When the Belgian cartoonist Hergé died in 1983 at the age of 75, The New York Times saw fit to run only a brief, 182-word obituary, picked up from Reuters. But in the Francophone world, Hergé’s death was front-page news, inspiring the kind of orgylike coverage reserved in America for fallen statesmen and overdosed pop stars. Belgian politicians asserted Hergé’s greatness, while the French philosopher Michel Serres went so far as to declare that the cartoonist was the author who has had the “most impact on contemporary French life.”
Granted, many people on this side of the Atlantic are also fans of Hergé’s best-loved creation, the tuft-haired boy reporter Tintin, who, along with his trusty dog, Snowy, foiled serial bands of smugglers, gangsters, kidnappers, spies and crude ethnic caricatures across the pages of 24 book-length, Saturday-morning-serial-style adventures. But even Tintin’s most passionate American devotees may choke on the French author Pierre Assouline’s observation, in his scrupulous but stolid biography, HERGÉ: The Man Who Created Tintin (Oxford, $24.95), translated by Charles Ruas, that “today, some speak with some justification of a ‘Tintin century,’ signifying the 20th.” American exceptionalist that I am, I had presumed the 1900s belonged to Mickey Mouse or Batman — or maybe to that relative latecomer Bart Simpson. Though I like Tintin too, I wouldn’t even give him a decade.
