When I was a kid I was a big fan of the Tintin comic book series and collected all of them that were available in English translation at the time. Since then I’ve been made aware of the high regard that the author, Herge, is held for his skills. Repeatedly, I’ve heard people praise his graphic skills and his narrative skills.
These past few weeks, I’ve dug out my collection and have re-read nearly all of it (I don’t have Congo, Soviets, or Alph-Art), and I’ve come to the conclusion that while Herge might have been a pioneer as a graphic artist, as a storyteller (both visually and verbally), he was an amateur, and, in my esteem, pretty lazy.
There are several obvious characteristics of the Tintin stories that are glaring examples of Herge’s failures as a storyteller; these include –
The simplistic characterizations – Most of the characters are fairly one-dimensional, and Tintin himself is actually zero-dimensional. Tintin has almost no identifiable character traits at all. There is absolutely no attempt to create reasonable characterizations. Tintin is a reporter, but he never actually does any reporting work; nevertheless, he, as a teen-ager, is able to maintain an apartment and support himself and operate nearly any technical machine or gadget that he comes across.
The extensive expository dialogue – almost every event or fact is explained in freaking huge dialogue balloons, sometimes taking up the majority of the space on a page. This is not an indication of someone with skill as a visual storyteller.
Every two pages, something exciting happens, but pretty much 100 percent of Tintin’s success in any of these incidents is the result of either (1) an extremely improbable coincidence or (2) an extremely improbable feat of skill. It’s all very deus ex machina. Almost nothing can be chalked up to a character’s skillful application of a believable trait.
In many, many cases, the chief villain is shown simply overhearing his minions communicating by radio and chuckling evilly to himself. Come on – very cheezy.
Resolved: The Tintin studio should hire a modern, skilled storyteller – say someone like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman – to reimagine/reinvent good Tintin stories while preserving the outstanding ligne claire graphical style.
Agreed. Though I don’t find this necessarily bad. Some great fiction has one-dimensional characters. For instance, Catch-22 and The Fountainhead. Also, what he lacks in character depth, he makes up for in multitude.
I think, in the early books, Tintin prevailed mostly because of very fortunate circumstances. However, in later books, he used his wits to a higher degree. What are some examples of improbably feats of skill?
Intrestingly, I heard Gaiman speak at a convention a few months ago and he had basically the same criticism of French comics - *Tintin[/]i in particular - that you have: beautiful drawings, bloody awful writing. He said that growing up, he and his friends used to idolize French comics… until they read a translation.
Tintin comics were written between 1929 and 1947, or so. They still stand up well. Herge was pretty enlightened for his time, and Tintin’s “boy scout” ideals still have something to teach young people. His comics predate James Bond villains, and later comic artists borrowed heavily from Herge.
I read all of his books when I was young. At that time, I did not find them badly written. You might as well criticize the characterization of the 1930s radio serial “The Shadow” as being one-dimensional, or complain that the monsters in “Where The Wild Things Are” should be more complicated. I’m not convinced that Tintin is (these days) aimed at an adult audience. I’m not convinced 1930s comic standards are the same as today’s.
I’m not sure Tintin’s age was every clearly stated. Perhaps he is not a teenager.
I’m not convinced that deus ex machina skills and technical aptitude constitute bad writing. I think his depiction of a complicated event, say the bombing of the Nanking railway and the invasion of Manchuria in The Blue Lotus (IIRC) in a few panels, is indicative of a good storyteller even if this needs to be explained partly using dialogue balloons.