Like millions of others, I grew up with Tintin (in French, in my case, and I shall be using the French names). I owned most of the albums, and read them scores of times. To this day, I can not only explain their plots, but can evoke hundreds of specific episodes. If you show me just a single panel from a Tintin album, I can often tell you accurately from which book it comes, and where in that book. Nor is this level of Tintin-knowledge rare. The twenty-two canonical Tintin albums are numerous enough for one to cycle through them many times without getting bored, but also few enough that one ends up effectively memorizing them. This process creates a very deep affection for Tintin, and so parents in turn pass him on to their children.
Still it is not easy, as an adult, to articulate quite what is so wonderful about Tintin, even if it is easy enough, when opening an album, to get sucked back in. Nor is there a single, over-riding quality that is the key to Tintin’s excellence. One could speak of the meticulous, bright drawing, the finely honed structure of the storytelling, the tinge of tragi-comic madness in the supporting cast. All this and much more make Tintin a well of satisfaction.
Yet Tintin is more than artwork, storytelling or characterization—it is a whole universe. Its unique power is due in large part to the unique nature of that universe. Tintin’s world is an alternate reality to our own, yet one that is not straightforwardly fantastical: rather, it is just slightly askew from the history and geography of the world in which the albums were written.
Tintin’s unique power is due in large part to the unique nature of its universe
This askew universe does not appear to have been part of Hergé’s original plan. In the first three albums, Tintin travels to the “pays des Soviets” (I’ve never read that one), to America and to the Congo. Here Hergé is sending his reporter-hero to places of central political relevance, attempting a light-hearted, but direct, engagement with two emerging superpowers, and with his native Belgium’s largest colony.
Had Hergé continued in this vein, much of Tintin might have aged as poorly as the jovial racism of Tintin au Congo. But in the event, Tintin was never to return to another major country, or directly confront a major historical event. From Les cigares du Pharaon onwards, Tintin’s world became one of excursions from a blurry center to a periphery in vivid focus.
In the center is post-war Western Europe, and more specifically the Francophone part thereof. This is where Tintin lives and where he works as a reporter, until his very early retirement from gainful employment, after he and Captain Haddock obtain a treasure and château. That we are in the post-war West is established by implication, never explicitly stated, not least because neither the existence of the Soviet bloc nor the Second World War are ever mentioned. Likewise, Hergé scrupulously avoids ever identifying, by either words or pictures, the city in which pre-retirement Tintin lives, or the location of the château de Moulinsart, to which he and Haddock retire. He also avoids making these into alternate, imaginary places, like Batman’s Gotham and Superman’s Metropolis. Tintin lives in not-quite-France and not-quite-Belgium: neither country is ever named, or ever ruled out.
Neither the existence of the Soviet bloc nor the Second World War are ever mentioned.
It is not only Tintin’s home-base that is thus blurred, but a very wide area around it. Apart from some hi-jinks in Scotland in L’Île mystérieuse and a brief episode in Switzerland in L’affaire Tournesol, no real Western or Eastern European nation or city is ever named or entered by Tintin, and America too never again features.
Instead Tintin travels to two sorts of places, exotic destinations (Egypt, China, Peru, Tibet, the moon[!]), and made-up ones (the banana republics of San Theodoros and Nuevo Rico; the Gulf oil state of Khemed; the Eastern European rivals, benignly Ruritanian Syldavie and the buffoonish dictatorship of Bordurie). To further complicate matters, the real locations, despite element of exquisite local observation, are largely more fantastical than the imaginary ones. In Egypt, Tintin wanders among the mummies in catacombs; in Peru, he finds a hidden kingdom of Incas; in Tibet, he meets the abominable snowman; on the moon he is, well, on the moon. In contrast, San Theodoros and Nuevo Rico, Khemed, Bordurie are all sites of Hergé’s quite bitter political satire. Even Syldavie, a never-never land of good-natured monarchy in Le sceptre d’Ottokar, becomes in the moon albums the location for Hergé’s very precise rendering of a Manhattan Project-like space program.
The result of all this is that Hergé built a world where he could set modern fairy-tales, that are both truly modern and truly fairy-tales. Tintin dwells in that country of “once upon a time” whence hail the princes and farmers’ lads of the Brothers Grimm. Yet just as that country was only a generalized version of the medieval kingdoms where those tales originated, Tintin’s home is an all-purpose rendition of places where Hergé’s young readers lived, or could easily imagine living. And just as those lads and princes had to travel East of the Sun and West of the Moon, so as to have a story worth telling, Tintin needs to get out of his familiar home, so as to see and do things worthy of our attention (he only stays home once, in the absurdist, almost Beckettian Bijoux de la Castafiore).
Hergé built a world where he could set modern fairy-tales, that are both truly modern and truly fairy-tales.
Yet modernity is too imposing and aggressive for mere travel to shift it seamlessly into any sort of fairyland. At its edges, indeed, one may still find abominable snowmen and Incas sitting on their fabled gold. And one cannot confront its horrors in full—the camps and gulags and hydrogen bombs—without leaving behind any world digestible for children. But there is no magic wardrobe or Platform Nine and Three-Quarters for Tintin. He must confront gun-toting political thugs, weapons of mass destruction, the lust for oil. All of this is softened by its imaginary setting, but it is not escaped. Tintin’s adventures are the stuff of children’s dreams, but they are dreams anchored in the harsh world children of the machine age must also confront.
Like any fairy-tale, every Tintin album has a happy ending. The ogres are vanquished; the treasures are won; the lost are found. Yet Tintin is, famously, a prince who never gets, or even seems to want, a princess. He is forever half a boy, forever in need of no companionship but his friends’, of no life beyond adventures and the rests between them. This is in part merely a necessary condition of the serial genre: Tintin cannot grown up once and for all, but must return for the next story. Yet his frozen boyishness, his unexplained celibacy—along with the barely contained lunacy of most of his entourage—build an anxious foundation to this bright, clean-drawn world of tight resolutions. Tintin is destined never to settle down in his nameless home. His world is, in the end, fantastical enough to offer up twenty-two different and delightful stories, but sad enough, and modern enough, that it will never admit of the ending “he lived happily ever after”.
