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The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not So Clear ed. by Joe Sutliff Sanders

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.2017.0022

1553-1201

Ken Parille,

Digital Storytelling and Education

Reviewed by: The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not So Clear ed. by Joe Sutliff Sanders Ken Parille (bio) The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not So Clear. Edited by Joe Sutliff Sanders. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. As Joe Sutliff Sanders notes in his introduction, the study of Hergé, his boy-hero Tintin, and the cartoonist's "clear line" style drives "a major industry in both the scholarly and popular presses … [of the artist's] native Belgium … throughout the Francophone world, and even beyond" (4). It is this "beyond" that receives the collection's careful attention. The Comics of Hergé embraces a global approach, featuring scholarship from North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. In many ways, though, its primary concern is with the North American scholarly community. The collection introduces this audience to and expands the long-running critical project of "Tintinology." For the Quarterly's readers, the volume's most relevant essays are those that examine Hergé as a children's author. Gwen Athene Tarbox looks at comics by cartoonist Gene Luen Yang and their engagement with Hergé's representations of violence. Tarbox explores Yang's companion young adult graphic novels Boxers and Saints to show how he revises his predecessor's clear-line aesthetic and ideology in what she calls the "tableau vivant effect," moments when "the violent act, stripped of a chaotic, crowded background or jagged lines, becomes a moment frozen in time for the reader's contemplation" (147). Her essay models a productive dialogue between Hergé and a North American cartoonist, situating her analysis within the fields of children's and adolescent literatures. [Editor's note: See Tarbox's essay on young adult comics in this issue.] Focusing on children's magazines, Kenan Koçak surveys Tintin's Turkish publication history from 1949 to 1994. He looks at pirated versions, "home grown" imitations, and a "new" Tintin story assembled with panels lifted from several Hergé comics (185). Koçak demonstrates that these versions were modified to meet the culture's needs, even though such changes were "sometimes in direct conflict with the creator's wishes" [End Page 248] (181). Turkish editors initially depicted Tintin (whom they renamed Tenten) as an American child, for example, because they believed that the character could advance a nationalist agenda: the plan to "transform Turkey into a little America" (183). Two of the collection's contributions discuss Jean-Marie Apostolidés's influential notion of Tintin as the "superchild." According to Apostolidés, "the superchild, which stands in contradistinction to the Nietzschean superman, constitutes a key myth of the twentieth century" that employs "two key motifs": the "rejection of patriarchal values" and "symbolic victory over parents" (101). This concept suggests interesting ways in which future scholarship could contextualize the child heroes who have been central to so many European and American visual and nonvisual children's texts. Given that the most well-known North American version of Hergé's boy-hero appears in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin, a discussion of the film's reimagining of the "superchild" myth within this new geographical and historical context might have been useful. While Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey's "Modernizing Tintin" does not focus on issues directly relevant to children's literature, it continues the transatlantic dialogue that energizes the collection and essays such as Tarbox's. The authors discuss comics by North American cartoonists Seth, Matt Madden, and Charles Burns, looking at how these creators work with and against Hergé's aesthetics and politics. As the authors note, Burns's graphic novel trilogy Last Look offers the most sustained commentary on Hergé and the "Tintin myth" by a North American artist (99). (The trilogy was serialized from 2010 to 2014 in three European "album format" editions and then collected as Last Look in 2016.) Although the essay was written before Burns released the final installment, it helpfully sets the stage for additional scholarship, especially work on the cartoonist's and his characters' investment in children's comics. Since Last Look engages Tintin mythology through the lens of American comics (especially horror and romance stories), it's easy to imagine several essays investigating...