The Man Behind Tintin

As seen on The New York Times: The Man Behind Boy, Dog, And Their Adventures. An excerpt:

For some reason, the comic-book character Tintin, beloved just about everywhere else, has never quite caught on in America. This may change in 2011, when Steven Spielberg brings the first of three planned Tintin adventures to the movie screen, but for now he remains underappreciated — a little too odd and earnest, perhaps, in a landscape ruled by superheroes.

Tintin, a virginal, 15-year-old journalist with a perpetually upswept quiff of reddish-blond hair and a wire-haired fox terrier named Snowy, is the hero of 23 book-length adventures — what we now call graphic novels — completed by the Belgian artist Hergé, who died in 1983 at the age of 75. Most of them are little masterpieces of the form, combining inventive and suspenseful comic storytelling with drawings that are clear, precise and as thrilling as movie stills. Andy Warhol was a big fan, and so was Roy Lichtenstein.

Regrettably, though Pierre Assouline summarizes the books in great detail, his biography of their creator, “Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin,” is unillustrated, so if you don’t already know the work, this is not the place to start. And even if you do, the story is a little depressing. Hergé here is frequently reminiscent of the Charles Schulz depicted in David Michaelis’s recent biography: an artist far happier and more interesting in his work than he ever was in life.