Adventurous art

One intrepid boy reporter and his white dog have made a triumphant comeback this year with the release of the Tintin movie by Steven Spielberg.

Tintin is the most widely-translated comic strip hero of all time and it is partly thanks to his creator, Herge, that Belgium became the birthplace of scores of other iconic comic strip heroes such as Lucky Luke and the Smurfs.

"Herge was like the locomotive for the entire comic strip train," said Willem De Graeve of the Belgian Comic Strip Center, an Art Nouveau temple dedicated to what the Belgians refer to as a "ninth art."

"Herge was the very first artist in Belgium to become famous with his comics," added De Graeve. "Tintin was a bestseller from the start and that inspired other artists here to follow in his footsteps."

When Herge, whose real name was George Remi, first put colored crayon to paper in the early 1920s, Europe was still lurking in the comic strip dark ages. The United States had already forged ahead with the first weekly comic adventures inserted within newspapers, but European artists were still mainly working on graphic novels for children.

"Along came Herge, with a completely different way of drawing and storytelling," said De Graeve. Gone were shadows and dark outlines; in came bold, bright colors which enabled readers to grasp the entire scene in seconds.

Yves Fevrier, from the Herge foundation Moulinsart, explained, "It was a super-simplified style, not just visually but also terms of the dialogue. The stories are very well structured, which caught on instantly with an entire generation of children."

To his very own ligne claire or "clear line" style, the 22-year old Herge added speech bubbles and juxtaposed contrasting characters, with the voluble, boozy Captain Haddock a perfect antidote to Tintin's goody-two-shoes ways. The style caught on fast and, soon, Belgian comic strip magazines were publishing a mix of home-grown strips as well as the popular imports from the US, home of the comic super hero.

Belgium's comics craze

Tintin's adventures were first published in the weekly magazine, Le Petit Vingtieme, and by the late 1930s, rival publications such as Spirou and Robbedoes had also sprung up to feed the new craze for comics.

Spirou in particular was an instant hit, carrying a winning mix of short stories, gags and American comics such as Superman. Then came the twist of history: After the invasion of Belgium by the Nazis, all publishers were forced to stop carrying American comics and turned to their national artists for content. This initial setback actually ended up boosting the popularity of the magazines even more.

Soon, Spirou was publishing stories by Andre Franquin, creator of the anti-hero Gaston Lagaffe, the stories of Blake and Mortimer, and Lucky Luke, the cowboy extraordinaire created by Morris. Artists clubbed together, traveled to the US, home of Marvel Comics and others, and brought fresh ideas back home.

The Smurfs, the tiny blue creatures invented by Peyo, also appeared in Spirou during the late 1950s. "Kids liked them so much when they first appeared on Spirou's pages that they wrote to Peyo begging for more," said Francois Deneyer, who runs Brussels' Comic Strip House, a bookstore and exhibition space.

Whereas Tintin failed to catch on in the United States - despite Herge's numerous attempts to break into the market there - the Smurfs and Lucky Luke had the good fortune of being picked up by the Hanna Barbera studios in California, which turned them into hit television series.



"Hanna Barbera is really decisive in helping to turn Belgian comics into a global phenomenon," said Deneyer. "It's unlikely that without that, Lucky Luke and the Smurfs would have become household names and millions of children would never know about them today."

Lucky Luke in particular was a natural fit for American audiences: Morris had spent years living in the US, bathing in American culture and feasting on Westerns. The lanky cowboy who shoots faster than his own shadow also cut a more heroic figure than, for instance, Tintin.

"Americans were traditionally more used to super-heroes, but Tintin has nothing for the super-hero DNA, he never fit right in," said Yves Fevrier. "Herge regretted this a lot." Walt Disney had snubbed an offer to bring Tintin to the big screen and an earlier effort to work with Spielberg in the 1980s failed to come off. To date, four million Tintin books have been sold in the States, only a small slice of the comics cake.

"It's the one place he never made it big and, let's face it, Tintin is rather boring and neutral," said Willem De Graeve. "But that's also a big part of his global appeal. It's so easy to identify yourself with him. Tintin is like an empty envelope, you open it and you can put whatever you want in it."

To prove it, De Graeve points to drawings of Tintin disguised as an old lady, a Chinese worker and then as an African boy before revealing that his one defining feature, his trademark blond quiff, was in fact an accident.

In the first-ever Tintin adventure, "Tintin in the land of the Soviets," our boy reporter speeds around in an open-top sports car so fast that his hair is blown upwards. "Herge kept the quiff to give Tintin more character," said De Graeve.

The Tintin sequel

Spielberg has now announced that he plans to work on a sequel to Tintin movie next year, following its huge box office success so far, even ahead of its US release this Christmas.

The 3-D film, with its chases across oceans, deserts and Arab bazaars, has sent sales of the original comic books soaring. In Brussels, visitor numbers to the many comic strip bookstores and centers have also ballooned and many tourists take part in tours of the city's colorful comic strip murals, which are dotted around town.

Belgium was the first country in the world to create the first-ever schools for comic strip artists, of which there are now half a dozen and the industry is booming. An astonishing 3,000 new French-language comic books are published every year.

"Comics run through people's blood here," shrugged Deneyer. "Those who had read Tintin and other comics as children before the war carried on being fans even as they grew up and they introduced their own children to comics and it's carried on. Let's hope it continues."

Author: Vanessa Mock, Brussels
Editor: Kate Bowen