I forgot to warn you. If it’s your first time reading Tintin;
don’t begin at the beginning.
In fact, I recommend that you pretend that these
first two (or three) books I’m discussing don’t even exist. Move along. Nothing
to see here. Skip right on over to
Cigars
of the Pharaoh. Once you’ve read the 20 (or 20½) books in the canon two or
three times, come back and we’ll talk. We’ll see if you’re ready for
In the Land of the Soviets and
Tintin in America. In fact, I, lifelong
Tintin fan as I am, have never actually read the one book not listed on the
back covers,
Tintin in the Congo.
One, because it was never actually published in the United States and as such
was difficult to find before the days of Amazon and eBay, and, two, because I have
always feared that it would sour my admiration for Hergé permanently.
I won’t detail the specific flaws of these first albums here,
for they are legion—and Wikipedia articles do a fair job of contextualizing
their failings—but a fresh read has given me several takeaway lessons I can use
as an author.
Lesson #1: Write your own way
Tintin had a less-than-auspicious beginning as a tool of
propaganda.
In the late 1920s,
George Remi (Hergé) was a young aspiring
cartoonist and illustrator, eager to create a regular strip for a newspaper. He
was taken in by
Norbert Wallez, a priest and editor of an extremely right-wing,
if not downright fascist, Catholic newspaper in Belgium and given a chance to
work for the paper’s weekly children’s supplement. While the characters of
Tintin and Snowy seem to be Hergé’s creations, their initial adventures were
not of his design. Wallez directed Tintin closely, choosing his destinations
and dictating his politics—viciously anti-Communist, anti-Semitic,
anti-capitalist, and patriarchal. Like many upstanding Catholic Belgian men of
the time, Hergé accepted these ideas as a matter of course. Tintin’s overt
politics weren’t necessarily controversial, nor did Hergé include them
unwillingly, but without Wallez standing over Hergé’s shoulder, I’m sure that
Tintin’s beginnings would have been much different. I believe that Hergé wanted
to entertain, not to preach or to spout ideology. I’m certain, given his later,
more researched, work, that Hergé would have preferred for Tintin to explore
the world, to investigate, and to learn from its people, and not to venture
forth with a closed mind and unshakeable assumptions.
Wallez’s hand is particularly evident in Soviets. Young reporter Tintin sets out
from Belgium with the sole aim to expose the evils of the Stalinist revolution
and regime in the USSR. Fine, yes, they were evil, but the misadventures that
befall Tintin expose nothing of the true situation. They paint everyone as
either wholly evil or wretched victims. There is no middle ground, no attempt
to reflect reality. Soviets was the
only Tintin adventure that Hergé refused to redraw and color in his eventual
classic style for publication. He himself called it embarrassing propaganda. I
think this reflects a possibility that he knew that the work wasn’t exactly
his. It had been his pen on the paper, but it was not what he would have
written.
As an author I feel pressure from many fronts—from my wife to
random Internet commenters. And it seems like everyone has some idea of what type
of book I should write. “That Dave Barry is funny, you should write like him.”
“Fifty Shades of Twilight, but set in a beachfront town in North Carolina.” “Must
your characters swear so much?” “…and then there should be a zombie attack!”
But if I were to write solely to appease any of those voices, or heaven forbid,
all of them at once, the result would not be my work. I doubt it would have much
merit. And I wouldn’t believe in it. I have to write the books that I would
want to read. My own books, in my own voice.
What would Tintin’s first adventures been like if Hergé had
been able to work without Wallez’s hand on his shoulder?
Lesson #2: Stereotypes are lazy
Critics have long savaged Hergé for the excessive use of
stereotyped characters, if not outright racism. The first two (three) Tintin
albums are full of them: from bomb-chucking, trigger-happy Bolshevik devils; to
money-obsessed, hook-nosed Jewish shopkeepers; to half-naked, fat-lipped, childish
Congolese natives; to hatchet-burying, rain-dancing Native Americans. But I
don’t think Hergé was intentionally trying to spew misinformation or foment
hatred; he was simply naïve. He was a product of his generation, trying to
please his employer, and probably on tight deadlines that gave little time for
research. He used what he knew of far-off places and people, which
unfortunately was very little and was sourced from such unworthy sources as
Hollywood movies and propaganda pamphlets. Hergé stereotyped the countries
Tintin visits as well, and the end results are more checklist-style travelogues
than real stories. And as such, these first books barely fit with the others.
Beginning with Cigars
of the Pharaoh, but especially with The
Blue Lotus, (and not coincidentally around the time that Wallez was removed
as editor of the newspaper) Hergé began to do a great deal more research. He
began to talk to natives of the places he intended to write about. And he began
to attempt to reflect the character of the locations more accurately. He paid
attention to real modes of dress (later lampooning his earlier tendencies by
dressing the Thompson Twins in ridiculous and assumptive native costumes). He
began to add background, wherein a city would be populated with realistic
locals going about their daily business. Villains were given actual motives
such as greed, lust for power, or valid political disagreements and were not
portrayed as innately evil. Hergé no longer depicted the locals as naïve
simpletons desperate for Western enlightenment, but neither were they treated
with kid gloves. They became people, some educated, some not, some poor, some
rich, some helpful, some malevolent, and many simply indifferent to Tintin’s
adventures. Tintin had moved from a fantasy into the real world.
Stereotypes are easy to write. We all have a ready
storehouse of such characters. But stereotypes are insulting to readers,
offensive to those portrayed, and, in my opinion, a mark of lazy writing. And,
if one absolutely must make a political point, there are many other less
ham-handed methods. Not every character I write gets a complete dossier, but as
I haul my main cast around the world I try to consider the lives of the various
people they touch. From the taxi driver with a four-word speaking part to the acquaintance
who shows up for a whole chapter, I try to give each character a little depth,
considering gender, age, family background, intentions, what kind of day
they’ve been having, basically whatever might be relevant. This takes a little
time, and perhaps a little research, but I’ve found that such consideration can
create a believable human interaction, and I believe this depth fleshes out the
world I’ve worked so hard to create. I absorbed this lesson from Hergé at an
early age, and it has always stuck with me. Even as a child, I sensed that his stereotypes
were jarring and empty. But when he began to treat everyone as an individual,
Tintin’s world became tangibly and emotionally real.
Lesson #3: Action wins the battle…
So what did these books get right? Why didn’t these racist,
fascist comic strips get pulped into history with the rest of Wallez’s
newspaper? Why am I reading them still, 84 years later?
My guess: They were
exciting. Hergé had undeniable talent. Even the crude sketches of Soviets show great promise. The book
includes a power-boat chase that might as well be the storyboard for the Venice
boat chase in Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade. And the action is relentless. Tintin never quite escapes any
peril, jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire on every other page,
until he is left with only his wits, his mettle, and his dog. Like Saturday
matinee cliff-hangers, Hergé kept readers dangling for next week’s strip. Will
he…? How will he…? Wow.
A writer’s lesson if I’ve ever heard one. Make every scene
matter. Up the stakes. Make the situation just that much more hopeless. Take
away one more escape route. Kick your character down just one more time.
Whether you’re writing
bonnet-rippers or war stories, the lesson applies; only
the volume of blood varies.
Lesson #4: …but story wins the war.
Soviets and In America both end with Tintin getting
a ticker-tape parade. But I have always been left wondering, “What for?” All
he’d done for 60-odd pages is to trip almost accidently from one stereotypical
scene to the next. Sure, his life was usually in danger, but like I said
before, the adventures read more like travelogues. And once all of Hergé’s (or
Wallez’s) boxes had been checked, Tintin at last escaped, or finally caught the
gangsters, and that was that. Hurrah?
As a sci-fi writer, this kind of checklist tourism is a real
temptation. I invest a great deal of time inventing the world of my stories.
I’m not careful, it’s easy to want to take my characters everywhere and explore
every detail. Otherwise, what’s the point, right? My first full draft of
Legitimacy was over 500,000 words, most
dedicated to this very thing. As a child, Teague lived in the Bangkok of
tourists, not residents. I took characters on actual guided tours of the inner
workings of space stations. I spelled out exactly how vat-grown meat gets from
the factory to an asteroid colony’s freezers. (Don’t ask why.) I described
every technical detail of Gwen’s spacecraft. (I even have the blueprints if you
want to see them. No surprise: They bear a stylistic resemblance to
Hergé’s blueprintsfor the rocket in Destination Moon.)
I outlined the rules of zero-G wallyball. Some of these scenes were vaguely
exciting and most told a lot more about certain fringe characters. But in the
long run, was any of it interesting? Perhaps tangentially, but little of it
drove the story. It diluted the problems and buried the conflict. It may have
been messy and cluttered as real life, but it wasn’t anything anyone would want
to read. The story matters more than any technical detail, no matter how dear
to my heart. And the ticker-tape parade at the end means little if not
supported by the rest of the book.
It says a lot to me that, for the rest of the books, Hergé
did away with the parades. Tintin returns from his subsequent adventures with
little fanfare, maybe just a newspaper headline or two. I think Hergé
understood that Tintin didn’t go on adventures for the fame and accolades. And
he must also have realized that people didn’t read Tintin to just casually bear
witness, but to journey with him, no matter how difficult, and somewhere in
there is what story is all about.
Next time: Cigars of
the Pharaoh: The Devil is in the Details
