Tintin and Alph-Art, and B-movies A Bucket of Blood and House of Wax. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey discuss Tintin’s influence on three North American cartoonists, including one (Matt Madden) who is well known as being influenced by French comics and two (Seth and Charles Burns) who are not. Gwen Athene Tarbox’s essay is perhaps the most accessible to readers with limited knowledge of Tintin, since it brings Hergé’s work together with that of a widely taught and studied American cartoonist, Gene Luen Yang. Unfortunately, as Sanders admits (15), these articles are mostly unillustrated due to inability to obtain copyright permissions. The difficulty of obtaining image permissions is a consistent and annoying problem in both American and European comics studies, and this book is a good example...