Carolyn Bandel went on assignment to the National Maritime Museum to find out what was so special about Le Petit Vingtieme’s foreign correspondent.
In Germany they call him Tim, in Dutch he is called Kuifje, the Greeks call him Tentén and in China he’s known as Dingdong. Who am I talking about? Tintin!
For 75 years the reporter with the distinctive quiff hairstyle and the small white terrier has been trotting around the globe, but now he is visiting the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, South East London.
Marking his 75th birthday, the exhibition The Adventures of Tintin at Sea, running until September 5, is a collection of original drawings by Belgian Cartoonist Georges Remi – more commonly known as Hergé, the francophone pronunciation of his reversed initials – and some of the artefacts and models that inspired him.
"Tintin has found a place in history as that rarest of commodities: a famous Belgian," Joren Vandeweyer, the country’s cultural attaché to Britain told reporters.
'Famous' is an understatement: books of his adventures have been translated into nearly 60 languages, including Latin, Retoroman and Mongolian, and 200 million copies have been sold since the comic strip character first saw the light of day in 1929.
Hergé, born in Brussels in 1907, dreamt of being a journalist but soon realised that his talents lay in illustration. At the Brussels newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle he was employed to design, supervise and illustrate the children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième.
To make up for his lack of journalistic talent Hergé came up with Tintin, foreign correspondent at Le Petit Vingtième. In 1929 Tintin made his first appearance in the paper, when he was sent on assignment to investigate the Bolsjevik rule in far away Russia.
Since then, in 22 further adventures, the ginger-haired journalist has been as far afield as the jungles of the Congo, the backstreets of Shanghai, the docks of Chicago and even the surface of the moon, 15 years before Neil Armstrong.
In the 1940s Tintin had already visited five of the world’s seven continents but had had relatively few nautical experiences.
This changed when Hergé decided to explore his long-held fascination with the maritime world by sending Tintin on the trail of drug smugglers in the Atlantic Ocean in his ninth adventure.
In this ninth adventure the famous and – Blistering Barnacles! – foul-mouthed Captain Haddock was born. "I asked Hergé once, why Haddock?" Michael Turner, translator of Tintin adventures into English for over 40 year, recalls. "He said because it was the name of a sad old English fish who drinks a lot."
Even though Tintin has only filed one story to his editor in 75 years, Hergé believed in the importance of placing Tintin in a real and believable world.
"He was obsessive about accuracy," says Kristian Martin, curator of the exhibition. "There is a night sky in one cartoon in which every star is correctly placed. He studied ship models, sea charts and all kinds of objects to get the details correct."
Against a backdrop of amazing detail, Tintin travelled the world to fight the baddies, tapping into our love of excitement. Tintin still gives us our fix of adventure.
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, SE10 9NF, England
T: 020 8858 4422
Open: Daily, 10.00-17.00
Last admission is 30 minutes before closing.
From 3 May–31 August 2008, the Royal Observatory courtyard will remain open until 8pm.
Closed: All three sites close early on 31 December and open late on 1 January and on the occasion of the London Marathon each year.
