Ahundred years ago, on May 22,1907, a child named Georges Remi

came into being. He was born in the Et-terbeek district of Brussels, which is aboutas quiet a start in life as any person canhave. Four years earlier and sixty milesaway, in Liège, another Georges wasborn, a countryman ofRemi's named Si-menon, of equally unremarkable origins.

g Yet each man would, in his unobtrusive~ way, conquer the world. Simenon be-~ came the author of more than four hun-§ dred books, including seventy-five novels.~ featuring Maigret, the wisest and least~ judgmental of detectives. In his novice8 years, he often wrote under the pseu-~ donym of Georges Sim, and Georges'"o Remi, likewise, preferred a shrunken;;;;name, although in his case the dirninu-

,'11r...,..·- ....- -

A CR.ITIC AT LAR.GE

A BOY'S WORLDThe Tintin century.

BY ANTHONY LANE

tian stuck. He took his initials, switchedthem around, and ended up with R.G.,which a Frenchman-or a French-speak-ing Belgian-would pronounce asHergé.He devised his own investigator: youngerthan Maigret, more geographicallythrusting, and far less fond of the bottle,but imbued by his creator with a similar,lightly borne air of moral purpose. Hisname was Tintin, and to date some twohundred million copies of his adventureshave been sold.There are twenty-three complete

Tintin books, ranging from "Tintin inthe Land of the Soviets" (1930) ta ''Tin-tin and the Picaros" (1976). They arecomic books, and Tintin is the cheery,footloose hero of them all, his braveryjust this side of recklessness and his con-

stant companion a small white muttnamed Snowy. Each book began, like aVictorian novel, in serialized form, theplot unfolding-or left judiciously hang-ing-in the pages of a newspaper or amagazine. To the majority of his un-countable fans, however, in more thanforty languages, Tintin means a book aslender object of desire, as large as a filefolder but asjewelled in its coloring as anilluminated Psalter, and so clearly un-wordy that even the least bookish of chil-dren will feel that they are holding some-thing more delicious than burdensome.To receive a copy in hardback, as op-posed to softcover, was, in my child-hood, a gift beyond compare. At board-ing school, Tintins were the rarest kindof contraband; just to add to the mystery,

THENEWYOI\IŒR.,MAY28, 2007 47

we were forbidden to read them exceptin the sickroom, and there must be oth-ers besides me who were left with theProustian suspicion that illness, howeverpainful, was not without its joys, andwith the feverish memory oflying there,propped up, hearing the noise of a nor-mal school day swell and recede below,and plunging instead into the far moreextravagant, unregulated life of the boyreporter and his dog.Tintin addicts are a mixed bunch.

Last week, Steven Spielberg and PeterJackson, the director of "The Lord of theRings," announced a three-picture dealto bring Tintin to the big screen. I onceheard Hugh Grant declare on a radioprogram that if he could take only onebook to a desert island it would be "KingOttokar's Sceptre" (1939). The samework, which takes place in the imaginarykingdom of Syldavia, was described tome by Timothy Garton Ash, a Britishhistorian steeped in the culture of theBalkans, as one of the most acute paro-dies ever written--or drawn--of the re-gion's nationalist politics. General deGaulle declared that Tintin was his onlyinternational rival-he was envious, per-haps, not just ofTintin's fame but of thedefiantly positive attitude that he came torepresent. (Both figures can be recog-nized by silhouette alone.) The Frenchhave half claimed Tintin as one of theirown, and earlier this year the PompidouCenter, in Paris, mounted a major Hergéshow. On the outside of the museum,draped down the full six-story height ofthe building, was a red-and-white rocketwith a long, explosive plume. Ifyou hadread "Destination Moon" (1953) or "Ex-plorers on the Moon" (1954), you wouldrecognize that rocket instantly, andwould know that its nose was pointingnot only at the stars above but toward anarea no less ripe for exploration. Itwasgoing to Tintinland.How to describe the place? "A fictive

universe which is as coherent, and asclosed in on itself, as the world of Bal-zac." That is the view proposed, in 'TheMetamorphoses ofTintin" (1984), byJean-Marie Apostolidès, who states thatthe hero of the early stories "annihilateshimself in the absolute," which may beanother way of saying that he keeps fall-ing through trapdoors. Hergé has neverbeen short of commentators, who areboth enticed and (although they would

4-8 THE NEW YOI\K.Ef\,MAY 28, 2007

not admit as much) exasperated by thecare and calmness of his art-by howlittle it gives away and by how much, totheir prying eyes, it must therefore beconcealing. In 'Tintin and the Secret ofLiterature," published last year, the Brit-ish artist and novelist Tom McCarthyplots an enjoyable course through thecorpus, helped on his way by Baudelaire,

serve." And you thought you were read-ing a comic book.On one level, the growing band of ex-

egetes- Tintinologists, as they arecalled-know that they are playing anoverheated game, toying to the point ofcomic surfeit with a set of kids' storiesthat are intended to be funny. In McCar-thy's words, 'The Tintin books remain

Thj~ time Y1ot-~it19 is qait!9 ,to stop ~e ~peakiHg to him

,•

both unrivalled in their complexity anddepth and so simple, even after morethan half a century, that a child can 'readthem with the same involvement as anadult." I would say that the child's in-volvement has a credulous freshness thatthe adult, for all the critical tools at his orher disposal, will strive in vain to recap-ture, but McCarthy is right to point up

With books like ''King Ottokar's Sceptre" (1939), Hergé moves into the territory ofJohn

Sartre, Derrida, Freud, and the anthro-pologist Marcel Mauss, whose namecould easily belong to an Hergé villain.For McCarthy, Tintin-in particularthe Tintin who gazes out from the coverof "The Castafiore Emerald" (1963),shushing the reader with a finger held tohis lips-is "the protector of the ulti-mate meaning held irretrievably in re-

the simplicity of Hergé's achievement.There is infinite variety in the settings ofthe Tintin books-he journeys to land-scapes as disparate as Peru, Scotland,Egypt, Tibet, and the pitted lunar sur-face--and yet what keeps the tales intact,and prevents them from splintering intotravelogues, is the unifYing presence ofour hero, plus that select squadron of

since have been flushed away by the con-tending flood of alcohol. At his earliestmeeting with Tintin, in 'The Crab withthe Golden Claws" (1941), the Captainis little more than a lush, with a drunk-ard's unthinking bravado but few othervirtues; as is so often the case, it took theauthor a while to realize the potential ofhis own creation. (P. G. Wodehouse

Buchan, Graham Greene, and the Ruritanian jàntasies ifAnthony Hope.

characters who recur from book to book,and who warm even the most exotic

i:> scenes with their foolish familiarity.~ Most important, there is Captain~ Haddock, a bearded sailor, who, as we8 learn from 'The Secret of the Unicorn".3 (1943), which recounts the legend of his~ seventeenth-century forebear, has the sea~ in his blood, although the salt may long

'.wrote ofJeeves, '1 still blush to think ofthe off-hand way I treated him at ourfirst encounter.") Haddock proved indis-pensable as a roistering cornic foil, foreverissuing the sarne polysyllabic curses ("Bil-lions of blue blistering barnacles!"), andhe is still there, pipe in mouth, on thefinal page of "Tintin and the Picaros,"thirty-five years after his début.

There are other figures who acquirethe relentlessness of the leitmotif--strik-ing when they first appear, dangerouslyclose to tedious as you realize that, likeeager party guests, they are never goingto leave, yet somehow growing funnyagain through that undaunted capac-ity for repetition. I am thinking of Pro-fessor Calculus, Hergé's benign twist onthe loony scientist, vast of brain and hardof hearing; Bianca Castafiore, the operasinger whose embonpoint fights for su-premacy with the punishing force of hercoloratura; Jolyon Wagg, the insurancesalesman and archetype of the heartybore, roaring at his own good humoras he invades the space of more retiringsouls; and Thomson and Thompson, thehapless detectives who come with theirown built-in repetition, each being al-most a mirror image of the other. A sin-gle letter keeps them apart: to Frenchreaders they are Dupont and Dupond,to Spanish Hernandez and Fernan-dez, and to Mrikaners (who call Had-dock "Kaptein Sardijn") Uys and Buys.Arabic-speaking Tintinophiles knowthem as Tik and T ak.The detectives' initial act, on the

fourth page of "Cigars of the Pharaoh"(1934), is to arrest Tintin for suspecteddrug smuggling. Once that misunder-standing is ironed out, they become botha perpetual annoyance-tripping fromone tale to the next, often worsening thescrapes in which Tintin finds himself-and a ridiculous double talisman. He isinvariably glad to see them, and so arewe, in the way that we relish the com-pany of our most mockable relatives;when they fail to show up in 'Tintin inTibet" (1960), one ofHergé's finest proj-ects, we vaguely miss their presence, re-gretting that they are unable to join thefray. They like to don disguises, espe-cially national costumes, yet camouflagehas the effect of making the pair lookmore, not less, conspicuous, and theytend to revert to their basic outfit: blackbowler hat, mustache, dark suit, andpratfall-enhancing cane. How did thislook arise? Hergé admitted, in an inter-view in 1971, that his father, Alexis, hada twin brother who copied him in everyparticular, including headgear and facialhair. "My father had a cane, my unclewent and bought the same one," he re-called, then added, ''What's odd is that Inever gave a second's thought to them

THENEWYORJŒR,MAY28, 2007 49

when creating Thomson and Thomp-son. But the coincidence is strange, aUthe same." So it is.

Hergéwas a product of the solid Cath-olic bourgeoisie, educated at Saint-

Boniface school in Brussels. HarryThompson, one of his biographers, startshis second chapter with the heading"Hergé and the Unbelievably Dull Child-hood," and, indeed, what follows is quitehypnotizing in its lack of drama, let aloneof glamour. Hergé performed well atschool, although, as he later claimed, "ifyou believe my parents, I was only reallywell-behaved when I had a pencil in myhand and a piece of paper." He added, "Icouldn't tell a story except in the form of adrawing." Notice, from the start, the em-phasis on plot. Within the Tintin books,there are compositions so perfect, so un-cluttered, that they have been inflatedfrom two or three square inches to postersize, yet it would be hard to find a singleframe that does not either set a scene ornotch the tale forward, as precisely as thecog of a gear.Such stimulation as there was in Her-

gé's youth came from his exploits as aScout. A proto-Tintin by the name ofTatar appeared in a cartoon strip thatHergé drew for a journal called Le Boy-Scout Beige, and there remains, in thedeveloped character, a trace of the try-anything, do-gooding spirit of the Scouttroop. The troop itself, however, has longsince faded; Tintin has a number offriends, most of them disturbingly weird,yet essentially he acts alone, with only hispet as a sidekick. As the books progress,he becomes a kind of hyperscout, so de-termined never to be bored that, not con-tent with seeking or initiating thrills, heappears to attract them by some inherentforce of narrative gravity. There aretwelve frames on the first page of "TheBlack Island" (1938), three across by fourdown. In the first, our hero is walkingalong a country road, with Snowy chas-ing a butterfly at his side. The pastoralinterlude lasts exactly one frame. In thenext, a sound breaks the peace ("RRRRPFIT PFIT"), and by the twelfth frameTintin is lying face down in a field with abullet in him and Snowy barking at a de-parting airplane. In short, things fall overthemselves to happen to Tintin, who iswhat aU boys both love and dread be-coming: a magnet for trouble.

50 THE NEWYOI\IŒI\,MAY 28. 2007

In 1925, Hergé, his studies completed,went ta work for Le Vingtième Siècle,orthe Twentieth Century, a daily whoseguiding principles-it was described onits masthead as a "Catholic and NationalNewspaper of Doctrine and Informa-tion"-bore the stamp of less toleranttimes. The editor was an energetic right-wing clergyman named Father NorbertWallez, who kept a framed photographofMussolini on his desk. In 1928, Hergéwas deputized to edit the children's sup-plement, Le Petit Vingtième, which ap-peared every Thursday. On January 10,1929, there was an announcement:

Le Petit Vingtième, always keen to satisfyits readers and to keep them abreast of what ishappening abroad, has just sent into SovietRussia one of its best reporters: Tintin!

And there he was: a kid in a striped tieand checked suit, boarding a train with adog. The cheeks made no effort to followthe curve of the clothes, being simply im-posed in a grid pattern-a rebuke to per-spective, and a first sign of the bracingflatness that we associate with the classicTintin image, unhampered by fuss. Clar-ity is administered like a punch. Happiestof all is the incident on page 8, which willshape our hero for all time: he leaps downfrom a tree into the front seat of a car andspeeds off, with the windy force of accel-eration blowing his forelock back into aquiff. And there it stays, a never-breakingwave, as stiff as a unicorn's horn, for therest of his days, as if to remind us of thatprimordial thrill.The Soviet Union was no random des-

tination. Father WaUez wanted Tintin,the mascot of impressionable Catholicminds, to use his first assignment to un-cover the perilous scourge of Bolshevism.Whether young Belgians had a genuinethirst for spiritual propaganda is hard totell; at any rate, so successful was therookie reporter that, for his return fromthe Red menace, on May 8, 1930, anactor was hired to grease his hair, put onRussian clothes, and step off a train inBrussels into an adoring throng. The factthat, officially, Tintin did not exist, thathe lived in two rather than three dimen-sions, and that he had been dreamed upby a man named Remi, who walked somedistance behind "Tintin" at the station,put no damper on the day.Tintin was launched, and his next port

of call was still more provocative. Foryears, the result, "Tintin in the Congo"

(1931), was unavailable, and no wonder.(Its eventual reappearance in a magazinein Zaire may be an irony too discomfort-ing for Western readers.) The book is anunmitigated parade of racial prejudice,with bug-eyed natives swaying betweenignorance and laziness. Hergé redrew itin 1946, but without changing suchscenes as a black woman on her knees,bowing to Tintin (who has just given herhusband quinine) and crying, 'Whiteman very great! ... Has good spirits ....Him cure my husband! ... White misteris big juju man!" Back comes the reply:'We're the tops, aren't we just?"--deliv-ered not by Tintin but by Snowy, whosethoughts are bubbled like speech. Notonly is the white man superior to the racesthat he rules; so is his dog.Hergé did alter the lesson that Tintin

teaches to a classroom of Congolese chil-dren. In the later version, it is mathemat-ics. In my facsimile copy of the original, asprinted in Le Petit Vingtième,our hero, in-troduced by a Catholic priest, points to ablackboard and begins, "My dear friends,I am going to talk to you today about yourcountry: Belgium!" Behind that exclama-tion mark lurks a saga of appropriationand enslavement that, even by the stan-dards of European incursions into Mrica,took cruelty to bewildering extremes. (Itis often the most placid and orderly of na-tians that give rise to the most unfetteredof distant colonies, as if requiring a junglein which to unleash their communal id.)The Belgian Congo had been born as anidea, and thus grabbed as a usable posses-sion, in the last quarter of the previouscentury; it owed its allegiance to LeopoldII, the King of Belgium, who never wentnear the place, and who grew rich on M-rican rubber. Those who refused to toil forthe regime were summarily punished; in1899, an American Presbyterian mission-ary reported finding more than eighty sev-ered human hands being smoked likehams over a fire. This was the comic par-adise in which Tintin larked.What matters about the early Tintin

books is not just the attitudes that theyenshrine-Hergé claimed that his con-cept of the Congo, which remained under ~Belgian rule until 1960, was no different ~from that of his compatriots at the time- ~but the steps that he then took to shrug off 8his xenophobia. A crucial happening, in .~this respect, was his encounter, in 1934, ~with Chang Chong-chen, a student at the ~

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In "Tintin in Tibet" (1960 j, Tintin searchesfOr hisfriend Chang. The real Chang helped Hergé make his work more true to life·

Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. Hergéhad declared his interest in China as aplausible setting for a Tintin tale, and heneeded an adviser. Many years later,Chang recalled their coalescence:

We were like two brothers. I suggested tohim that to use real events as the inspirationfor his adventures would be a better idea ...the oeuvre would have a historical value, di-vested of pure fantasy and artificial senti-ments. Thus "The Blue Lotus" was born.

The book came out in 1936, and withit emerged the principle that would bothdrive and stabilize Hergé's efforts for therest of his life. It is an ethic that the flau-bert of "Salammbô" would recognize:the farther your reach, whether into thepast or across continents, the more com-pelling your duty to get it right. You or Imay not know what a chorten is, butHergé knew: it is a Buddhist monu-ment, and he would not be able to em-bark on 'Tintin in Tibet" without amass-ing photographs of monasteries, lamas,and, yes, chortens, all of which would becopied in fanatical detail in the book.The same held true for every other re-gioR, as for every automobile and air-plane, that he presumed to depict. Itis asthough he went in terror of improvisa-tion, because he knew where-in thecase of the Belgian Congo--ignorancehad led. This is not to ascribe any gnaw-ing shame to Hergé but merely to sug-gest that he redeemed his transgressionin the only way that an artist can-namely, with pencil and pen, banishingtechnical error and hoping that other,larger injustices would disappear in turn.Hergé remained indebted to Chang,who returned to China, and with whomhe lost contact for years. In 1960, "Tin-tin in Tibet" showed Tintin searchingdesperately for a friend named Chang inthe yeti-haunted snows, and in 1981,two years before Hergé died, the realChang came to Belgium for a tearful re-union. He had shown Hergé how tobeat back prejudice: Don't flare up, cryvengeance, or launch competing theo-ries. Just tell the truth.

That iswhy my favorite Tintin storiesare those with their feet on the

ground. They may be oudandish, but Ilike to recognize the lands in question,and the activities that unfold upon them.Give me rain, a running Tintin, thebrewing of European intrigue, and the

52 THE NEW YORKER,MAY 28, 2007

IN PI\ISON

In prisonwithout being accused

or reach your familyor have a family You have

conscienceheart trouble

asthmamanic-depressive

(we lost the baby)nomeds

no oneno window

blackwaternail-scratched walls

your pure face turned awayembarrassed

youwho the earth was for.

long, menacing hoods of enemy cars: attimes like these, in "King Ottokar's Scep-tre" and "The Calculus Affair" (1956),Hergé slots into position next to JohnBuchan, Graham Greene, and the Ruri-tanian fantasies of Anthony Hope. Con-versely, whenever the fantastical looms,however splendid, my attention drops. Iam keen to follow Tintin, forexample, ashe pursues a chunk of meteorite that hasfallen into the Arctic Ocean, in "TheShooting Star" (1942), but once he stepsonto the bobbing rock, and finds it brim-ming with giant spiders and sproutingtoadstools the size of elephants, some-thing in the story drowns. 'The Land ofBlack Gold," similarly, is about a fightover oil supplies, but at the last gaspThomson and Thompson swallow somebad tablets and wind up with floor-length green hair and green bubblesspewing from their lips.The Tintin books seem so blithe

today, and their farcical mechanisms sowell lubricated, that it is hard to imagine

-jean Valentine

how they had to be mended and recastalong the way. "The Land of BlackGold," for instance, appeared as a bookin 1950, full of references to the SternGang and other cells of Jewish resis-tance against the British Mandate inPalestine. By the time it was revised, in1971, these had all but vanished. Yetthere had been an even earlier version,initiated in 1939 but dropped in May,1940, not least because its central bad-die was German. By then, Belgium wasoccupied, and Le Vingtième Siècle hadshut down. Hergé, after brief militaryservice and a spell in France, returned tohis homeland and to a job at Le Soir,where, in September, 1941, the weeklyration of Tintin expanded to a dailystrip. Under these new conditions,Hergé--like Wodehouse, who was in-terned as an enemy alien-not only sur-vived but bloomed into one of his mostflourishing periods. Once the war ended,both men were interrogated about thenature and intensity of their collabora-

\

tian (Le Soir had been taken over by theoccupiers)j both pleaded guilty of inno-cence, and neither ever dispelled theshadow of suspicion.There are two kinds of evidence

against Hergé. The first is circumstan-tial: his acquaintance with Léon De-grelle, tàr example, a Tintin fan whofounded Rex, the association of BelgianFascists. became a decorated officer inthe S.S.. and devoted himself, after thewar. to the cause of Holocaust denial. ItWJ.S Degrelle who, years before, as a for-e:;n .::orrespondent for Le Vingtième5::""";"".had sent a package of American..:omicsto Brussels from Mexico, thus:nrroducing Hergé to the delights of theF(atzenjammer Kids and Krazy Kat..\ lore damning is Bohlwinkel, the rapa-.::iousfinancier whom Hergé planted in-The Shooting Star," and who originallybore the name of Blumensteinj in a let-ter of1954, the author, responding to acharge of anti-Semitism, placed himalongside "English colonists thrashingthe Chinese, German merchants ofsudden death, treacherous Japanese, ter-rible Mrican sorcerers, Chicago gang-sters," adding that he had nothing asa whole against ''Yellows, Blacks, orWhites." Hergé himself was no villain;indeed, he became a joy-bringer ofglobal renown. But his ability to dighimself into a hole of misconceptions,and to avert his gaze from evil, verges attimes on the chronic.Or are we asking too much? Might

children crave such ready aversion morethan ever? Nobody could advocate thereturn of the blunt stereotypes in whichHergé dealt, but the dangers in whichhis hero gets trapped--excitingly mor-tal yet shorn of actual suffering-requireno adjustment. Tintin seems ideallyformed to glance off real history, catch-ing and bruising himself on its corners;it's no surprise that Spielberg, the manwho brought us Indiana Jones, shouldhave declared an interest. Like Indy,Tintin has more than enough literalplunges to keep him busy; he seems tospend an inordinate amount of time onrockfaces and heaving decks, in tunnelsor the cockpits of plummeting planes.You could try to count the number oftimes when walls, bookshelves, andother surfacesgiveway and yield up hid-den passages, but you would go crazy,just as Tintin almost tears his quiff out

trying to decipher the clues with whichfate both bestrews and blocks his path.(Hergé, asked what he would have be-come if not an artist, replied, "Spéléo-logue," or spelunker.) After a mere eightpages of "The Crab with the GoldenClaws," we find Tintin adding up theoddities that have arisen so far: "A tin +a drowned man + five counterfeit coins+ Karaboudjan + a Japanese + a letter +a kidnapping = a real Chinese puzzle."There was also the magnifYing glassthat he mistook for a bone.Such fetishistic love of objects would

have pleased Hitchcock, as would themoment on the penultimate page of"The Secret of the Unicorn" when threescraps of paper, each of which has beentucked inside the mast of a model ship,are layered together and held up againstthe light, the palimpsest revealing thelocation of the next concealment-a pi-rate's hoard, to be unearthed in the se-quel, "Red Rackham' sTreasure" (1944).Tintinologists cannot get enough ofthese buried treasures, and I applaudTom McCarthy for the logical rigorwith which he deduces that the jewelembedded in the title of'The CastafioreEmerald" is, in fact, Bianca Castafiore'sclitoris. Given that she is not only a diva,whose party piece is the "Jewel Song,"from Gounod's "Faust," but a certifiableball-breaker (Haddock quails at thesight of her), anything is possible.Yet McCarthy's argument falters for

one reason: there are no genitalia inHergé's work, because there is no sex.Tintin passes increasing portions of hislife with an unmarried seaman, yet itseldom occurs to us to question theirrapport. Tintin never has a girlfriend,nor does he express the need for one,and that absence is part of his greatermystery. He has no parents or siblings.He has no children, of course, and weare unsure whether he counts as a childhimself; like Peter Pan, the boy reporternever ages, being a person both of histime and buoyantly apart from it. Heoften dresses in plus fours, like a golferof the nineteen-twenties, yet when hefinallyupgrades to flared brown jeans, in

\

~~\

'Tintin and the Picaros," we feel embar-rassed and betrayed on his behalf. Ifhe reminds me of anyone, it is CharlieBrown. Both characters are more pro-foundly understood by their dogs thanby any human. Both, indeed, are barelycharacters at all, being a bundle of un-changing qualities-courage and curi-osity in one, hope and defeatedness inthe other-allied to the simplest ofgraphic gestures. An oval, two dots, aline that sometimes widens to an 0:such is Tintin's head, and at momentsof stress or shock it is surrounded by abizarre halo of flying drops, thoughwhether these are symbolic or sweaty Ican never decide.He came here once, for "Tintin in

America" (1932), but though the visitended with a ticker-tape parade, it wasnot a success, for Tintin failed to roothimself in the local imagination. He hassold in forty languages, and his quest-ing has become a lingua franca, yet theUnited States has felt no widespreadcraving for his exploits. Spielberg willhave his work cut out for him: Tintinmay be too constrained for Americantastes, being possessed of no superpow-ers, and with his earthly powers undertight restriction. He is Clark Kent with-out the phone booth, although Clark atleast had a paying job, whereas Tintin,nominally a reporter, never receives asalary or files a story. If anyone here haswarmed to the primary boldness of Her-gé's colors, and to the confidence of hiscompositions, it is not child readers butgrownup artistssuch asWarhol and Lich-tenstein, both of whom admired him.(Warhol did Hergé's portrait on re-quest.) In such spirited company, he canbe viewed as a prophet of Pop, and thatis how I revere him, too, decades after Ilay in the sickroom and devoured hiscollected works. Hergé has long ceasedto make me laugh, but he puts me into ablissful trance, in which the same oldjokes and people, with minor variations,stream brightly across the page. In sucha light, Thomson and Thompson are nolonger bumbling detectives but cleverco-conspirators of the bowler-hattedgentlemen who--as painted byMagritte,Hergé's fellow- Belgian-ga ther to-gether, stand in contemplation, or dropin their hundreds from the sky. Out ofthe smallest countries come the strang-est things .•

THE NEWYORKER,MAY 28, 2007 53