The urban adventures of Tintin
The comic book hero’s adventures may have taken him and Snowy across the world and even into space, but Tintin has always had his feet firmly planted in Brussels, as Guy Dittrich reports
This year has seen the opening of two museums showcasing the work of two of Belgium’s favourite sons – Hergé, creator of Tintin, and the surrealist artist René Magritte. Magritte and Georges Remi, to use Hergé’s real name, used to share a glass of beer at Het Goudblommeke in Papier (55 Rue des Alexiens), but as anyone who has read the Tintin comic books will know, the simplistic plotlines of the former’s work are far removed from the surreal paintings of the latter. Even the drawing technique of Studio Hergé is known as ligne claire, or clear line, to differentiate it from the more dynamic approach adopted by artists of the Marcinelle school, whose cartoon characters include the Smurfs and Lucky Luke.
However, Tintin, the quiffed cub reporter, did have a rather surreal relationship with his alleged hometown of Brussels. “Hergé was generally vague about Tintin’s home city, certainly after the first few books, so they were more international,” says Chris Tregenza, a Tintin enthusiast and founder of Tintinmovie.org, a website devoted to the first Tintin movie, which is due to be released in 2011. And the universal popularity of Tintin is clear. The 24 stories of The Adventures of Tintin have been translated into more than 80 languages, with sales exceeding 230 million copies.
In the first story, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, our hero leaves from and returns to a Brussels railway station thought to be Gare du Nord. Several other adventures begin in a city that may be Brussels, but nothing is ever explicit. Is that the shopping drag of Avenue de la Toison d’Or in the initial scenes of a post-cinema meeting between Tintin, Captain Haddock – the old sea dog famous for his “billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles” expletive – and General Alcazar in The Red Sea Sharks? Is the blue car really speeding past Hotel Metropole on Boulevard Anspach in The Seven Crystal Balls?
Hergé was respected for the extraordinary lengths to which he went to get the technical details of his stories right. And, of course, it makes sense for him to make reference to places he knew well. No surprise then that Tintin is strolling through Parc de Bruxelles when he finds the briefcase that sets off the adventure of King Ottokar’s Sceptre. The park itself is in front of Palais Royal, which is used as a reference for the palace of Muskar XII in the same story. The motorbike chase that follows passes some fabulous art-deco buildings representative of those seen all over the Belgian capital.
Why would Hergé not copy the nearest observatory in the southern suburb of Uccle for The Shooting Star? And when Tintin goes to a museum of ethnography in The Broken Ear, it’s most likely based on the Royal Museum for Central Africa (
www.africamuseum.be) in nearby Tervuren. “If Tintin were to visit Brussels today, he would undoubtedly go to Autoworld [
www.autoworld.be] and Brussels Air Museum [
www.airmuseum.be] to have a look at the fabulous vintage cars and planes that raced him around the world,” says Tine Anthoni of the Belgian Comic Strip Center.
Cashing in on Belgium’s reputation as the birthplace of the so-called ‘ninth art’, Brussels has made 2009 the Year of the Comic Strip. In May, the world’s largest ever Tintin image – a 32m by 21m copy of page 42 of Destination Moon – was hung in Grand’Place. A more modest model of the red-and-white chequered space rocket can be seen at the Belgian Comic Strip Center (20 Rue des Sables, comicscenter.net), which itself is 20 years old this year.
Brussels also boasts a comic strip walk, which takes visitors past murals by a variety of artists. The main Hergé work is taken from The Calculus Affair and shows Tintin and friends making their way down a fire escape. In a city not known for its cleanliness, the murals remain largely untouched by graffiti. Certainly Hergé’s ligne claire style cleans up the daily flea market on Place du Jeu de Balle, where Tintin finds the model ship that becomes the catalyst for the adventure in The Secret of the Unicorn.
This story is the basis of the movie The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, and set for release in late 2011. “I’m cautiously optimistic [about the movie],” says Tregenza. “Many comic-to-film conversions have been awful, either because the director hasn’t understood what was special about the source material or they didn’t have the budget to pull it off. But both Jackson and Spielberg have done adaptations previously that are true to their source material and they have the budget.”
One thing’s for sure. If the film is a success, it’s bound to bring even more people to Brussels in search of one of its most famous creations.
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