The Adventures of Hergé

Posted on | Saturday, January 26, 2013 | 6 Comments

The Adventures of Hergé

Georges Prosper Remi

May 22, 1907-March 3, 1983

One of my favorite types of movies when I was a kid were the swashbuckling adventures, particularly Indiana Jones. To be honest, I still have a soft spot for these stories, and this is why I gravitated to a television series that was on the air when I was little--The Adventures of Tintin. The various adventures of this reporter and his faithful dog, Snowy, enthralled me. As I grew older, I started getting interested in comics because it was an entire story literally drawn out in pictures. By the time I was ten, I could name various comic artists like Charles Schulz and Winsor McCay. One Saturday, my mom came back from her morning traversing the different yard sales with a book of games for me. I flipped through the slender, paperback volume, and recognized the drawings right away. The characters were from The Adventures of Tintin. Then I saw the name of the creator, Herge. I became fascinated for years.

Hergé was the pseudonym of the artist Georges Prosper Remi who was born in Brussels, Belgium, in May of 1907. While growing up, Remi lived an average lifestyle. He said: “My childhood was extremely ordinary. It happened in a very average place, with average events and average thoughts. For me, the poet's "green paradise" was rather gray... My childhood, my adolescence, Boy Scouting, military service – all of it was gray. Neither a sad boyhood nor a happy one – rather a lackluster one.” Remi found his revival in drawing and drawing a particular character. The character didn’t have a name, but he was a sort of Boy Scout who would thumb his nose at his German captors (from 1914-’18 Germany occupied Belgium). Years afterwards, Remi still had this mere idea. When he started working for a paper entitled Le XXe Siécle (The Twentieth Century) he developed a comic strip about a brave Boy Scout named Totor. And, after serving in the military, Remi worked at another paper called Le Petit Vingtiéme. Here Remi concocted his most famous character,
a journalist named Tintin.

Tintin made his debut in the comic entitled Tintin in the Land of the Soviets under the new name Hergé, which was Remi’s initials (GR) backwards (RG). This comic started Remi’s rocketing career as a master storyteller with a unique drawing style. Remi took Tintin to the far corners of the globe, the bottom of the sea, and even the Moon a good 16 years before Neil Armstrong. Remi’s style evokes that of Charles Schulz and George McManus in its simple, yet lifelike manner. Like Norman Rockwell, he used himself as a model in order to better understand human anatomy. Remi as Hergé inspired other storytellers and artists because of his drawing style and sense of adventure--including myself.
I still have that game book as well as a small shelf
dedicated to my Tintin books.

Needless to say, Hergé is part of the pantheon of great comic artists such as Charles Schulz, George McManus, Chester Gould, and Winsor McCay who seem to defy their own genre.