Hernandez and Fernandez

Hernández and Fernández are fictional characters created by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé in his comic series The Adventures of Tintin. Their names in the original French version are Dupont et Dupond.

Characterization

These are two secret police agents identical in appearance and clothing whose only difference is the shape of the mustache. In the original, Dupond is the one with the straight mustache, while Dupont's mustache bends a little outward. In the Spanish translations there does not seem to be a criterion for assigning the name Hernández or Fernández to the one with the shorter mustache. fallen or wavy, so their names change interchangeably from album to album and sometimes even within the same volume. Even so, this is not a very important detail, since they always appear together and do not seem to have very differentiated personalities.

The bond that unites them is never clear; They do not seem to be brothers, since they have different surnames, although this may be due to a bad translation, since in the original they are Dupond and Dupont Dupondt (Snowy mentions it in Objective the Moon). In some volumes it is implied that they live together; They call each other "friend" or "colleague". The other characters call them "the inseparables", "the policemen" or, simply, "the Fernández". Hergé's intention was probably to caricature a certain type of official, in every way identical to his colleagues.

They are two characters with quite distracted and not very lucid personalities who are incompetent for the missions assigned to them. Their role within the stories is generally secondary, causing certain gags, providing some information to Tintin that will make him enter a adventure or arriving with reinforcements when it is almost over. The most common confusion they fall into is wanting to go unnoticed using a costume that they believe is typical of the place and is actually ridiculous. They also tend to be widely confused about what they are investigating, although possibly their most remembered characteristic is that when one of them states something, the other reiterates it by changing words, thus saying the opposite or something meaningless. An example of this can be found in the album Aterrizaje en la Luna:

• Fernández — This individual has insulted us and demanded an explanation.
• Hernández — That's... this individual has explained to us and demanded an insult.
• Fernández — That's not it, you bastard! It's the opposite!
• Hernández — In fact, we have insulted this individual and we owe him an explanation.

Their first appearance took place in the story The Pharaoh's Cigars, the fourth album in the series, in which they intend to arrest Tintin for alleged drug trafficking. It should be noted that in this adventure they show enormous ingenuity and courage by managing to save the lives of both Tintin (sentenced to death by firing squad) and Snowy (going to be sacrificed to the Hindu deity for offending a sacred cow). Even his disguises are effective. This facet is completely replaced by the clumsy personality in the rest of the stories. However, in the color reissue of Tintin in the Congo, the second album in the series, which was published in 1947, Hergé already makes them appear in the first vignette, in the scene in which Tintin takes the train to begin his journey to the Congo. Curiously, in The Blue Lotus, a continuation of Pharaoh's Cigars, when they meet Tintin they call him "dear friend", implying that they have a friendship of years.

They have a short-lived appearance in Asterix in Belgium, announcing the arrival of Julius Caesar to that country.

Appearances

Long:

Pharaoh's cigars

The Blue Lotus

The black island

Ottokar's Scepter

The crab with the golden claws

The secret of the Unicorn

Red Rackham's Treasure

The seven crystal balls

The Temple of the Sun

Tintin in the land of black gold

Target: the Moon

Landing on the Moon

The jewels of the Castafiore

Tintin and the Rogues

Brief (only appear on a couple of pages):

Tintin in the Congo (1946)

The broken ear

The mysterious star

The Tornasol affair

Coke stock

Tintin and the Alpha-Art

Absences:

Tintin in the land of the Soviets

Tintin in America

Tintin in Tibet

Flight 714 to Sydney