By MEGHAN COX GURDON

In a month's time, a new Steven Spielberg movie will introduce millions of American children and more than a few adults to the intrepid boy reporter Tintin and his dog, Snowy.

The movie trailer and early buzz suggest that "The Adventures of Tintin" crackles with swashbuckling Indiana-Jones-like action sequences and vertiginous escapes, all intensified by a swirling John Williams score.

The open question is whether the film will retain the charm of the cartoonist Hergé's original comics. This is no trivial matter to Tintin's legions of devoted fans across the globe (if not so much in the U.S., where the character is less familiar). In Europe, where the movie has already opened, some enthusiasts have been more horrified by what the movie does to their favorite fictional Belgian than grateful for Tintin's increased exposure.

For Tintin's abiding appeal has nothing to do with smash-em-up, big-budget special effects. He is not a superhero or a young James Bond. He is not even really a reporter. His adventures are dramatic yet human-scale, invested with a spirit of moral enterprise and derring-do, in a cartoon world populated by characters at turns quirky, faulty, comical and villainous.

Tintin moves through this world with wit and confidence but not infallibility. In the course of 23 rich and eventful stories, he gets into countless scrapes: We see him get trapped and drugged and sandbagged and even pelted with rotten fruit. Yet the ageless youth with the blond quiff, natty plus fours and sidekick terrier is always on the side of the good guys and always defending the underdog.

And he is always gorgeously drawn in the distinctive clean lines of his creator, Georges Remi (whose initials reversed and pronounced in French produced the nom de plume Hergé). Hergé's style is so perfectly suited to the two-dimensional medium of comics that any digital version was bound to produce howls of outrage. It was to address these anxieties that Mr. Spielberg and his collaborator, Peter Jackson, chose motion-capture animation in which to make their movie. Using live actors to animate digital images was thought a way of getting as close as possible to Hergé's ligne claire (clear line) drawings, a technique that avoids shading and hatchmarks, uses color flatly, and gives each line equal weight.

Tintin first emerged from Hergé's pen in 1929, in a tiny black-and-white comic strip in a Belgian newspaper supplement aimed at Catholic youth. The cartoonist closely identified with his young character and, from the start, so did young readers: Children mobbed a Tintin lookalike during an early publicity stunt.

The young reporter's first adventure, "Tintin in the Land of the Soviet," took children behind the façade of Bolshevism and showed them the cruelties and deception of Stalinist rule. The peril-packed story was based not on Hergé's firsthand observations but on contemporaneous anticommunist accounts. Readers adored it, though Hergé was later to deprecate this fledgling and uneven work. (When, in 1942, the cartoonist began revising and adding color to his oeuvre, he omitted this book; it did not come back into widespread availability until 1973.)

Soon Tintin was off to Africa in "Tintin in the Congo" (1931), where the young hero shot wild game, praised Belgian missionaries and outfoxed a homicidal shaman. A year later Hergé sent his character to investigate Al Capone's crime syndicate in "Tintin in America" (1932), a turbulent adventure that takes Tintin and Snowy from gangland Chicago to a Blackfoot Indian reservation and back again. Tricked into visiting a cannery, Tintin escapes death in a meat grinder only when, in a droll Chicago moment, the workers go on strike and the machine shuts down.

There are really no humdrum pages in the adventures, which is a reminder of their origin as weekly comic strips. To keep the attention of young readers, Hergé crammed his stories with conflict and sight gags, with explosions and pratfalls and jets and cars and rampaging animals. This energetic pacing, sustained over 60-odd pages in book form, manages to make the experience of reading Tintin both prolonged and quick. It also speaks to the narrative taste of young readers, who love action and do not require the emotional psychodrama or character development adults so enjoy.

There are other reasons that Tintin has resonated with so many readers for so long. Through his international exploits—in pre-revolutionary Shanghai, the jungles of Peru, a faux Eastern European police state, even the surface of the moon 20 years before Neil Armstrong got there—Tintin shows young readers that the world in all its complexity is theirs to bestride.

The resonance with children can't be exaggerated. When you are young and your hero crash-lands in the Sahara or treks through the snows of Tibet, you do, too. The Himalayas and North Africa then become, in an elusive yet significant way, "yours," part of your personal geography. When your hero outwits assassins, solves riddles and escapes execution by firing squad, you do, too. And when your hero, in pursuit of a baddie after dark, steps on a rake and knocks himself out (with comical stars circling his head to show it) or finds himself duped into drinking an intoxicating aperitif, you too experience his concussion and befuddlement.

In such a way, for more than 80 years, the Tintin books have given children a foothold in the sophisticated adult world—in pages filled with drama, peril and risible adult frailties. The whole amounts to a flattering communication of confidence between author and young reader.

Hergé (1907-83) was unable to have children of his own, and, according to his biographer Pierre Assouline, did not really like them, yet he delighted in entertaining young readers. A man of prodigious energies, he poured himself into producing not only a steady supply of Tintin exploits but also other comic series, in addition to a vast quantity of posters, picture-book illustrations, book covers and artwork for advertising campaigns. Indeed, Hergé worked at such a ferocious pace that, at several periods in his career, he exhausted himself to the point of illness.

He also attracted considerable notoriety, which persists. Tintin's uncomplimentary reporting trip to Soviet Russia earned Hergé the lasting detestation of many on the left. The boy reporter's foray to Africa contains depictions of credulous Africans and paternalistic Belgians that were unremarkable at the time but that scandalize today. The Congo adventure was not published in English until 1991, and its British publisher is only selling it now with a warning label.

In addition, early versions of certain unsavory characters in the series bore suspiciously hooked noses that brought accusations of anti-Semitism. As Hergé re-drew and re-worked his books in the 1940s—eventually, from 1950 onward, with the help of the assistants of "Studios Hergé"—he smoothed away many such burrs.

Most controversial in Hergé's lifetime, however, was his decision to continue producing comic strips during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Though the cartoonist was not a particularly political man and the Belgian king had urged his subjects to keep calm and carry on when the Germans occupied the country in 1940, Hergé's contributions to the collaborationist-run newspaper Le Soir put his name on a list of "traitors" carried by vigilantes after the war. He was repeatedly detained and widely vilified, though he escaped dire punishment.

The strain of postwar opprobrium nearly broke Hergé, at the very time that Tintin was consolidating his position in the hearts of Europeans. Though Hergé would continue writing and illustrating Tintin adventures until he died, the tensions of this period seem to have snapped his sense of identification with his fictional hero. In a 1947 letter to his wife, Germaine, excerpted by Benoît Peeters in his forthcoming biography, "Herge: Son of Tintin" (Johns Hopkins University Press), the cartoonist wrote: "I'm exhausted from drawing the same gag for the tenth time, tired of the sure laugh, tired of giving the best of myself, my essence, my life, in my work. . . . My true nature (honest and generous Boy Scoutism, hungry for heroism, thirsty for justice, defender of widows, orphans, and noble savages oppressed by the evil white men) expressed itself spontaneously through Tintin. All of it was fresh, young, spontaneous, neat and tidy—and a vacuous nothing."

But what a nothing! If Hergé no longer felt that he himself was Tintin, his readers had no such trouble. For one thing, Tintin's gallant nature is only part of the books' appeal. There are the comical interactions of his picaresque companions: doughty Snowy, who in the early books converses with Tintin like a person; Capt. Haddock, the explosive, semi-sozzled scion of Marlinspike Hall; Cuthbert Calculus, the nearly deaf genius inventor; Thompson and Thomson, the bumbling identical-twin detectives; and opera diva Bianca Castafiore, aka the Milanese Nightingale, who is the sole female character to recur in Hergé's Tintin stories. (As Mr. Peeters dryly observes: "Femininity does indeed struggle to find a place in the series.")

To his distinctive drawing style and idiosyncratic characters Hergé added verisimilitude. By using real-life models for many of his cameo characters and exotic locations—and particularly the planes, boats and rockets he depicted—Hergé created not so much a cartoon world as a world rendered in cartoon. So meticulous was he about producing realistic scenes with fidelity that at one point he drove around Geneva to find the exact spot where a car might plunge into the lake so that he could draw it correctly.

Exploring Hergé's archives, Tintinologist Michael Farr has collected fascinating images that the cartoonist used, in some cases almost line-for-line (sans shading, of course), to conjure Tintin's comic-book realm. Reissued in September, Mr. Farr's "Tintin: The Complete Companion" juxtaposes Hergé drawings with their sources. There is an Hergé drawing of a street scene from "The Blue Lotus" beside a black-and-white photograph from Shanghai, with banners slung across the road and men pulling rickshaws. Elsewhere Mr. Farr shows us photographs of tribal antiquities from Belgian museums alongside Hergé's precise rendering of them in his fictive Museum of Ethnography in "The Broken Ear" (1937). We see snapshots of gypsies that Hergé borrowed for scenes in "The Castafiore Emerald" (1963) along with the real-life model for the rascally Abdullah in "Land of Black Gold" (1950), the young Faisal II of Iraq, and for dome-browed Professor Calculus, who was based on a certain Prof. Auguste Piccard.

Over the years, Hergé's oeuvre has been subject to scholarly exegesis of the most imaginative and sometimes hilarious kinds. In "Tintin et les Secrets de Famille" (1990), French cultural critic Serge Tisseron sees in the Tintin books the painstaking working-through of a half-traumatic family secret—specifically, the possibly royal (though unacknowledged, therefore bastard) origins of Hergé's father and uncle. Mr. Tisseron and others believe that these relatives, who were twins, inspired the bowler-hatted Thom(p)son twins, with their malapropisms, sartorial misfires and social insecurity.

Mr. Tisson, furthermore, is not alone in interpreting Capt. Haddock's pipe as not just a pipe. Its repeated loss and breakage, we are given to understand, recapitulates castration. British writer Tom McCarthy sees the eponymous gem in "The Castafiore Emerald" as female genitalia in semiotic disguise. Jean-Marie Apostolides, in "The Metamorphoses of Tintin" (2009), meanwhile, sees the Belgian boy-hero as literally the Christ: "He is the savior of the world corrupted by sin. Miracles are his daily bread. He neither loves nor hates; he is obsessed with the Good, which he believes he incarnates."

It is refreshing to consider that Hergé himself had no such pretensions—or none to which he admitted. When he devised "The Castafiore Emerald," for instance, into which Tintinologists have read so much, he seems to have been playing a bit of a parlor game with himself: "My aim was to simplify further, to try this time to tell a story where nothing happened," he told an interviewer. "I wanted simply to see if I could keep the reader in suspense until the end."

Almost from the start, the resonance of Hergé's art and characters inspired others to hijack them for their own purposes. In "Tintin and the Secret of Literature" (2008), Mr. McCarthy explains that this practice is known on the Continent as detournement. The first instance came in 1944, when Tintin and Snowy appeared in a Resistance newspaper in a scathing anti-Hergé strip titled "Tintin in the Land of the Nazis." Pornographers have made free with the characters, alas, as have artists and writers with political axes to grind.

And now comes, we might say, a detournement by Hollywood. The trailer for Mr. Spielberg's movie suggests that it will grieve purists (though it must be said that Hergé himself thought Mr. Spielberg a genius). In the books, Snowy is fluffy and white; in the preview, his coat appears grayish and almost shorn. In the books, Thompson and Thomson are identical but for the spellings of their surnames; in the film, one detective's nose is bulbous while the other's is pointed. In the film, Capt. Haddock speaks not with a French (or Belgian) accent but with a Scottish one, and Tintin himself is given to Hollywood insipidities such as: "This may sound crazy but I've got a plan!" Like the great ship Unicorn after its fatal encounter with the pirate Red Rackham, the heart sinks.

Yet somehow Tintin and Snowy seem themselves unsinkable, through all sorts of mysteries, enigmas, double-crossings and comic mixups. And in the face of scheming villains in any number of exotic and faithfully researched locations, they always escape. Surely they'll survive this cinematic adventure, too.
—Mrs. Gurdon is the Journal's regular children's-books reviewer.

The World of Tintin

Tintin is more than just a character; he is today a brand and an industry—the original 23 books have been translated into 80 languages and sell four million copies annually world-wide. The best introduction to his world is the sequence of nine adventures that Hergé created during one of Europe's darkest decades: from the "Cigars of the Pharaoh" (1934), where Tintin travels to Egypt and India to thwart a drug cartel, through the two-volume treasure hunt "The Secret of the Unicorn" and "Red Rackham's Treasure" (1943-44). Along the way our boy and his dog visit China ("The Blue Lotus," 1936), South America ("The Broken Ear," 1937), Scotland ("The Black Island," 1938), the Balkans ("King Ottokar's Sceptre," 1939), North Africa ("The Crab With the Golden Claws," 1941) and the Arctic ("The Shooting Star," 1942). Together these books (all kept in print by Little, Brown at 62 pages and $10.99 each) form a great world adventure and introduce all of Hergé's immortals.

For many readers, though, the tales have long since been consumed, and it is the Tintinology that must tempt. Michael Farr is responsible for a long list of lavishly illustrated works about Hergé and his famous creation. The newly reissued "Tintin: The Complete Companion" (Last Gasp, 205 pages, $35) is but one good choice from the Farr canon. "Tintin and Co." (Last Gasp, 131 pages, $29.95) is a sequence of mini-biographies of the series' main characters, including secondary figures like the "champion bore" Jolyon Wagg and Abdullah, "the naughtiest young rascal anybody ever saw." It's the companion to the "Companion." And "The Adventures of Hergé, Creator of Tintin" (Last Gasp, 127 pages, $29.95) is a charming account of the author, being brief and focused on the intersection of the life and work.

Mr. Farr is the translator rather than the author, though, of the greatest of the Tintinological publications: the three volumes of "The Art of Hergé" by Philippe Goddin (Last Gasp, 207 pages, $39.95 each). The first two were published in 2008 and 2009, and the third has appeared just in time for Christmas. These albums are a sumptuous appreciation of Hergé's working life. It's not just that they show in brilliant color the development of the stories and books. They also depict the immense variety and sheer profusion of his art. Here are covers done for Tintin magazine, Christmas cards, charity appeals, calendars, one-offs for promotion (e.g., a poster for a 1979 golf tournament showing Capt. Haddock taking a violent swing). Here, too, are Hergé's abstract paintings and some lovely autobiographical sketches (one from 1947 shows the overworked artist plagued by a cat perched on his shoulder and watched over carefully by a scowling Tintin holding a cat-o'-nine-tails). The drudgery and magic of a great graphic artist's life both shine through these volumes. They are the single best thing ever likely to be published about Tintin or Hergé.

The Editors

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