Hergé

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Georges Prosper Remi signed the first 500 copies of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets using the signature of his own fictional creation. Beside each one, his fiancee Germaine Kieckens drew the paw print of Snowy the dog. The man behind that signature took his pen name, Hergé, from the French sound of his initials reversed: R.G. He was born in a grey suburb of Brussels he found extremely boring, and he would build from it the most popular European comic of the 20th century. How did a bored subscriptions clerk who quit art school after a single lesson become a master of the medium? How did the same hand that drew anti-socialist propaganda for children later earn an award from the Dalai Lama? And why did a man celebrated across Belgium spend his final decades unable to escape the word collaborator?

• 2. The Curious Fox

  ›

  Aged 12, Remi joined the Boy Scout brigade at Saint-Boniface School, became leader of the Squirrel Patrol, and earned the name Curious Fox. With the Scouts he camped in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Spain. In the summer of 1923 his troop hiked 200 miles across the Pyrenees. Scouting gave him a love of camping and a moral compass that prized loyalty and keeping promises.

  His Scoutmaster, Rene Weverbergh, was the first to put his drawing into print, publishing a sketch in the Saint-Boniface newsletter Jamais Assez, meaning Never Enough. When Weverbergh joined the Federation of Scouts' newsletter, more illustrations followed, the first appearing in 1922 in a publication soon renamed Le Boy-Scout Belge. The young artist tried out pseudonyms, signing as Jérémie and Jérémiades before settling on Hergé, which first appeared above his work in December 1924.

  Growing up bilingual in Brussels, he spoke his father's French but learned Dutch too, picking up a Marollien accent from his maternal grandmother. He loved cinema, favoring Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur and the films of Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, and Buster Keaton. In July 1926 he launched a comic strip for Le Boy-Scout Belge, Les Aventures de Totor, about a Boy Scout patrol leader. Totor was where he first experimented with speech balloons, and the character would later supply the raw material for someone far more famous.

• 3. Born In Propaganda

  ›

  Toward the end of his military service in August 1927, Hergé met the Abbé Norbert Wallez, editor of the conservative Catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. Wallez was a vocal fascist who kept a signed photograph of Benito Mussolini on his desk. He gave Hergé a job as a cartoonist, and Hergé came to view the Abbé as a father figure.

  Wallez founded a children's supplement, Le Petit Vingtième, that carried strong Catholic and fascist messages, with many passages that were explicitly anti-semitic. For it, Hergé created Tintin, a Belgian boy reporter who travels the world with his fox terrier Snowy, called Milou in French. He based the character partly on Totor and partly on his own brother, Paul. He drew on new techniques from US comics like George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Rudolph Dirks's The Katzenjammer Kids, copies sent to him from Mexico by the paper's reporter Léon Degrelle.

  Hergé wanted to send Tintin to the United States. Wallez instead ordered an adventure in the Soviet Union as anti-socialist propaganda for children. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets began serialisation on the 10th of January 1929 and ran until the 8th of May 1930. The next story, Tintin in the Congo, was built to encourage colonial sentiment toward the Belgian Congo, depicting the Congolese in a paternalistic style that later decades would condemn as racist. Tintin in America, the third, let Hergé push an anti-capitalist agenda in keeping with the paper's ultra-conservative line. By the time these stories reached book form, syndication requests were arriving from Swiss and Portuguese newspapers.

• 4. The Blue Lotus Turn

  ›

  In May 1934 Hergé was introduced to Zhang Chongren, a Catholic Chinese student at Brussels' Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Zhang gave him lessons in Taoist philosophy, Chinese art, and Chinese calligraphy, reshaping not only his style but his outlook on life. As thanks, Hergé wrote a young Chinese boy named Chang Chong-Chen into The Blue Lotus, where he meets and befriends Tintin.

  Set in China and dealing with the recent Japanese invasion of Manchuria, The Blue Lotus was serialised from August 1934 to October 1935. For it, Hergé devoted far more attention to accuracy, producing a largely realistic portrayal of China. The result has been widely hailed as Hergé's first masterpiece and a benchmark in the series. From this point, careful background research became central to his method.

  The Broken Ear, from 1935 to 1937, was the first story Hergé plotted from a synopsis written at the start. It introduced General Alcazar and the series' first fictional countries, San Theodoros and Nuevo Rico, two republics modeled on Bolivia and Paraguay. Its violence upset the publishers of the French Catholic magazine Cœurs Vaillants, who asked for something gentler. Hergé answered with The Adventures of Jo, Zette, and Jocko, a series about a brother, sister, and their pet monkey, which he privately admitted bored him terribly. Working three series at once, he was drawing every day of the year and feeling the strain.

• 5. Working Under The Occupation

  ›

  The day Hergé was declared unfit for military service in May 1940, Germany invaded Belgium. Le Vingtième Siècle was shut down partway through the serialisation of Land of Black Gold. He fled by car to France with his wife, staying near Puy-de-Dôme for six weeks before returning to Brussels, where he found his house occupied as an office for the German army's Propagandastaffel.

  Hergé declined a post at the openly political Rexist paper Le Pays Réel and instead joined Le Soir, Belgium's largest Francophone daily, which had been confiscated from its owners and remained firmly under Nazi control. He relaunched Tintin with The Crab with the Golden Claws, which introduced Captain Haddock and dropped the political themes of the earlier books in favor of neutrality. He was drawn to Le Soir's enormous readership, which reached 600,000.

  From October 1941 to May 1942 the paper serialised The Shooting Star, whose villain was a wealthy Jewish American businessman; it would prove deeply controversial after the war. Casterman wanted the books in colour and shortened from 120 pages to 62, and Hergé agreed in February 1942, insisting that colour stay secondary to line. To manage the load he brought in the cartoonist Edgar P. Jacobs and the colourist Alice Devos. The Secret of the Unicorn followed in June 1942, drawing on Jules Verne through his collaborator Jacques Van Melkebeke, and its sequel Red Rackham's Treasure introduced Professor Calculus.

• 6. Blunderer Or Traitor

  ›

  Le Soir ceased publication on the 2nd of September 1944 as Allied troops liberated Brussels, partway through The Seven Crystal Balls. Hergé was arrested the next day, named in a Resistance document called the Gallery of Traitors. It was the first of four arrests, by the State Security, the Judiciary Police, the Belgian National Movement, and the Front for Independence, during which he spent one night in jail. A newspaper tied to the Resistance, La Patrie, mocked him with a strip titled The Adventures of Tintin in the Land of the Nazis.

  The recriminations were vast. Military courts condemned 30,000 on minor charges and 25,000 on more serious ones, with 5,500 sentenced to life imprisonment or death. The deputy public prosecutor, Mr Vinçotte, urged leniency, writing that it would bring ridicule on the judicial system to go after an inoffensive children's book author. The case was closed on the 22nd of December 1945 by the general auditor Walter Jean Ganshof van der Meersch.

  His path back ran through Raymond Leblanc, a former member of a conservative Resistance group who had fond childhood memories of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Leblanc obtained clearance papers and asked the Resistance leader William Ugeux to review the file; Ugeux concluded Hergé had been a blunderer rather than a traitor. In May 1946 Hergé received a certificate of good citizenship, by then largely necessary to work in post-war Belgium. He later called the period an experience of absolute intolerance, and said simply: it was horrible, horrible.

• 7. A Magazine And Two Wives

  ›

  The first issue of Tintin magazine appeared on the 26th of September 1946 under the slogan The Newspaper for the Young Aged 7 to 77. As artistic director Hergé held a 10 percent stake, while Leblanc provided half the capital. It sold 60,000 copies within three days. He concluded The Seven Crystal Balls there before moving into Prisoners of the Sun, while the magazine also carried Jacobs' new Blake and Mortimer series.

  On the 6th of April 1950 Hergé established Studios Hergé as a public company. It began with three employees and grew to fifteen, all working on his projects. He hired Bob de Moor as his primary apprentice in March 1951 and persuaded Jacques Martin to join in January 1954. He sent Tintin to the moon across Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, breaking off the latter for an eighteen-month hiatus when he fell into clinical depression; some readers wrote in convinced he had died.

  His personal life was unraveling alongside the work. He had married Germaine Kieckens on the 20th of July 1932, a union neither was entirely happy with, pushed on them by Wallez, who carried out the ceremony himself. In January 1955 a young colourist named Fanny Vlamynck joined the Studios, and Hergé began an affair with her in November 1956. Amid this turmoil he produced Tintin in Tibet, his personal favorite of all his works. Belgian law kept him from divorcing for 17 years; his divorce from Germaine was finalised in March 1977, and weeks later, aged 70, he married Fanny, who was 42.

• 8. The Long Last Decades

  ›

  In 1982 the US filmmaker Steven Spielberg requested the rights for a live-action Tintin adaptation, a prospect that excited Hergé. He had been scheduled to meet Spielberg when, on the 25th of February 1983, he suffered cardiac arrest. Diagnosed in 1979 with osteomyelofibrosis, he had come to need blood transfusions first every two weeks, then every week. He died at Brussels' Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc on the 3rd of March 1983, aged 75, leaving Fanny his sole heir.

  Much of his late energy went to recognition and reunion rather than new Adventures. He grew annoyed at the success of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's Asterix, which commentators said was eclipsing Tintin in the Franco-Belgian tradition. In 1962 he took up painting under the abstract painter Louis Van Lint, producing 37 works before abandoning it; the conservator Léo Van Puyvelde told him his real talent lay with cartooning. He met Andy Warhol in New York in 1972, and Warhol later made a pop art portrait of him.

  He had long searched for Zhang Chongren, asking any Chinese person he met if they knew his old friend. In 1979 a staff member at a Brussels Chinese restaurant turned out to be Zhang's godson. The two were reunited in March 1981 in a heavily publicised event Hergé found difficult, sensing the distance the years had opened between them. His legacy now stands in a building of its own: the Musée Hergé, designed by the architect Christian de Portzamparc and built for 15 million euros, opened in Louvain-la-Neuve in June 2009, its eight permanent galleries displaying original artwork that had never before been visible to the public.