Content area
Full Text
American readers tend to think of Hergé’s Tintin comics, if at all, only as minor curiosities—as insubstantial, if entertaining, works that have little to do with larger traditions of children’s literature. Steven Spielberg’s 2011 movie The Adventures of Tintin had box office success and won a Golden Globe but did little to change Tintin’s marginal status in North American culture. Moreover, most American readers are unaware of any larger cultural or critical contexts into which Tintin fits. In much of the world, however, Tintin is far more important than Superman. Tintin is widely considered the greatest French-language comic, the centerpiece of the canon of Francophone comics (a.k.a. bandes dessinées or BD). The Clear Line style of Hergé and collaborators like Edgar-Pierre Jacobs and Jacques Martin is one of the standard stylistic traditions of French comics. In Europe, Tintin is viewed not only as a great work for children but as an object of serious adult study, and has inspired an entire critical industry.
Yet Hergé’s artistic and critical legacy is mostly invisible in North America. Despite recent efforts by publishers such as IDW, Fantagraphics, and Cinebook, the vast majority of French-language comics are unavailable in English translation. Similarly, although the University Press of Mississippi (UPM) and Leuven University Press have translated some French-language scholarly works on comics, most French-language comics scholarship remains untranslated. Joe Sutliff Sanders’s The Comics of Hergé, a volume in UPM’s Critical Approaches to Comics Artists series, makes an admirable effort to remedy the invisibility of Hergé’s cultural and...