The collaborators?

As well as racism and anti-semitism, a familiar charge levelled against Georges Remi (Hergé) is one of collaboration. When the Allies liberated Brussels in September 1944, the Belgian creator of cartoon hero Tintin was arrested as a traitor and questioned.

Hergé had decided to stay in Belgium following the country's invasion by the Nazis, and continued to produce comic strips for the German-run Le Soir newspaper. During World War II, he retreated into the apolitical fantasies of The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham's Treasure (recently made into a film by Steven Spielberg, of course) and The Seven Crystal Balls.

The Shooting Star (1942) is undoubtedly anti-semitic but its apocalyptic atmosphere can surely only have been informed by the arrival of the Nazis, while the pre-war King's Ottokar's Sceptre is decidedly anti-fascist (though only Tintin in America and The Black Island were banned by the Nazis).

Nevertheless, the first form of official pardon for Hergé came as late as 1958, when he was met by the Belgian ambassador on a visit to London. According to biographer Harry Thompson, the author 'remained bitter at the treatment meted out to those who - as he saw it - had stuck with Belgium in her hour of need.'

One of the reasons Hergé gave for remaining in the country was because his beloved king (Leopold III) had also stayed and, indeed, urged his subjects to work as usual. Another possibility may be that Hergé was not disposed to living in another country, as was the case with German Hans Fallada - real name, Rudolf Ditzen - currently much celebrated for Alone in Berlin and A Small Circus.

Fallada had any number of opportunities to leave Germany during the Nazis' rise, but decided to stick it out. In 1944 he wrote: 'I am a German, I say that today with pride and sorrow, I love Germany, I don't want to live or work anywhere else in the world. I probably couldn't live or work anywhere else.' (Quoted in Jenny Williams' biography More Lives than One.)

His novels show a fine judge of the human spirit, though whether his political judgement was so sharp remains open to question. In November 1937 he accepted an approach to write a novel 'dealing with the fate of a German family from 1914 until around 1933'.

When Fallada brought Iron Gustav to a close in 1928, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, intervened to ensure the writer fulfilled the detail of his contract, which meant Fallada had to cover the rise of the National Socialists. Williams writes: '[Fallada] later tried to justify his capitulation in the following terms: "I do not like grand gestures, being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way."'

He may have found some sympathy from Vasily Grossman, the Russian celebrated for Everything Flows and Life and Fate, his massive novel centred on the battle for Stalingrad. For three years from 1943, Grossman contributed to an astounding narrative of Jewish massacres in Poland and the Soviet Union - informing some of Life and Fate - and yet, in 1952, he signed an official letter condemning Stalin's Jewish doctors for a plot to kill the dictator.

Perhaps only someone who has experienced such extremes can write, as Grossman does in Life and Fate: 'Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian state depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and worldwide triumph of the dictatorial state is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian state is doomed.'

Tintin on the deathbed

BELGIUM MONTH FINALE

It’s stupid. I was at the launch of the National Maritime Museum’s Tintin at Sea exhibition when there he was, in front of me: Tintin. Of course, it was a man dressed as the redoubtable boy reporter, suitably bequiffed in regulation plus-fours, clutching a fluffy toy Snowy dog under his arm. And I was nervous, as in the presence of one of my heroes. For a moment I cursed myself that I hadn’t thought to bring a book for him to sign. Which makes no sense on any level - this was a man dressed as a cartoon character.

Even though I have some trepidation about Steven Spielberg's adaptation, The Adventures of Tintin - particularly in terms of the 'dead eyes' - I feel a similar excitement about the film (pictured). The last week has seen a glut of online reviews, many of which reference the author Hergé's respect for Spielberg - as did an interview I did for October's Gulf Life magazine with expert Raphaël Taylor.

Spielberg first proposed to film Tintin in 1982, when the director was riding high on the success of Jaws and E.T. Hergé was keen for the project to move ahead but when, at the last moment, a clause was inserted in the deal whereby someone other than Spielberg could direct the movie, Hergé demurred. Nevertheless, Spielberg continued to renew an option on the material for the next two decades.

According to Pierre Assouline's biography of the writer (out now in paperback from OUP), Hergé was preoccupied with the matter on his deathbed: 'He said that he had been ready to give [Spielberg] the freedom to create even if he what created was no longer recognisably Tintin. He considered Spielberg a genius.'

Previews of The Adventures of Tintin begin today.

For whom Anthea Bell toils

The Adventures of Tintin comes to the cinema next week, so I thought I'd write about the cartoon character people who don't like Tintin are said to prefer: Asterix. The series' co-creator, Albert Uderzo, announced last month he was retiring from the comic-book frame, 52 years after the plucky Gaulish hero's debut, alongside special chum Obelix, pet Dogmatix and chief Vitalstatistix.

Recently I had the chance to hear the books' English translator, Anthea Bell, talk as part of the Institut français' excellent, inaugural BD & Comics Passion festival. The translator of several works by Stefan Zweig and WG Sebald's Austerlitz, Bell was especially concerned with the problems of conveying the puns and cultural references that populate the Asterix books thanks to wordsmith René Goscinny, who died in 1977 - since when Uderzo worked alone.

Bell sees the books as a comic version of Odysseus - with its journey, quest and homecoming - and was keen to play up the historic accuracy of Uderzo's artwork, something Tintinologists tend to emphasise in the work of the boy reporter's creator, Hergé. One slip, however, was drawing the villagers' houses with chimneys, as they would have only had smoke holes.

There is controversy, too: in the same way Hergé is pilloried for his depiction (visually, dramatically and linguistically) of any number of non-European characters, the Asterix albums have a black pirate who speaks a sort of patois, something Bell would have no truck with in the English editions.

She pondered Asterix's lack of success in the USA. Accepting these were huge generalisations, Bell suggested that irony doesn't work on the other side of the Atlantic, and that Americans don't have enough history to be anachronistic about. The translator transposed the Gauls for William the Conquerer (our comedy equivalent being 1066 and All That), Byron for Victor Hugo, and Hamlet for Cyrano de Bergerac...

Bell claimed to have been accused of corrupting youth in her naming of the druid Getafix, though she justified this as druids 'get a fix' on the stars. Observing that people often say 'asterix' instead of asterisk, and the same for 'obelix' she said, 'I think I've done violence to to the English language.' As to the future of Asterix, following Uderzo's announcement: 'What is going to happen to the series now, one doesn't quite know.'

Tintin fans may be interested in a lecture, 'Tintin - Ace Reporter', by Michael Farr at the Wigmore Hall this Saturday afternoon, click here for details.

Tintin in retirement

Plenty has been written about the central place in Hergé's life and oeuvre of Tintin in Tibet (1960) - a biography due out in October promises a special focus on the story. The perfect Tintin album, however, must be Tibet's immediate successor: The Castafiore Emerald (1963).

Tintin in Tibet came at a time when Hergé suffered from eczema and insomnia - his dreams were dominated by eerie white spaces he transferred into the book. Hergé's marriage was collapsing and a Jungian psychologist advised him to stop drawing his hero - instead he created one of his most powerful books, revisiting one of Tintin's (and Hergé's) oldest friends, Tchang.

Penned 32 years after the boy reporter's first appearance, The Castafiore Emerald (pictured) is no less personal: Hergé wanted to stay home with his new, second, wife, and restricted his hero to Marlinspike Hall - there was to be no running around the world for this adventure. But the author's cartoon alter ego Captain Haddock has no peace: he is confined to a wheelchair after tripping on a broken step, has to tolerate a visit from the formidable Bianca Castafiore and still the stair is not fixed (by a character named in the French after a real builder with whom Hergé had problems, M Boullu).

Hergé's line is the purest of any of the books, as Tintin and co attempt to recover one of the diva's missing jewels amid a stream of red herrings. In his book Tintin: Hergé and his Creation, Harry Thompson quotes the writer saying: 'My ambition was to try and tell a tale in which absolutely nothing happened, simply to see whether I was capable of keeping the reader's attention to the end.'

In the final two (completed) books - Flight 714 (1968) and Tintin and the Picaros (1976) - Hergé reintroduces several old characters, including General Alcazar, Colonel Sponz, Rastapopoulos, Captain Allan and Piotr Skut, but all the favourites are reunited for The Castafiore Emerald: Professor Calculus, the Thompsons and Castafiore herself. The premature idyll heaps further irritations on Captain Haddock, however - pursued by paparazzi, bitten by a parrot (twice) and stung by a bee. Though Hergé took his time to produce the final albums, it was time for Tintin to travel once more.

Related: Tintin in Arabia

Tintin in Arabia Part Two

Land of Black Gold was begun in wartime although frequently interrupted until a colour version emerged in 1950, set in Palestine. At the instigation of UK publishers Tintin's arrival in Haifa - and prompt arrest by British police controlling the then mandate - was changed in a third edition (1971) to the fictional location of Khemed, ruled by Emir Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, excising a rich historical seam. (Michael Farr's book Tintin: The Complete Companion, 2001, illustrates the changes, as well as showing many of Hergé's pictorial sources for the stories.)

The early petrol explosions that instigate the adventure still sparkle, as do the book's night-time desert scenes and the comic mirages experienced by bungling detective duo Thompson and Thomson (in part reprised from Cigars of the Pharoah, where they made their first appearance); Oliveira de Figueira and Sheikh Patrash Pasha both reappear, alongside villain Dr Müller (from The Black Island, 1938, 1943, updated 1966). Working alongside Sheikh Bab El Ehr, whose acts of sabotage are destroying the country's reputation as an oil provider, he aims to acquire Khemed's petroleum industry for western corporations.

This is the most atmospheric of the Arabian books - and one of the most atmospheric of the entire series - full of telling behaviour. Fans of Tom McCarthy's novel C won't be surprised to learn the author picks up on the misreadings in the book in his study Tintin and the Secret of Literature. McCarthy is particularly drawn to Tintin as an avatar for the century of communication: 'Forget journalism: what Tintin actually does is send and receive radio messages. This is his job on the boat in Land of Black Gold... Some of Hergé's most striking images are not of characters or actions but of radio masts, wires casting signals and antennae picking them up. In both Cigars of the Pharoah and The Red Sea Sharks Tintin floats on the ocean while transmissions billow and swirl around him.'

In The Red Sea Sharks (1958), the last of Tintin's adventures to be set in the Middle East, Bab El Ehr (a name embodying miscommunication: babbler) seizes power from Emir Ben Kalish Ezab, while the emir's spoilt son Abdullah, introduced in Land of Black Gold, takes centre stage. The book is again terrifically relevant, as Captain Allan is now engaged in human trafficking (giving rise to an an image riffed upon in bleak but very funny new film Louise Michel). Nor can Hergé resist a visit to Petra, Jordan's rose city, another setting for Indiana Jones, of course.

As Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier write of Emir Ben Kalish Ezab, 'it is clear the man is a self-centred autocrat, no better than Bab El Ehr... Is he supposed to be on our side merely because he sells oil to us? Is restoring him to power the happy ending the book suggests...? The whole dynamic of the western world's dealings with the Arab world is appropriately captured, if not resolved, in The Red Sea Sharks.' Perhaps even, as they note, in a way its author had not intended.

Tintin in Arabia Part One

Much ink has been expended on racism and anti-semitism in Hergé's Tintin books. As the Belgian author's draughtsmanship improved so did his knowledge of the world; in these tumultuous times, and ahead of Steven Spielberg's much-vaunted screen version, I wanted to pick out the Arab themes in his oeuvre. The best artists manage to anticipate events, and this could be said of Hergé's development from two-dimensional characterisation.

The intrepid boy reporter first travels to North Africa in the fourth Tintin adventure: Cigars of the Pharoah (black-and-white edition 1934, colour 1955). After the message locations of the problematic earlier books (in the Soviet Union, Congo and USA), Egypt offers an ideal setting: full of iconic landmarks and mythology loved by children. Surprising, then, that our hero should be framed for smuggling heroin, of all things.

Hergé is extending his palette here, notably in a drug-fuelled dream sequence, while pursuing the nonsensical leaps and bounds of the adventure format. In Tintin: Hergé & His Creation, Harry Thompson says the adventure was originally called Tintin in the East, with the first half dubbed The Cairo Affair, before the action moves to India. It introduces, too, a series of characters who recur in the Middle East stories: Sheikh Patrash Pasha (a Tintin fan, it turns out), entrepreneur Oliveira da Figueira - though Portuguese, he is reminiscent of the enterprising fixers you so often encounter in the Levant - and media mogul Rastapopoulos, who becomes one of Tintin's stock enemies.

The latter's sidekick, Captain Allan, and the mysterious sign of Kih-Oskh recur in a parallel work, The Crab with Golden Claws (1941, 1944), one of the books Hergé created under German occupation. Famously, it includes our first encounter with bibulous Captain Haddock, the series' most beloved character, who helps Tintin escape from the attentions of Allan Thompson aboard their drug-smuggling ship, the Karaboudjan. Tintin and Haddock crash land an airplane in the Sahara, where the captain suffers hallucinations from his suddenly enforced temperance, before saving them both from attacking Berbers with the usual choice phrases: 'Rats! Ectoplasms! Freshwater swabs! Cannibals! Bashi-bazouks! Caterpilllars!'

The duo are rescued by the French Foreign Legion - a staple of any boys' own adventure - before they make their way to Morocco. Hergé had to add four beautiful full-page illustrations when the 62-page Casterman edition came up short, including a chase in a local market that could almost have served as the template for a scene in Tintin fan Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In one of the punning names that would get Hergé into trouble on another occasion, the episode's baddie is Omar Ben Salaad (loosely 'lobster salad' when said in French).

To be continued... Tune in tomorrow for Part Two!