Читать книгу The Graphic Mythology of Tintin - a Primer - Tim MDiv Mountford - Страница 4

2. Beginnings

For a Belgian, Georges Remi is an artist without mentor. By his own admission the protagonist in a rather dull childhood (born in 1907 in an unremarkable suburb of Brussels), the young Georges was easily amused by a pencil and paper. The escapist adventures of his imagination saw the light of day crayoned on scraps of paper and later his school books. Remi had little cartoons all over the margins; there were boy heroes defending the country from the foe (the first World War was not long over), footballers, and caricatures and characters of all types. Influences and inspirations for these early drawings came from all around him; Remi was bright and soaked up information, though at home at least there were very few books. Those early days which he referred to later as ‘a kind of grey’ only started to brighten with the advent of scouting. Not only did Hergé’s recollections begin to colour at this point but thanks to a sketchbook he took with him on various excursions and jamborees we also can see the things that caught his eye and moved him to draw. Equally enlightening are some of his interests and the influences upon Georges during these formative teenage years: there was a deep interest in Native Americans (or Redskins as they were known then) and their noble lifestyle in tune with nature which enriched his outdoor camping exploits; his father’s work as a children’s outfitter continually impressed Georges by his deft skill in sketching clothes and figures; and he likewise had a preference for les sujets vivants, active figures rather than still life (in French aptly called la nature morte) though his hopes of sketching any nude model were well and truly dashed by the strict Catholic morality of pre-war Belgium.

But with scouting came Remi’s first opportunities in graphic design and illustration. A monthly publication of the Catholic scouts called Le Boy-scout was his first experience of seeing his illustrations published. The budding talent adopted various guises: aside from his scouting name Renard Curieux (Curious Fox) his drawing appeared as ‘Georges Remi’, plain ‘Remi’ and even ‘Atelier de la Fleur de Lys’, until finally by inverting his initials he struck upon the name Hergé (being the French pronunciation of the letters RG) which is first known to appear under a banner heading in December 1924. His contribution grew over the ten years he eventually amassed with the periodical until he was not only drawing column headings and regular single- and double-frame gags but had effectively redesigned the magazine. Confined to black and white, here Georges mimicked and created illustrative styles that took advantage of these restrictions. His skills in lettering and an eye for modern design made a humble scouting circular into a stylish and exciting publication.

It was in this publication that Hergé drew his first real ‘cartoon’ character – or moreover his first true héros de la bande dessinée. Christened Totor, Chef de Patrouille des Hannetons, he was a small button nosed scout whose adventures in the Wild West embraced all that Hergé held dear at the time: scouting, Red Indians and filmic adventures. In fact the strip was headed by the banner ‘United Rovers présente un extrasuper film’ and later ‘Hergé Moving Pictures’. One influence at least was quite clear. Whether Georges was interested in anything more than the content of the films he saw at the cinema is uncertain, but it is surely no coincidence that the early forms of comic strips developed alongside the studio storyboard and the very frame-by-frame nature of cine film itself. Alain Resnais, director of films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour, an admirer of Hergé’s work and a great campaigner for the art of BD, thought that the exciting episodic escapades that Hergé introduced to Belgian children through his strips, especially with the appearance of Tintin, paralleled the American week-by-week adventure serials that ran at this time.

Here was home-grown Belgian (also read European) talent to rival any American Flash Gordon or cowboy flick for weekly thrills and spills. Only one thing marked Totor apart from the films and the majority of Hergé later strips: a running narrative under each box. But this was de rigeur at the time and as Hergé later found out when he abandoned this text in creating Tintin, there remained some who believed his strips like foreign films still needed these subtitles!

Concurrent to the illustrations and this early strip that Hergé was submitting to Le Boy-scout, Hergé’s talent was called upon in the service of the Belgian Catholic youth movement L’Action Catholique de la Jeunesse Belge (A.C.J.B.), at that time a prolific lay wing of the church. It is important to note that Georges was not in fact a militant Catholic but more and more profoundly agnostic in his beliefs. Rather it was due to the same key figures in the Federation of Catholic Scouts who knew Remi’s skills and continued to use them (René Weverbergh for one, who had originally encouraged Georges to contribute to Le Boy-scout). Yet in spite of this conflict of belief Hergé continued to produce some fine graphic motifs and illustrations for A.C.J.B. and its subsidiary organisations, often based around vaguely religious themes. In magazine work Remi worked on La Blé qui Lève producing a stylish masthead and other fine typographic tides; numerous logos and insignia led Hergé to create forceful militant brands; and a propagandist pamphlet Mon Avenir saw the one and only performance of two young Brussels lads, Fred and Mile. Similar in appearance and format to Hergé’s later creations Quick and Flupke, these Marollien ketjes were like many of his other caractères sans lendemain with whom the reader instantly feels familiar. In retrospect, maybe it is because, as initiates in the universe of Hergé knowing Quick and Flupke so well, these others seem like their brothers. Nevertheless, in the context of the universality of the Tintin myth, we must consider Hergé’s consistent ability to create characters that we accept so readily. Is it perhaps because they have about them something that reminds us of ourselves, or that they personify our worst traits or our greatest ideals? Such theories come to the fore when we consider the personality of Tintin, and in particular the way that his character has been elevated to the point of sainthood by the Tintin myth. Yet all this seems a far cry from the mundane circumstances that led to the birth of the hero.

The Opportunity of the Century

Having completed his secondary education Hergé began his employment with the national Catholic daily Le Vingtième Siécle where he worked in the subscriptions department. Mandatory military service in 1926 interrupted both this and the regularity of the adventures of Totor, yet on his return in 1927 he entered a new position with the Vingtième, that of apprentice photographer/photo-engraver and illustrator for special pages, and in Le Boy-scout Belge (as it was now called) after intermittent absence and with a paragraph recap, Totor’s exploits picked up where he had left them.

Over the next few years Hergé’s skills as an illustrator and graphic designer matured considerably as he took on a great range of work. René Weverbergh as a Catholic book publisher had a number of titles in need of illumination and for which he engaged Hergé. At the Vingtième a new supplement began in the Autumn of 1928 called Le Vingtième Litérraire et Artistique. It was published weekly and during its life saw Hergé produce well over a hundred rich and varied illustrations. Another supplement aimed at women called Votre Vingtième Madame also appeared shortly after to which Hergé contributed. But it is not only the number of pictures that show his prodigious talent but also the range of different styles that he would use to achieve them, especially tailoring his graphics to respective audiences. All rendered in pen and ink Remi managed to suggest both the delicacy of a pencil sketch and the boldness of a print. From realistic figure drawing through to caricature, cartoon and even stylish Art Deco forms, he would experiment and adapt to suit both subject matter and graphic intention. It is often noted that the most remarkable of these styles was a pseudo-woodcut effect; although there is no knowledge of Hergé ever actually working in woodcut, with indian ink and white gouache he developed a strong graphism that mimicked genuine prints. To some extent Hergé may have created this great range in his graphic vocabulary as he was apparently the only illustrator in the employ of the paper and he was aware of the importance of variety to the reader’s eye. Nevertheless, such flexibility was to be to treat gain in another area of Remi’s interest: advertising

As Benoît Peeters notes in Les Débuts d’un illustrateur, Hergé’s ambitions at the end of the Twenties were more towards publicity than bande dessinée. It is in this domain that we see him as a competent graphic designer aware of stylistic trends and skilful in creating memorable advertisements. Like the precocious Atelier de la Fleur de Lys, Remi was the sole worker at the eponymous Atelier Hergé which came about at this time. Its name appeared on a wide range of advertisements mainly in newspapers and magazines for shops and services in Brussels itself, though others would have achieved a wider circulation. It was here that his typography both with conventional typefaces and hand-drawn letterforms really developed, being obviously a crucial element in any publicity. Hergé would call on the various styles in his portfolio to execute different jobs, but often he would resort to BD, creating characters who were to become as familiar as actors in advertisements today. The beginning of the Thirties saw the birth of a whole host of stars: Tim L’Ecureuil, héros du Far West for the department store L’lnnovotion; Jef, le manoeuvre humoristique in La Reyue Facq; Antoine, Antoinette, Dropsy and Plouf’s many adventures for les Confiseries Antoine; les Mésaventures de Jef Debakker for Union charcoal briquettes; L’Aimable Monsieur Mops for Le Bon Marché, and others whose names went unmentioned and who were never seen again. Yet Hergé seldom cruelly discarded his creatures and they often underwent a form of re-incarnation or occasionally resurrection. Tim L’Ecureuil later metamorphosed into a bear and the story became Popol et Virginie chez les Lapinos – a story which remains in the Hergé canon his only lasting attempt at working solely with non-human characters. Antoine and company were in many ways precursors of the adventures of Jo, Zette and their monkey Jocko. And Monsieur Mops, who was quite clearly a Charlie Chaplin look-alike and act-alike, re-appeared in Quick and Flupke strips and is a raw type of the sublime idiot which pervades Hergé’s work. When Hergé found a character he liked he would rarely lose them, working them through various incarnations, developing the character’s persona, their virtues and vices, purging or even adding to their sins, honing their visual strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps a good example of this is when Totor became Tintin.

To be precise, Totor continued to exist after Tintin was born and even after Hergé had ceased to draw him – an artist called Evany continued to animate the young scout in Les Memoires de Totor for six months in 1930. But the true spirit of the hero came to reside in the heart of a reporter who was a deadringer for his predecessor, albeit sporting a quiff and partnered by a talking dog. Tintin was born almost out of necessity as Hergé had been given new responsibilities which afforded him the chance to create a young adventurer. Fr. Norbert Wallez, the editor of the Vingtième and a great encourager of the young Remi, having already created various special supplements in attempts to increase the journal’s circulation, put Georges in complete control of a new children’s supplement called Le Petit Vingtième.