Herge
Georges Prosper Remi (Etterbeek, May 22, 1907 - Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, March 3, 1983) was a Belgian cartoonist, better known by the artistic pseudonym Hergé (/ɛʁʒe/), as this is the French pronunciation of their initials in reverse order (R.G. —Remi + Georges—).
Hergé was the creator of The Adventures of Tintin in 1929, which to this day continue to exert an important influence on the world of comics, particularly in Europe. In addition to this series, Hergé created others with different characters, including The adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko and Quique and Flupi.
Childhood and beginnings
Georges Prosper Remi was born in 1907, the son of Alexis Remi (an employee at a children's clothing house) and Elizabeth Dufour, a homemaker.[citation needed] Georges had only one younger brother, Paul, with whom he never had much contact.[citation needed]
Between 1914 and 1918 he completed his primary studies at the Ixelles municipal school, at the time of the First World War.[citation needed] Showing his incipient ability for drawing, his first illustrations in the margins of his notebooks are inspired by war.[citation required]
As a result of pressure from his father's employer, Georges is withdrawn from the secular public school to start his secondary studies at a religious school, Saint Boniface,[citation required] which will have a decisive influence on his subsequent ideological positioning.[citation required] Despite being an outstanding student Usually top of his class, he never took drawing lessons (with the exception of a few classes at the École Saint Luc).[citation needed]
Along with the change of school, he left the Boy Scouts of Belgium (non-religious) to join the Federation of Catholic Boy Scouts,[citation needed ] a fact that would later be remembered by Hergé with feelings of guilt and almost betrayal.[citation needed] The plots of his comics were strongly influenced by ethics of the scout movement, as well as the trips he made in this early stage of his life, one of them to Spain.[citation required] His time as a scout also goes back his interests in redskins and his fascination with America.[citation needed]
As a teenager, Hergé channeled his passion for drawing into comic strips that would be published in Le Boy-Scout,[citation needed] publication later turned into Le Boy-Scout Belge. It was in 1922 when he signed one of these comics for the first time, and in 1924 when the pseudonym that would accompany him for the rest of his life appeared for the first time: Hergé.[quote required] This name is simply his initials: erre ge (Remi, Georges) pronounced in French.
Although his contributions to this publication were quite modest, limited to illustrating a few articles and occasionally the cover, in July 1926 Hergé created his first "official" series: Totor, C.P. of the bumblebees. The protagonist would continue to appear in the monthly magazine until the year 1930.[citation required]
Once he finished his secondary studies, in 1925, Georges joined Le XXème Siècle, an ultra-conservative newspaper with a clerical and nationalist orientation.[citation needed] However, and in parallel to his employment in the subscription service of said newspaper, he continued illustrating the adventures of Totor.[citation required]
In 1926, Hergé decided to do his military service, being assigned to the First Regiment of foot hunters.[citation needed] Eventually, he went from being a private to Corporal, and then Sgt. Inevitably, he devoted most of his free time to drawing. [citation needed ]
Back to Le XX ème Siècle
After completing his military service, Hergé returned to the newspaper in October 1927, now as an apprentice photographer and special page illustrator. Abbe Norbert Wallez, director of the publication, had a great influence on Remi, encouraging him to read and educate himself, and entrusting him with more far-reaching responsibilities.
When Wallez decided to broaden his newspaper's target audience by including a youth supplement, he trusted the man who would later become engaged to his secretary, Germaine Kickens. On November 1, 1928, the first issue of Le Petit Vingtième appeared, under the direction of Hergé.
Although at first the cartoonist was satisfied with the publication of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette et Cochonnet, some time later he returned to Totor. He changed a few letters to his name, assigned him the job of reporter and added the company of a fox terrier named Snowy. On January 10, 1929, Tintin first appeared on the pages of Le Petit Vingtième.
The young reporter's first adventure takes him to the Soviet Union, where he clashes with the Bolsheviks. At the end of its weekly publication, in May 1930, a crowd of readers gathered in Brussels next to the train station, where the newspaper simulated the arrival of Tintin from the USSR (in the figure of a young man dressed as Tintin with a fox -terrier). The enormous and unexpected success of the publication encouraged Hergé to prolong his adventures.
It is in 1930 when Georges Remi created another of his popular characters, called Quique and Flupi (Quick et Flupke in the original language), who would remain in the pages of the supplement until the late 1930s.
While Hergé began to publish Tintin's second adventure, Tintin in the Congo, the adventures of the protagonist in Russia began to appear in a French weekly, the Catholic Coeurs Vaillants, thus beginning the international career of the author.
In 1932, the year in which Tintin in America was published, Hergé had his first contacts with the Casterman publishing house, which would soon be in charge of publishing all his albums. In that same year he married Germaine Kieckiens, to whom he had become engaged the previous year. The marriage had no children.
Between the publication of The Pharaoh's Cigars and that of The Blue Lotus, Remi would have one of the most transcendental meetings of his life: after having stated his intention to Before one of Tintin's adventures took place in China, a chaplain suggested that he meet Zhang Chongren, a Chinese student. This was the one who familiarized him with oriental culture, and supervised the Chinese texts that appeared in the comic. Hergé would maintain a friendship with him for the rest of his life, and would create the character of Tchang Tchong-Yen, a great friend of Tintin, and who is a transcript of Zhang Chongren (whose name, at the time, was written in French as Tchang Tchong-jen, which is how he appears in the original comics).
Starting in 1936, a new series was added in Le Petit Vingtième: The adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko. Unlike the other two series in which the cartoonist worked until then, the new story arose at the request of the parents who directed Coeurs Vaillants. Fearing that a reporter without parents would be an unsuitable model for Vingtième readers, they suggested the creation of new heroes more set in a family environment. Hergé will never feel comfortable in this series, in which he did not feel free, and will abandon it after four comics (the fifth will basically be the work of his collaborators).
To the intense activity as a cartoonist of Hergé, was added a no less important work as an illustrator. His drawings appeared on several book and magazine covers, as well as in several advertising works that were carried out under the brand name Atelier Hergé (Hergé Workshop).
During the Nazi occupation of Belgium, Hergé continued to publish despite the fact that many press professionals had decided to leave their trade in view of the fact that the country's media had been placed at the service of the German occupier (popularly called media "stolen"). Once Le XXème Siécle was closed in 1939 (with which he had to leave Tintin in the Land of Black Gold unfinished), Hergé signed up for an openly pro-Nazi outlet, Le Soir, directed by Raymond de Becker, and it was during this time that he drew the most and made his character more known. The first of the six comic strips created during the war will be The Crab with the Golden Claws.
During the course of World War II, two factors arose that would lead to a revolution in the style of Hergé. First, the scarcity of paper forced Tintin to be published as a daily strip of three or four cartoons, instead of the two weekly pages that were the usual practice in Le Petit Vingtième. First, in order to create tension at the end of each strip rather than the end of each page, Hergé had to introduce more frequent gags and a faster pace into the action. Secondly, Hergé had to divert attention from adventures on current affairs to avoid controversy, turning to stories with an escapist flavor: an expedition to a meteorite (The Mysterious Star), the search for a treasure (The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure) and how to undo an ancient Inca curse (The Seven Crystal Balls and The Temple of the Sun).
In these stories, Hergé placed more emphasis on character than plot, and indeed Tintin's most memorable companions, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus (Professeur Tryphon Tournesol in French), were added around this time. Haddock made his debut in The Crab with the Golden Claws, while Calculus made it in The Treasure of Red Rackham. The impact of these changes was not reflected in readership; in later reissues, these stories are among the most popular.
In 1943, Hergé met Edgar Pierre Jacobs, another comic book artist, whom he hired to help him review the early Tintin albums. Jacobs' most notable contribution would be the redesign of the costumes and backgrounds in the revised edition of Ottokar's Scepter. In addition, he began collaborating with Hergé on a new adventure, The Seven Crystal Balls (see above).
Post-war problems
The occupation of Brussels ended on September 3, 1944. Tintin's adventures were interrupted towards the end of The Seven Crystal Balls when the Allied authorities closed Le Soir. During the chaotic post-occupation period, Hergé was arrested four times by different groups (State Security, judicial police, the Belgian National Movement and the Independence Front) accused of sympathizing with Nazism and Rexism. The origin of these accusations was mainly found in Hergé's continued professional activity under the Nazi occupation, which earned him before many the qualification of "collaborationist", and the fact that with his cartoons he strengthened in a way The distribution and sale of Le Soir controlled directly by the Nazis was decisive.
Although there is no clear political commitment in his work and some of the stories published before the war were critical of fascism's territorial expansionism (mainly Ottokar's Scepter depicted Tintin working on the defeat of a veiled allegory of the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany) are not completely free of suspicion either.
Suspicions that appear from the first album (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets), commissioned by Norbert Wallez, a recognized fascist, with the aim of instructing young Belgians against communism and the Soviet Union from the youth supplement of the newspaper Belgian Catholic Le Vingtième Siècle. Suspicions also go through the undisguised racist character of Tintin in the Congo and are reflected especially in The Mysterious Star where the main villain of the album is a New York Jew named Blumenstein, and in one of whose vignettes two stereotyped Jews appear, one of the who are happy about the news of the end of the world because "so I wouldnt have to pay my suppliers". In later editions of the work this cartoon was deleted, and another in which Tintin's rival expedition flew the American flag was retouched. Likewise, Hergé changed the name of Blumenstein to Bohlwinkel, and located him, instead of in New York, in an imaginary country, São Rico. However, he later discovered, to his surprise, that Bohlwinkel was also a Jewish surname.
Later, he would have time to regret some of his decisions, thus in March 1973 he declared in the course of an interview with the Haagse Post: «I admit that I also believed that the future of the West could depend on the New Order. For many, democracy had been disappointing and the New Order brought new hope. In view of everything that happened, it was naturally a great mistake to have been able to believe in it. That same year he would add in an interview with the Flemish magazine Elsevier: «My naivety at that time bordered on foolishness, we could even say stupidity».
Because of all this, and like other former employees of the Nazi-controlled press, Hergé found himself cut off from work in the press, spending the next two years working with Jacobs, as well as a new assistant, Alice Devos, adapting to color several of the first adventures of Tintin.
Tintin's exile ended on September 6, 1946. Publisher and resistance fighter Raymond Leblanc provided the necessary financial support and anti-Nazi credentials to launch the Tintin magazine with Hergé. This weekly publication featured two pages of the adventures of Tintin, beginning with the remainder of The Seven Crystal Balls, as well as other strips and miscellaneous articles. It was a tremendous success, with a circulation of more than 100,000 copies per week. It is probable that Hergé would have suffered some kind of legal sentence had it not been for the creation of this supplement. In this sense, it has often been pointed out that it was Tintin who saved Hergé.
Tintin has always been publicized simply as "by Hergé", with no mention of Edgar Pierre Jacobs and other aides of Hergé. With Jacobs's contribution to the production of the strips increasing, he began to demand credit recognition (in fact, they shared the pen name Olav in a series of small plates produced by both). Hergé objected, thus ending his fruitful collaboration. Jacobs then began producing his own comics, including the acclaimed Blake and Mortimer .
Personal crisis
The increase in effort that the Tintin magazine brought to Hergé, as well as the burden of conscience and resentment accumulated after the post-war "purification" phase, began to take their toll on him. In 1949, while working on a new version of Tintin in the Land of Black Gold (the first version was left unfinished, as has already been said, due to the start of the Second World War), Hergé suffered a nervous breakdown that forces him to take an abrupt four-month break. At the beginning of 1950 he suffered a new crisis working on Objective: the Moon . During both absences, the magazine Tintín is forced to apologize to its readers, publishing, as a reward, plates of The exploits of Quique and Flupi.
To lighten Hergé's workload, the Hergé Studios were created on April 6, 1950. These had various assistants who helped Hergé in the production of the adventures of Tintin, highlighting among them Bob De Moor, who would collaborate with Hergé in the rest of the adventures of Tintin, with details and backgrounds such as the spectacular lunar landscapes of Landing on the Moon. With the help of the studio, Hergé produced The Calculus Affair (considered by some to be his best work and one of the most brilliant comics ever) in 1954, followed by Coke Stock in 1956.
At the end of this period, his personal life was again in crisis. His marriage to Germaine was breaking up after twenty-five years, as he had fallen in love with Fanny Vlaminck, a young artist who had just joined the Hergé Studios. Subsequently, he begins to have recurring nightmares that lead him to consult a Swiss psychoanalyst, who advises him to stop working on Tintin. Instead, he embarks on the creation of Tintin in Tibet , possibly the most personal of the Tintin stories.
Published in Tintin magazine from September 1958 to November 1959, Tintin in Tibet takes Tintin to the Himalayas in search of Tchang Tchong-Yen, the young Chinese with whom he befriended in El Loto Azul. The adventure allowed Hergé to face his nightmares, filling the album with austere alpine landscapes, giving him a powerfully spacious environment dominated by the purity of white, a color that flooded his nightmares. The usually rich cast of characters was pared down to a bare minimum—Tintin, Captain Haddock, and the Sherpa Tharkey—as the story focused on the desperate search for Tchang. Hergé came to recognize this personal and emotional adventure as his favorite. The end of the story also seemed to signal the end of his problems: the nightmares stopped tormenting him, he divorced Germaine in 1975 (they had separated in 1960), and finally married Fanny Vlaminck in 1977.
Last years
The last three complete Tintin adventures were produced at a much slower rate: The Jewels of the Castafiore in 1961, Flight 714 to Sydney in 1966 and Tintin and the Rogues in 1975. However, around this time Tintin began to appear in other media. Since the inception of the Tintin magazine, Raymond Leblanc had used Tintin for merchandising and advertising. In 1961 the first Tintin film was released: The Mystery of the Golden Fleece, with the Belgian Jean-Pierre Talbot as Tintin. Several animated films were also made, the first being The Temple of the Sun in 1969.
The financial success of Tintin allowed Hergé to spend more time traveling. He toured Europe extensively, and in 1971 he visited the United States for the first time, meeting Native Americans whose culture had been a source of fascination for him. In 1973 he visited Taiwan, accepting an invitation issued three decades earlier by the Kuomintang government, in gratitude for The Blue Lotus .
In a remarkable example of how truth is stranger than fiction, Hergé manages to re-establish contact with his old friend Zhang Chongren, years after Tintin rescued the fictional Tchang Tchong-Yen in the last pages of Tintin in the Tibet. Tchang, of communist convictions, had been demoted to street sweeper during the Cultural Revolution, before becoming director of the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in the 1970s. He returned to Europe to join Hergé in 1981, moving to Paris in 1985., where he remained until his death in 1998.
Hergé died on March 3, 1983, at the age of 75, at the Saint Luc University Clinic, due to complications from the anemia he had suffered for several years, complicating it after having contracted HIV in one of his blood transfusions from routine, leaving unfinished the twenty-fourth adventure of Tintin, Tintin and the Art-Alpha. At her express wish not to leave Tintin in the hands of another artist, it was published posthumously as a set of sketches and notes in 1986. In 1987, Fanny closed the Hergé studios, replacing them with the Hergé Foundation. In 1988, the Tintin magazine ceased to be published.
An animated version of Hergé makes several cameos in the TV series The Adventures of Tintin, produced by Ellipse-Nelvana.
Since the year 2000, Tintin has been published in various Asian countries and his adventures have gradually appeared in different versions, also in black and white and on pages of poor printing quality, in countries such as China and its remote regions or Mongolia.. The police arrested, in connection with this phenomenon of piracy , counterfeiters who had distributed thousands of pirated copies of his albums without permission.
Awards
In 1973, Hergé received the Saint-Michel Prize, and in 1977 he was awarded the Vermilion Medal of the city of Angoulême, France. In 1978, Hergé was made an Officer of the Order of the (Belgian) Crown, in Brussels.
Assessment and influence
Tintin has become a character that is already part of universal culture. His attitude to fight against injustice and his courage to confront the tyrant and face a challenge wherever he is presented, together with his everlasting youth, are the hallmarks of a character accepted today with a certain aura of rebellion. and justice.
Hergé's work, in addition to being very popular, has been the subject of exhibitions and is a reference for later authors, especially those of the clear line. In this sense, the Spanish magazine Cairo dedicated a monograph to him in 1983, on the occasion of his death.
In April 2008, Hergé's watercolor original for the cover of Tintin in America (Tintin en Amérique, 1932) fetched 177,000 euros at auction, a record at the time.
Work
- The Adventures of Tintin (24 albums)
- Jo, Zette and Jocko adventures (5 albums)
- Quique and Flupi (12 albums)