From the mid-Seventies, the magazine Anandamela began to carry Bengali translations of the adventures of Tintin, almost half a century after the character was created. He has since become a part of Bengali cultural life, and many of us have had the doubtful pleasure of being named or nicknamed after him. It may therefore appear surprising that the birth centenary of Tintin’s creator, Hergé, has passed without much fanfare in these parts. Perhaps the availability of cutting-edge graphic novels in Indian bookstores has taken some shine off the boy reporter.

For the first-time reader of the comic book though, there are few series more reader-friendly than Hergé’s. This chiefly owes to Hergé’s deployment of the ligne claire or the ‘clear line’ method in much of his work. When Hergé started drawing the early adventures of Tintin, his style was imitative of contemporary American cartoons, with uncomplicated lines and uniform frames. Background details, the chief strength of his later work, are by and large absent. This can be seen in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which appeared serially in Le Petit Vingtième from January 1929 through May 1930. This was one work which Hergé did not touch up or colour when it was later published in book form. With its crass politics and bleak noir ambience, the book is a somewhat disturbing read for the modern reader.

The early Tintin adventures appeared in two-page fascicules in Le Petit Vingtième. Though the covers were in colour, the pages themselves were in black-and-white. As a result, a lot of shading had to be used, which disappeared when the same stories were told in colour. Colour was introduced after World War II, when the adventures began appearing in a weekly magazine called Tintin. By this time, Hergé’s draughtsmanship had become much more assured, and he also benefitted from the collaboration of the artist, Edgar P. Jacobs, later of “Blake and Mortimer” fame. Though this association did not last long, Hergé recognized the necessity of a back-up team. In 1950, he set up the Hergé Studios, where his assistants carried out extensive research into details and background.

By the mid-Fifties, Hergé’s work had reached the highest stage in its development. The philosophy of the ligne claire informed not only his drawing but also his storytelling. There was no complex plotting or psychological studies: instead, there was an uninterrupted sequence of fast-paced action, almost geometrical in its neatness. And the chief example of this style was the figure of Tintin himself, drawn with a taut minimalism — circle for the face, two dots for eyes, laterally inverted ‘c’ for the nose — or what Scott McCloud calls the iconic style in Understanding Comics. This minimalism was offset by the unusually detailed background, allowing the readers “to mask themselves as a character and enter a sensually stimulating world”. In McCloud’s classic theorem, it was as if there were one set of lines to see, and another set of lines to be.

The rise of Hergé in the Fifties also coincided with a period of depression for the comic book in America. After the first wave of superhero comics waned, the genre diversified into horror and crime, and got its first taste of moral vigilantism, McCarthy-style. The industry adopted the Comics Code Authority in 1954, and drafted a set of self-regulatory guidelines, which effectively sent the genre into suspended animation. In Europe, on the other hand, Hergé’s style had become the signature for Franco-Belgian comics, represented by such figures as Bob de Moor, Jacques Martin, Roger Leloup, and Jacobs himself. The style permeated its way into Pop Art as well, with both Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein acknowledging their debt to Tintin’s creator. Warhol met Hergé in 1972, and made a set of silk-screen portraits of him.

Ligne claire fell out of fashion in the Sixties as the comic book received new life in the hands of Will Eisner — widely acknowledged as the father of the graphic novel — and Robert Crumb, whose anarchic and irreverent style mocked and undermined the restrictions imposed by the Comics Code Authority. Much avant-garde work began to come out from small and underground presses on both sides of the Atlantic, which dealt with issues of sexuality and gender and dismantled the protocols of the genre. For those familiar with the changes, Tintin was already an anachronism and Hergé an assembly-line producer of juvenile adventures. There will now be a resurgence though, with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) teaming up to make a series of films on Tintin. One suspects that all the resources of CGI technology will be unleashed to make the film resemble the comic book as closely as possible, and the full resources of Hollywood employed to turn a European icon into an American one.