Tintin as Spectacle: The Backstory of a Popular Franchise

and Late Capital

Paul Mountfort

Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, Volume 1, Number 1, 2016, pp.

37-56 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/675390

[ Access provided at 12 Apr 2023 17:38 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

 Tintin as Spectacle: The Backstory of a Popular
Franchise and Late Capital
Paul Mountfort  |  Auckland University of Technology

Abstract  |  This article frames the Tintin franchise in terms of its evolving transme-
dia modes of cultural production and consumption as a story of commodification that
is metonymic for key developments of the twentieth century, particularly in relation
to capital and its inextricability from mass media. Drawing on elaborations of Marx’s
notion of commodity fetishism, it argues developments in the early to middle decades
of the twentieth century can be viewed revealingly through John Crary’s speculative
explanation as to why Guy Debord chose 1927 as the precise birthdate of his Society of
the Spectacle. Fredric Jameson’s analysis of late capitalism’s developmental phases
through the Fifties to the Eighties supplies supplementary frames for the mid- to late
twentieth century. I argue that Tintin’s progressive conscription into late capitalist
spectacle reflects and reinforces these broader processes of commodification within
intermeshing global culture flows, and in doing so reinscribes the cultural dominants
of the twentieth century itself.

Keywords | Tintin, Hergé, transmedia, franchise, spectacle, Situationist,

­commodity fetish

Tintin is numbered among the great global transmedia franchises of the

early twenty-first century. This article is concerned with its backstory,
which appears in retrospect as one of commodification that is metonymic
for key developments of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to
capital and its increasing inextricability from mass media. I aim to make
this explicit by framing Tintin in terms of elaborations of Marx’s notion of
commodity fetishism,1 and, specifically, Jonathon Crary’s reading2 of Guy
Debord’s enigmatic claim that the Society of the Spectacle3 began precisely
in 1927. Also of interest is Fredric Jameson’s widely essayed characterization

Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2016

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 37 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 38 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

of the phases of late capitalist postmodernity between 1950 and the Eight-
ies.4 There is no intention to totalize these descriptions in bringing them
into juxtaposition with key milestones in the development of Tintin: Debord
rejected simplistic classifications of historical periods5 and Jameson is mer-
curial in his ambivalence toward periodization.6 What this article aims to do
is to explore a series of simultaneities between these materialist critiques
and a major cultural formation, thus offering new ways of reading Tintin:
namely as a franchise enmeshed in broader global culture flows that both
reflect and reinforce the spectacular dominance of late capitalism.

The Birth of Spectacle and Late Capital

There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes,
the fantastic form of a relation between things. . . . This I call the Fetishism . . . of
commodities. —Karl Marx7

For Karl Marx, the “fetishism of commodities” occurred when their use
value was transcended by their symbolic value within a system of rela-
tions between products. In doing so, the concrete commodity (Marx uses
the example of a wooden table) becomes “a very queer thing, abounding
in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,”8 which comes to over-
throw social life. The idea was a powerful one that would be elaborated by
post-Marxian thinkers, including those of the Situationist International, a
mid-twentieth century social revolutionary organization that helped fuel the
Paris insurrections of May 1968. Two key texts were Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité
de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations/The Revolution of Everyday
Life9 and Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle/Society of the Spectacle, both
published in 1967. For Debord commodity fetishism comes to encompass
the “entire life of societies,” transforming them into an “accumulation of
spectacles” that constitute “a pseudo-world apart.”10 He explicitly defined it
as “the domination of the society by ‘intangible as well as tangible things’
. . . where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images . . . which
at the same time are recognised as the tangible par excellence.”11 Debord
defines “spectacle” as the identification with products that effectively cel-
ebrate themselves and the leisure-time consumption culture within which
they are staged. The replacement of social life with representation leads
to degradation, relations between people having been overtaken by that
of commodities within the “advanced capitalist” system. Debord dated the

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 38 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  39

beginning of the spectacle to the late Twenties; some twenty years later,12
he claimed that the precise year was 1927. John Crary, in an article titled
“Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” notes that unfortunately Debord
provides no rationale for this “surprisingly precise date.”13
For Crary, however, 1927 becomes a symbolic marker of “the moment
when sign value takes precedence over use value,” as he paraphrases
Baudrillard.14 He takes up the baton in offering some “fragmentary spec-
ulations” as to why 1927, in particular, should serve as its starting point,
namely:

1. The technological perfection of television.

2. The arrival of synchronized sound film (“talkies”).
3. The rise of fascism, Stalinism, and associated forms of sound/­
image propaganda.15

Although speculative, Crary’s latter two factors in particular16 provide sur-

prisingly precise parallels with developments in the formative phase of the
Tintin franchise in the late Twenties, evolution through the Thirties and For-
ties, and beyond.
Jameson’s analysis of late capitalism’s post-war phases can supply
supplementary frames for charting the development of the franchise in
the mid- to late twentieth century. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism was, of course, so widely deployed from its publication in
1991 in the study of popular culture as to have become almost instinctual
for many media and cultural studies scholars, and was soon attacked from
both Old Left and postmodernist positions.17 However, here I am concerned
particularly with two of its more self-evident formulations: Jameson’s iden-
tification of new mid-century forms of media interrelationship and new
forms of business organization in concert with the internationalization of
business.18 Postmodernism’s use of the Frankfurt School–derived term “late
capitalism” popularized by Ernest Mandel can be, as Jameson suggests,
just as well inscribed by a number of others, including “the spectacle or
image society”19—a reference to Debord. Part of the condition of postmo-
dernity, in Jameson’s analysis, lies in the fact that popular cultural products
function not merely as physical commodities but have become enmeshed
in “the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.”20 Thus Marx’s
notion of commodity fetishism, by which capitalism is “naturalized” as an

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 39 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 40 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

inevitable given, metastasizes into an all-encompassing condition. It is no

longer simply an aspect of capitalism, but a metonym for capitalism itself.
Jameson goes on to say that this state of affairs “stands in relation to Marx’s
‘fetishism’ of commodities as these most advanced monotheisms [stand
in relation] to primitive animisms or the most rudimentary idol worship.”21
So complete has the consumer culture become that it has replaced nature
and reified endless consumption: commodification itself is fetishized. All
cultural production becomes complicit in the process.
More controversially, Jameson provides a kind of micro-periodization
of late capitalism’s development from the mid- to late twentieth century:
the preparatory phase of ramped-up new product and technology produc-
tion in the Fifties; the “psychic break” with wartime shortages and cultural,
as opposed to merely economic, turn to late-capitalist sensibilities of the
Sixties;22 the crystallization of the economic system in a “cultural structure
of feeling” in the oil-shocked Seventies;23 and ultimately the “conquest of
the discursive hegemony” by Thatcherism’s and Reaganism’s “economic
dogmas”24 in the Eighties. Of course, as Besserman notes for many in “con-
temporary literary and cultural studies periodization . . . finds itself in very
bad odor indeed”25 and that while describing it as “potentially rewarding,”
Jameson himself warned of the “facile totalization” of a “unified inner
truth”26 pertaining to both synchronic and diachronic schematizations of
history. A perhaps more intractable problem lies in the appropriation of Sit-
uationist ideas for the “administration” of academic criticism, which is to
risk reducing it in the memorable words of McKenzie Wark to “a three-way
necrophilia with the museum and with scholarship.”27
However, it is possible to correlate broad developments across decades
without valorizing “massive kinship and homogeneity and identity”; as
Jameson suggests, it may even be necessary in order to recover their “re-
sidual and emergent” antitheses.28 Similarly, while as a form of interpretive
play the “the moulding of [academics’] bodies to desks and texts”29 in the
production of journalized critiques may fall short of Debord’s ludic pranks
or Situationist détournement in general, it does not have to represent its
nemesis, the dreaded récupération.30 A spectacular analysis is particu-
larly suited to appraising the production and consumption of comics and
the other media to which Tintin was rapidly adapted. As Debord wrote, “The
spectacle . . . naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense . . . ; the
most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 40 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  41

abstraction of present day society.”31 Their predominantly visual language

and storyboard-like schematization make comics particularly amenable
to screen adaptation and transmediation across visual, textual, and aural
media, as many a Marvel or DC franchise will attest. Whether read, viewed,
or otherwise apprehended, Jean Marie Apostolidès’s warning, echoing Al-
thusser, may serve as much as to the Tintin franchise as to comics them-
selves: “There is no innocent reader any longer”32—an admonition surely
doubled in its applicability to cultural critics.33

Talkies and Propaganda

Crary’s identification of sound film (“talkies”) and the requisitioning of

sound/image for propagandistic purposes at the genesis of Debord’s So-
ciety of the Spectacle in 1927 provide pivotal frames through which to view
Tintin from its inception. Hergé’s famously “cinematic” style of represen-
tation took major cues from movies, first silent, then “talkies.” Indeed,
Tintin’s prototype, Totor, is introduced in his first adventure (July 1926) as
follows: “United Rovers presents a great comedy film: The Extraordinary
Adventures of Totor, Patrol Leader of the May Bugs in Le Boy Scout Belge.”34
Cinema’s influence was equally strong two and a half years later with Tin-
tin’s debut proper on January 4, 1929, in Les Aventures de Tintin reporter
du “Petit Vingtième” au pays des Soviets/The Adventures of Tintin, Reporter
for “Le Petit Vingtième” in the Land of the Soviets: “Acutely aware of the key
aspects to be considered in the production of a dynamic film narrative—
movement, action, and scene splicing—[Hergé] endlessly varies angles and
shots with the express intention of making his stories as authentic as pos-
sible.”35 Hergé went so far as to state in 1942 that: “I consider my stories
as films. Thus, no narration, no descriptions: I give all importance to the
picture. But my films are 100 per cent talkies, with sound effects, the dia-
logue coming directly from the mouths of the characters.”36 With regard the
advent of talkies, Crary writes: “The full coincidence of sound with image,
of voice with figure, not only was a crucial new way of organizing space,
time, and narrative, but it instituted a more commanding authority over
the observer, enforcing a new kind of authority.”37 Although realism was to
be a characteristic element of the bandes dessinées (drawn strips) comics
style that Hergé helped to define with his ligne claire (clear line) style, his
early cinematic influences ran the gamut from Fritz Lang’s expressionism

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 41 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 42 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

to the slapstick of Buster Keaton,38 and “[f]ilm techniques influenced . . .

action, pacing, and sequencing and were always in the service of the gag.”39
In a neat conceptual loop, Crary cites as examples Lang’s Dr. Mabuse films,
which Hergé knew and references intertextually, including the magician
performances in Les Sept Boules de cristal/The Seven Crystal Balls (1943–48)
and, much later, Tintin et l’alph-art/Tintin and Alph Art (1978–83).40 The
stylistic foundations of Tintin, therefore, combined a cinematic visual lan-
guage with the transplanted US convention of using speech balloons, mak-
ing Hergé’s “films” into talkies.
Crary’s second factor elides more or less seamlessly into his third: “[t]
he rise of . . . sound/image propaganda.” Parallels with the birth of fascism
and totalitarianism in the mid-Twenties, and their propagandistic req-
uisitioning of the new aural-visual media, are compelling. Crary cites, as
prime examples, Stalin and Goebbels’s “synergetic use of every available
medium, especially the development of sound/image propaganda, and . . .
devaluation of the written word.”41 Hergé’s early familiarity with comics was
supplied to him from 1928 by Léon Degrelle, a foreign correspondent for the
staunchly Catholic and conservative magazine, Le Petit Vingtième, where
Hergé worked. Degrelle went on to found the Rexists, Belgian Fascists, be-
coming their leader in 1935. Disconcertingly, it was he who “introduc[ed]
Hergé to the latest transatlantic developments in the strip cartoon”42 and
may indeed have inspired his first use of the speech balloon in 1928, with
Spanish versions of syndicated US comics in newspapers Degrelle sent back
from Mexico including George McManus’s Bringing up Father, Krazy Kat by
George Herriman, and Rudolf Dirk’s The Katzenjammer Kids.43 Right on cue,
the first two Tintin albums are pure right-wing propaganda. Soviets was
doctrinaire anti-Bolshevism, Tintin au Congo/Tintin in the Congo (1930–31)
a sustained valorization of the appalling Belgian colonial enterprise.44
Hergé’s dalliance with “comic art propaganda”45 would continue to inflect
Tintin albums until at least the pro-Axis—and arguably anti-Semitic—tone
of that “untimely script,”46 L’Étoile mystérieuse/The Shooting Star (1941–42).

Early Commodification and Transmediation

It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the Adventures were from
the outset part of a commercial enterprise designed to sell copy as well
as ideology, and the rapidity with which Tintin morphed into a popular

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 42 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  43

culture phenomenon was largely dependent on its spread across media.

Commencing January 10, 1929, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets appeared
weekly in the children’s supplement to Le Vingtième Siècle/The Twentieth
Century. It proved an instant success, and was published as a novel-length
album of 137 leaves by Le Vingtième Siècle in 1930. The bundling of a mag-
azine strip into a standalone album is itself a significant transition across
media, propelling Tintin into a sphere quasi-independent from its parent
magazine where it could be read in more novelistic terms than a “mere”
strip cartoon. This in turn affected the way Hergé plotted the Adventures,
with a move away from the episodic scrapes and escapes of the early works
toward more fully plotted and realized narratives. It was also a commod-
ification: by 1937, six adventures had been published as albums: the first
three (Soviets, Congo, and Tintin en Amérique/Tintin in America) by Le Petit
Vingtième, the latter three (Les Cigares du pharaon/Cigars of the Pharaoh,
Le Lotus bleu/The Blue Lotus, and L’Oreille cassée/The Broken Ear) by Caster-
man, based in Tournai, all in “an attractive cloth-bound hardback format.”47
The Shooting Star marked Tintin’s debut in the new, full-color,
sixty-two-paged format that was to be adopted for all future albums,48
the reduction in size from 126+ page originals driven in part by wartime
paper shortages.49 From 1943 to 1955, Hergé would rework his backlist of
black-and-white albums into color, excepting Soviets.50 As is the case for
the related visual media of photography, film, and television, color comics
constitute a different medium to black and white. Coloration not only intro-
duces new aesthetic considerations but creates a more premium product,
both in terms of print-production costs and desirability, marking a further
stage in the transmediation of the Adventures from a serialized strip into a
series of full-length comic books. One is reminded of Debord’s “diffusion
of fads” with “[w]aves of enthusiasm for a given product .  .  . propagated
at lightning speed.”51 Indeed, Hergé’s talkies were concomitantly breaking
out, linguistically and geographically, first into neighboring Francophone
countries and then further afield in an early European forerunner of today’s
globalized culture flows. The strip was published from October 26, 1930, in
the French weekly, Cœurs Vaillants; from September 1932 in the Swiss mag-
azine, L’Écho Illustré; and from 1934 in the Portuguese Catholic magazine,
O Papagaio.52 From September 26, 1946, with the premiere of Le Temple du
Soleil/Prisoners of the Sun, the series was published in the newly formed
Le journal de Tintin/Tintin Magazine,53 run by wartime resistance hero

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 43 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 44 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

Raymond Leblanc, who aided Hergé’s rehabilitation following his exonera-

tion from the charge of wartime collaboration with the Nazis. It was a wild
success. Moreover, Hergé’s work may be peppered with critiques of unfet-
tered US-style capitalism, but in a decade in which Disney was pioneering
character-branded product, “Tintin was being busily merchandised”54 from
as early as 1936 in a range which included puzzles, calendars, and cushions.
As well as being inspired in part by cinematic storytelling, Tintin was
also adapted to the big screen from early on, commencing with two 1946
releases: Les Beaux Films’ series of short “films,” really more akin to slides,
based on black-and-white stills taken from the albums, and a publicity film
directed by Claude Misonne for Tintin Magazine using puppet animation.55
The following year a seventy-five-minute version of Le Crabe aux pinces
d’or/The Crab with the Golden Claws using animated models became the
first cinematic adaptation proper based on the albums. From a strip car-
toon to albums, first black and white then color, multiple translations, ad-
aptations across media, film animation. . . . Approaching the mid-century
mark, and aided by the “means of mass communication” that allowed, by
the standards of the time, “instantaneous communication,”56 Tintin had
rapidly ballooned into a European pop culture phenomenon of almost un-
paralleled proportions, though the spectacle was set only to grow in scale.

Studio Hergé and the Conquest of Space

For Jameson, “the economic preparation of postmodernism or late capi-

talism began in the 1950s,”57 and two momentous events in the evolution
of the Tintin franchise occured around the symbolic mid-century mark.
On April 6, 1950, Studio Hergé was founded, inscribing in microcosm ex-
actly the sort of new forms of media interrelationships and business orga-
nization Jameson associates with the Spectacle Society. Artistically, the
studio brought to bear the talents of Bob De Moor, Jacques Martin, and
Roger ­Leloup to ­Objectif Lune/Destination Moon (1950) and its sequel, On a
marché sur la Lune/Explorers on the Moon (1952–53), which exemplify both
in their Space Age subject matter and means of production the new product
and technology ethos. Aspects of production would increasingly be special-
ized between researchers, illustrators, colorists, and model makers. Debord
notes “the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of
the division of labour into a parcellization of gestures . . . working for an ever

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 44 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  45

more expanded market.”58 The studio model, correspondingly, brought

with it a new commercial focus, since Hergé was no longer working for a
salary but heading up a business. Sales and profits soared, as ­Dominique
Maricq writes: “What was in many ways a cottage industry became a small
and successful business,”59 mirroring in microcosm the decisive process
Debord describes by which “craft production” is overtaken by “large scale
commerce.”60 Prefigured in the US by early Disney and paralleled in Japa-
nese manga and animation by agencies such as Tezuka Productions and
Studio Ghibli, this model can be seen as an intermediary between more or
less ad hoc groups of artists working for serialized publications to earn their
crust and the gargantuan commercial mega-entertainment complexes of
today (though fragments of the studio system survive embedded in the
latter).
Jameson further argues that the Fifties were the seminal phase of late
capitalist postmodernity in unifying cultural and commercial modes of pro-
duction: “[w]hat has happened is that aesthetic production today has be-
come integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic
urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from
clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover.”61 Both in economic
scale, organization, translation and transmediation the Fifties represented
for Tintin an intensification of the previous decades’ trends that propelled it
across a vital threshold. The founding of the studio, for instance, was soon
followed by the franchise’s penetration of the English-speaking world—a
major step toward “encompassing the world as a market.”62 Translations of
Le Sceptre d’Ottokar/King Ottokar’s Sceptre (1938–39) by Eagle appeared in
1951 to 1952 and Le Secret de la Licorne/The Secret of the Unicorn (1942–43)
and Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge/Red Rackham’s Treasure (1943) in 1952
in English by Casterman (Methuen followed suit in 1959). The release of
paperback editions by these publishers made the series available to an
ever-widening audience, and provided a major boost to its commercializa-
tion. As Farr writes, “[i]n the [postwar] years worldwide sales of the Tintin
books totalled over 120 million, with the annual figure topping four million
as the adventures came to be translated into more than fifty languages.”63
Nonetheless, it is worth dwelling on the irony that the United States, as
the dominant English-speaking nation and ground zero of the spectacle,
is one place Tintin never really took off, either as a serialized strip, set of
albums, on film or television, or as merchandise.64 Culturally, the albums

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 45 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 46 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

transplanted poorly to US soil, despite sustained attempts to grow an audi-

ence (and corresponding sales figures) for the Adventures. In the late Fifties,
US publisher Golden Press took up the rights to their publication, at the
encouragement of Georges Duplaix, who had overseen the development of
the Little Golden Books. However, their popularity was so limited that only
six albums were ever translated directly from French into American English
(King Ottokar’s Scepter by his daughter, Nicole Duplaix; The Crab with the
Golden Claws; The Secret of the Unicorn; and Red Rackham’s Treasure, Desti-
nation Moon, and Explorers on the Moon by Danièle Gorlin).
Indeed, deep-rooted cultural differences pressured both his publish-
ers and consequently Hergé to bowdlerize his work within what might be
characterized as, to borrow a phrase Jameson uses unrelatedly, “a crippling
structure of self-censorship.”65 For instance, in Golden Claws the frequent
scenes of Haddock getting drunk66 were at first blanked-out and later en-
tirely redrawn by Hergé for these sanitized US editions. Duplaix wrote to
Hergé explaining that: “I am sure you understand that an American, very
often puritan, point of view is different from the European point of view. A
joke that everyone would accept with a smile in France or Belgium would
horrify people here. The presentation of alcoholism, especially in a humor-
ous form, is absolutely taboo.”67 In the US, the spectacle must be respect-
ably clothed, at least for children. Sales were equally anemic, with only
8,000 each of the first three albums being sold over the Christmas period in
1959, compared to a quarter of a million sales per week in Europe. Despite
the subsequent release of the British translations by Michael Turner and
Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, serialization in the weekly Reader’s Digest, and a
rival publisher’s sales of 1,000 copies a day by 1969, Golden Books’ owner
Western Publishing never took up the cause again. Even with more or less
uninterrupted publication to this day by Atlantic-Little, Tintin readership
remains the preserve of a “small, yet significant, cult audience within the
USA.”68
Vis-à-vis the spread of Tintin via adaptation across (then) new media,
there were several film adaptations in the late Fifties, but the first televi-
sion series commenced at the start of that next decade of “expansion and
prosperity”:69 Belvision’s Les Aventures de Tintin (1961), coproduced with
Tintin Magazine. It was dubbed into English in 1962, and aired in the United
States from the same year with reruns until 1971, recalling Crary’s identifi-
cation of television as complicit with the birth of spectacle and paralleling

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 46 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  47

Jameson’s characterization of the Sixties is marked by capitalism’s cultural

and psychic turn, particularly in relation to new media interrelationships—
in this instance comics adapted to a syndicated television series. In the
early Sixties, Tintin also crossed from the world of animation to that of live
action with two French films, Le Mystère de la toison d’or/The Mystery of the
Golden Fleece (1961) and Tintin et les Oranges Bleues/Tintin and the Blue Or-
anges (1964), directed and written by André Barret and Rémo Forlani, and
by Barret  alone, respectively. In 1969, a Leblanc and Dargaud (of Astérix
fame) coproduction of The Temple of the Sun was authorized by Hergé and
produced by members of his studio staff and Tintin Magazine70 in a further
fusion of new media and business organization elements. Tintin had been
mobilized to occupy the full-spectrum of media available at the time and
was becoming recognizable worldwide. Jameson writes of “the penetra-
tion of culture itself by .  .  . the culture industry, and of which the media
itself is only a part.”71 The Sixties saw the formation of “popular culture” as
we understand it today, not as something low or marginal but occupying
the cultural center as a dominant—in relation to which Tintin stands as a
significant forerunner.

The Structure of Feeling, Anomie, and Personalph Art

For Jameson, the Sixties symbolically ended “around 1972–74.”72 Con-

versely, the sense of crisis he identifies with the Seventies—where late
capitalism is confronted by its vulnerability in light of the Oil Shocks,73
structural economic decline, and corresponding anxiety—is prefigured in a
widely diagnosed anomie in the Adventures, where Hergé “corrodes”74 his own
hero-myth across his final “triptych” of completed albums beginning in the
early Sixties (Les Bijoux de la Castafiore/The Castafiore Emerald [1961–61];
Vol 714 pour Sydney/Flight 714 [1966–67]; Tintin et les Picaros/Tintin and the
Picaros [1975–76]). The first is ostensibly a tale about nothing, which, con-
troversially, Tom McCarthy has interpreted in Lacanian terms to be a cipher
for diva Madam Castafiore’s clitoris;75 the second requires the intervention
of a UN-style mission led by a humanoid alien to rescue Tintin and company
from an exploding volcano; while the third depicts an adventure-shirking
Tintin sporting a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) symbol on his
motorcycle helmet. The general atmosphere matches that which Jameson
associated with Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling,” its “reshuffling

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 47 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 48 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

of canonical feelings and values.”76 Rod Cooke has suggested parallels with
the literary mien of the late French naturalist authors. He argues that “the
themes [these albums] share are in fact opposed to, or parodic of, those
Hergé had set up in his first 20 albums,”77 and that there is a deliberate “cor-
rosion” of the canon and its heroic or adventure-based comics conventions.
Thus, while in Picaros, the “boy-hero” has donned the popular idiom of
the peacenik (flared trousers, a motorbike, and a helmet with a CND sym-
bol) ideologically the album stands for nothing, depicting revolution as a
circular force totally exhausted of its ability to bring any kind of meaning-
ful societal change. Socialism’s aspirational control of the “periodicity of
crises”78 had proved as illusory of capitalism’s. That intensifying “left wing
countertendency”79 of Hergé’s against the reactionary biases of the early
works was hardly going to reprise, say, “the ways in which revolutionary or
communist artists of the 1930s also sought to reappropriate this excitement
of machine energy for a Promethean reconstruction of human society as a
whole”80 by the Seventies, especially given the ennui following the “almost
complete militarization of the Latin American regimes after the Chilean
coup of 1973.”81 The spectacle had long since attained “the total occupa-
tion of social life,”82 and one senses enervation both within and outside
the Adventures. Even the major movie release of the decade, Tintin et le lac
aux requins/Tintin and the Lake of Sharks (1972), was directed by Leblanc
with Hergé’s armchair “supervision”; it was subsequently issued as a kind
of ersatz, noncanonical Tintin album, gracing in thumbnail form Egmont
and Casterman editions in an apparent attempt to complete their famous
back-cover grid of the completed Tintin albums.
Finally, the last (unfinished) album, Tintin et l’alph-art/Tintin and Alph Art
(1978–83), is an almost perfect cypher for the postmodernism of the late Sev-
enties and Eighties—whose critical discourse Jameson himself helped intro-
duce to the Anglo-American world—which in turn marks a truly postmodern
dénouement to the Adventures: an ontological blank that readers/viewers
must fill in for ourselves. The album puns on the nature of art, particularly art
fetishized and reified as commodity. Archvillain Rastapopoulos’s final itera-
tion is as a fraudulent art dealer. Haddock is confronted with the enigma of a
plinth-sized Perspex sculpture of the letter H. Its artist, Ramo Nash, tells him,
“I have precisely what you need . . . This H in Perspex . . . Not just Alph-Art, but
Personalph Art!” Castafiore chimes in “Inspired . . . Sublime . . . ­Marvellous . . .
Transcendent! .  .  . It’s exactly what you need, dear friend! You can’t let it

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 48 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  49

go: this piece is waiting for you.”83 As Jameson notes regarding art production
in the period, “[I]n the population explosion of the postmodern there have
come to be too many of these private worldviews, personal styles, or points of
view for anyone to take them seriously, as was done in the modern period.”84
The cultural structure of feeling in which art is consumed (“Personalph Art!”)
elides perfectly into a culture of commerce in which aesthetic value is synony-
mous with bankability. Nash tries to clinch the deal: “Bianca is right, sir. Such
a chance may never come your way again.”85 The bamboozled Haddock re-
turns to Marlinspike with his prize, where it is ridiculed by the Thom[p]sons;86
finally, art itself is exhausted of value, emptied, an object of derision worth
only its resale value. Appropriately, perhaps, only forty-two of the standard
sixty-two pages of Alph Art were ever sketched, with none completed, leaving
readers forever in the dark as to whether, like Holmes with Moriarty, Tintin’s
archvillain Rastapopoulos will dispatch him—in this case, eternally embalmed
as a work of art a la Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde installations.
Alph Art was posthumously issued in 1986 and then in 2004 in English,
while the original black-and-white albums of the series have been similarly
reissued as facsimiles, thus coming to occupy the middle ground between
valuable archival resources and fetishized commodities, tokens of connois-
seurship, for fans and dedicated Tintinologists. The Adventures might trail
off midair like the “true” (if apocryphal) Buddhist scriptures composed of
blank pages, but there’s still coin to be minted from deluxe editions. The
ultimate coda to the tantalizing fragment that is Alph Art, however, is itself
a pastiche and perhaps the supreme irony: a “completed” but unautho-
rized version by Franco-Québécois comics artist Yves Rodier that is float-
ing illicitly around the Internet, Hergé’s long-time collaborator the late Bob
de Moor having been denied the opportunity to pen an “official” version
by Hergé’s widow.87 It shares its Intellectual Property Hades with a host
of other apocryphal takes on the series—whether homage, pastiche, or
­parody—from the communo-anarcho détournement Breaking Free (1988)
to the salacious Tintin in Thailand (1999), to take two examples from a wider
body that ranges from the political to pornographic.

Postscript: Leaving the Twentieth Century

From the Nineties to the 2010s, the official franchise would continue to
grow in terms of its conquest of media forms and concomitant commercial

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 49 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 50 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

success. Thirty years after the Belvision series debuted, an ambitious new
television adaptation of The Adventures of Tintin (1991) was commissioned
by the Ellipse and Nelvana studios, authorized via cooperation with the
Hergé Foundation.88 Adhering visually to the ligne claire style, the series,
still widely available on DVD, comprises twenty-one of the twenty-three
completed albums in the form of thirty-nine episodes of twenty-five min-
utes apiece. They are the most comprehensive, and perhaps “faithful,” of
the animated takes on the canon to date. Nevertheless, one feature the
series shared with the US releases of the Tintin comic albums is omission
bordering on censorship. The politically explosive Tintin in the Land of the
Soviets and Tintin in the Congo are entirely omitted, while cuts have been
made in extant works, such as the total excision of the critical Red Indian
scenes in Tintin in America and human trafficking in Coke en stock/The Red
Sea Sharks (1958). There is also frequent infantilization, including the era-
sure of violent and gun-toting content, editing out the use of opium in The
Blue Lotus (1934–35)—the eponymous opium den of the title becomes a
café—and toning down of Captain Haddock’s rampant alcoholism. Not just
Haddock but Tintin has been récupérated: the price to be paid for admis-
sion to the Elysian fields of North American children’s television.
The relative quiet following the Ellipse-Nelvana coproduction was, of
course, well and truly shattered with the long-anticipated Spielberg-Jackson
production of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011),
which grossed US$373 million total worldwide, with disproportionately
strong international sales (US$296 million) suggesting that the European
comic book hero still awaits a US following.89 Nonetheless, today’s over-
all global sales figures for the albums are calculated to stand close to
350 ­million, almost comparable in sheer scale to the estimated 450 ­million
book sales from the Harry Potter series.90 The commercial success of the
first ­Spielberg/Jackson movie—while savaged by many critics and contro-
versially likened by one to a rape91—may have dwarfed book sales in its
immediate aftermath, but the franchise’s combination of industrial scale
production, translation, merchandising, and cross-media adaptation
had already placed it as a forerunner of today’s transmedia franchises.
Hollywood aside, the Hergé Foundation’s own merchandizing continues
to occupy the elite of culture commodity fetishization, its objects carry-
ing eye-watering price tags. At Tintin shops, including that of the Museé
Hergé in Louvain-la-Neuve, which, since its founding in 2009, has helped

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 50 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  51

institutionalize Tintin within francophone culture, you can buy, at the time
of writing, Moulinsart-branded figurines from £72 for an 11cm-tall resin
Snowy to £315 for a 22cm-tall Castafiore. A 43.5cm-long replica of Calculus’s
submarine sets the buyer back £229, while a 55cm moon rocket fetches
£310. Resin models occupy only one category of merchandise of twelve,
from crockery to stationery.92 At the time of writing, with a second movie
to be directed by Peter Jackson long in the wings, it seems likely that the
franchise will continue to evince its parallelism with the unfolding phases
of late capitalism’s fusion of new and emerging corporate media interrela-
tionships, resulting in ever-increasing spectacle in both the everyday and
critical senses of the word.

Les Aventures De Tintin/The Adventures Of Tintin

There is no easy way to schematize the multiple publication dates of the

Adventures: for ease of reference, I have listed alphabetically all album
titles referred to in this article in French and English, respectively, with
the English language publishers and their places of publication metadata
included. All English editions were translated by Leslie-Lonsdale Cooper
and Michael Turner.

Hergé, Coke en stock/The Red Sea Sharks (London: Methuen, [1958] 1960).
———. Le Crabe aux pinces d’or/The Crab with the Golden Claws (London:
Methuen, [1943] 1958).
———. Le Lotus bleu/The Blue Lotus (London: Methuen, [1946] 1983).
———. Les Bijoux de la Castafiore/The Castafiore Emerald (London: Methuen,
[1963] 1963).
———. Les Cigares du pharaon/The Cigars of the Pharaoh (London: Methuen,
[1955] 1971).
———. Le Sceptre d’Ottokar/King Ottokar’s Sceptre (London: Eagle, [1947]
1952).
———. Le Secret de la Licorne/The Secret of the Unicorn (Tournai: Casterman,
[1943] 1952).
———. Les Sept Boules de cristal/The Seven Crystal Balls (London: Methuen,
[1948] 1962).
———. Le Temple du Soleil/Prisoners of the Sun (London: Methuen, [1949] 1962).
———. Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge/Red Rackham’s Treasure (Tournai:
Casterman, [1944] 1952).

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 51 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 52 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

———. L’Étoile mystérieuse/The Shooting Star (London: Methuen, [1942]

1961).
———. L’Oreille cassée/The Broken Ear (London: Methuen, [1943] 1975).
———. Objectif Lune/Destination Moon (London: Methuen, [1953] 1959).
———. On a marché sur la Lune/Explorers on the Moon (London: Methuen,
[1954] 1959).
———. Tintin au Congo/Tintin in the Congo (Tournai: Casterman, [1946] 1991).
———. Tintin au pays de l’or noir/The Land of Black Gold (London: Methuen,
[1950] 1972).
———. Tintin au pays des Soviets/Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (Brussels:
Tournai: Casterman, [1930] 1989).
———. Tintin en Amérique/Tintin in America (London: Methuen, [1946] 1978).
———. Tintin et l’alph-art/Tintin and Alph Art (London: Egmont, [1983] 2004).
———. Tintin et les Picaros/Tintin and the Picaros (London: Methuen, [1976]
1976).
———. Vol 714 pour Sydney/Flight 714, London: Methuen, [1968] 1968).

contributor details

Paul Mountfort is chair of the Auckland University of Technology Centre for Creative
Writing and vice president of the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New
Zealand (PopCAANZ). He has written and presented widely in the area of popular
cultural studies, in particular on the subject of oracle-texts, comics media, fan-
tasy, SF, and transmedia franchises. He sits on the editorial boards of the Journal
of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture (Penn State University Press), Journal of Asian Studies
(IAFOR), and Journal of Creative Technologies (AUT).

Notes

1. Karl Marx, Capital Vol I: Critique of Political Economy (1867; repr., London: Pen-
guin, 1990).
2. Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” in Guy Debord and the
Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (London: MIT
Press, 2004), 455–66.
3. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman (1967; repr., New
York: Zone Books, 1995).
4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
5. Debord, Spectacle, 125–64.

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 52 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  53

6. See Lawrence Besserman, The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and

New Perspectives (1996; repr., New York: Routledge, 2013), 4–5.
7. Marx, Capital Vol I, 83.
8. Ibid., 81.
9. Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations/The Rev-
olution of Everyday Life (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
10. Debord, Spectacle, 1–2.
11. Ibid., 36.
12. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imry (1988;
repr., London: Verso, 1990), 13.
13. Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 457.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 457–61.
16. Television becomes a material factor in the transmediation of the franchise
itself from the 1960s, widespread implementation following its “technological per-
fection” having been set back by World War II.
17. E.g., see Nancy McKoski’s “A Post-modern Critique of the Modernist Projects of
Fredrik Jameson and Patrician Brizzel,” Journal of Advanced Composition, 13, no. 2
(Fall 1993), 329–44.
18. Jameson, Postmodernism, xix.
19. Ibid., xvii.
20. Ibid., ix.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., xix.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 207.
25. Besserman, Challenge of Periodization, 3.
26. Quoted in Besserman, Challenge of Periodization, 4.
27. McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious
Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso, 2011), 285.
28. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the ’60s,” Social Text 9, no. 10 (2004): 178–209;
178.
29. McKensie, Beach Beneath the Street, 102.
30. In Situationist practice détournement (Fr. Rerouting, hijacking) involves the
appropriation of existing materials, and sometimes expressions of the capital-
ist system, into a “superior production,” often in the form of a quasi-plagiaristic
or propagandistic prank, which in so doing constitutes the Situationist milieu. A
récupération represents its opposite, i.e., when Situationist ideas or practices are
co-opted into bourgeois acceptability. See Definitions, trans. Ken Knabb, Interna-
tionale Situationniste #1 (June 1958), ed. Guy Debord, accessed on 1 October 2015,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline///si/definitions.html.

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 53 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 54 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

31. Debord, Spectacle, 18.

32. Jean Marie Apostolidès, Kepler’s Launch of The Metamorphosis of Tintin: or
­Tintin for Adults (US: FOTA.tv, 2010).
33. I am aware that the recourse to critical theory of this kind will do little to mol-
lify the most trenchant critics of academicized critiques of the spectacular. Wark
writes:
If anything, theory has turned out even worse [than art]. It found its utopia, and it
is the academy. A colonnade adorned with the busts of famous fathers: Jacques La-
can the bourgeoismagus, Louis Althusser the throttler-of-concepts, Jacques Derrida
the dandy-of-difference, Michel Foucault the one-eyed-powerhouse, Gilles Deleuze
the taker-from-behind. Acolytes and epigones pace furiously up and down, prostrat-
ing themselves before one master—Ah! Betrayed!—and then another. The produc-
tion of new dead masters to imitate can barely keep up with consumer demand,
prompting some to chisel statues of new demigods while they still live: Alain Badiou
the Maoist-of-the-matheme, Giorgio Agamben the pensive-pedant, Slavoj Žižek the
neuro-Hegelian-joker. (Wark, Beach Beneath the Street, 118–19)
34. Dominique Maricq, Hergé in His Own Words (Bruxelles: Editions Moulinsart,
2010), 17.
35. Ibid., 21.
36. Pierre Assouline, Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin, trans. Charles Ruas (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 83 (emphasis added).
37. Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 458.
38. Michael Farr, Tintin: The Complete Companion (London: John Murray, 2001), 17.
39. Assouline, Hergé, 16.
40. “Fritz Lang: Inspiration of Hergé?,” Tintinologist, last modified 22 March
2006, accessed 25 July 2013, http://www.tintinologist.org/forums/index.
php?action=vthread&forum=10&topic=1318.
41. Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 461.
42. Farr, Companion, 18.
43. Assouline, Hergé, 17.
44. See Peter Bate, Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death (London: BBC,
2003); Antoon Van Den Braembussche, “The Silence of Belgium: Taboo and Trauma
in Belgian Memory,” Yale French Studies 102 Belgian Memories (2002), 35–52; and
Paul Mountfort, “‘Yellow skin, black hair . . . Careful, Tintin’: Hergé and Orientalism,”
The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 1, no. 1 (2012), 33–49; 36–38.
45. Fredrik Strömberg, Comic Art Propaganda (London: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010).
46. Benoît Peeters, Hergé, Son of Tintin (2002; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2012), 270.
47. Maricq, Hergé, 21.

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 54 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 Tintin as Spectacle  |  55

48. Michel Daubert, Tintin: L’Art d’Hergé/Tintin/The Art of Hergé, trans. Michael Farr
(New York: Abrams Comicarts, 2013), 465.
49. Assouline, Hergé, 78–81.
50. Daubert, Tintin, 462.
51. Debord, Spectacle, 69, 67.
52. Assouline, Hergé, 35.
53. Daubert, Tintin, 466.
54. Assouline, Hergé, 55.
55. Philippe Capart, “Tintin Movies Timeline,” Tintinologist, last modified
28  ­November 2011, accessed 25 July 2015, http://www.tintinologist.org/guides/
screen/movies.html.
56. Debord, Spectacle, 24.
57. Jameson, Postmodernism, xix.
58. Debord, Spectacle, 25.
59. Maricq, Hergé, 45.
60. Debord, Spectacle, 40.
61. Jameson, Postmodernism, 3.
62. Debord, Spectacle, 39.
63. Farr, Companion, 8.
64. Chris Owens, “Tintin Crosses the Atlantic: The Golden Press Affair,” last up-
dated January 2007, accessed 20 March 2015, http://www.tintinologist.org/articles/
goldenpress.html.
65. Jameson, Postmodernism, 257.
66. Hergé, Le Crabe aux pinces d’or/The Crab with the Golden Claws (1943; repr.,
London: Methuen, 1958), 15,16, 19, 26.
67. Owens, “Tintin Crosses the Atlantic.”
68. Ibid.
69. Jameson, “Periodizing the ’60s,” 205.
70. Anders Karlsson, Irene Mar, and P. Mahler, “Tintin on Screen,” last updated
28 November 2011, accessed 20 March 2015, http://www.tintinologist.org/guides/
screen/.
71. Jameson, “Periodizing the ’60s,” 207.
72. Jameson, “Periodizing the ’60s,” 183.
73. In fact, Hergé foreshadows the dangers of an oil shock as early as 1939 to
1940 with Tintin au pays de l’or noir/The Land of Black Gold, production of which
was interrupted by the war with a resumption in 1948 and publication in French
in 1950.
74. Rod Cooke, “Corroding the Canon in Tintin and the Naturalist Novel,” E­ uropean
Comic Art 3, no. 2 (2010), 146–67; 146.

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 55 27/05/16 4:29 AM

 56 | Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture

75. Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (London: Granta, 2006),
93–116. Note that while received with hostility in some quarters, McCarthy is not
alone in his view: Apostolidès, for instance, provides an extended discussion on
­Castafiore’s jewels as sexual emblems: Jean-Marie Apostolidès, The Metamorphosis
of Tintin: or Tintin for Adults, trans. Jocelyn Hoy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2010), 242–48.
76. Jameson, Postmodernism, xiii.
77. Cooke, “Corroding the Canon,” 148.
78. Debord, Comments, 82.
79. McCarthy, Secret, 38.
80. Jameson, Postmodernism, 35.
81. Jameson, “Periodizing the ’60s,” 183.
82. Debord, Comments, 42.
83. Hergé, Tintin et l’alph-art/Tintin and Alph Art (1983; repr., London: Egmont,
2004), 9.
84. Jameson, Postmodernism, 149–50.
85. Hergé, Alph Art, 9.
86. Ibid., 12–13.
87. “Fanny Rodwell Says No to New Tintin Album,” last updated 14 May
2014, accessed October 12, 2015, http://www.bobdemoor.info/2014/05/14/
fanny-rodwell-says-no-to-new-tintin-album/.
88. The Adventures of Tintin, dir. Peter Bernasconi and Peter Hudecki (France:
Ellipse-Nelvana, 1991).
89. “The Adventures of Tintin,” accessed 20 March 2015, http://www.the-numbers
.com/movie/Adventures-of-Tintin-The#tab=summary.
90. “Harry Potter Series to be Sold as e-Books,” BBC, last updated 23 June 2011,
accessed 25 May 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-13889578.
91. Nicholas Lezard, “How could they do this to Tintin?,” The Guardian, last
­updated 18 October 2011, accessed 20 March 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/
culture/2011/oct/18/how-could-do-this-tintin.
92. “All the Adventures,” Tintin Shop, accessed 25 July 2015, http://www
.thetintinshop.uk.com/acatalog/.

JAPPC_1.1_03_Mountfort.indd 56 27/05/16 4:29 AM