I took the family to see Puss in Boots Sunday (go ahead and skip it or wait for DVD) and saw the Tintin trailer during the previews. I whispered to my wife just how big Tintin is in Europe. She’d not heard of Tintin before and I suspect most in the audience hadn’t either.
The LA Times Hero Complex blog is doing a series on the “heritage of the [Tintin] character”:
A cousin of such 20th century American young-adult heroes as the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Tintin is no longer a boy, nor quite yet a man. (“It’s difficult to say,” Herg’e once told a teenaged interviewer who asked the character’s age, and then settled on 17.) But he is manly in a way that boys were once told to strive to be: athletic, brave, loyal, cool-headed, polite. In any case, neither his friends nor foes, all his senior, treat him as a child; practically speaking, he is more adult than any of them. His virtues are, essentially, Boy Scout virtues – Herg’e had enthusiastically been a Scout himself – and in early drawings Tintin markedly resembles his predecessor Totor, the star of a strip Herg’e had written for Le Boy-Scout Belge.
Read the books!!!
Tintin, like Asterix and many many other French/Belgium comics are what I was reading as a child growing up in France. My love for “Bande Dessinees”, and cartoons comes from reading such amazing stories and artwork.
It should be on the to-do list of any cartoonist to go to a bookshop in France or Belgium and look at the amazing array of “Bande Dessinees” (graphic novels) available.
Tintin and Asterix have of course been available in English for a while now but a company in the UK, called CineBook, is translating more famous “Bande Dessinees” into English.
Note that I am not associated in any way with CineBook, apart from buying a lot of their books. My BD collection is mostly in French, but I buy the english version for the benefit of my kids who are more comfortable with the english language as we live in Australia.
For the Inkspot No62 edition of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association, I did an interview of Olivier Cadic, owner of Cinebook: http://issuu.com/australiancartoonists/docs/inkspot62
It’s a great interview Christophe – a must-read for any French comic fans.