The accidental geopolitics of Tintin

The author revisits Tintin as an adult and discovers that beneath the adventures, eccentric detectives and drunken captains was a remarkably sharp education in power: empire, oil, propaganda, coups, Cold War paranoia and the politics of small countries.

In Short

• The writer discovered Tintin through parents' merged shelves and worn hand-me-downs
• Hergé's clear-line drawings made fictional states feel as real as history
• The Blue Lotus tied comic adventure to Manchuria, racism and weak diplomacy

My first encounter with Tintin was with a stack of old Methuen hardbacks and later Mammoth paperbacks, inherited unevenly, my father's and my mother's separate collections merged onto one shelf sometime after their wedding, the way two people's bookshelves quietly amalgamate without either party quite agreeing to it.

Among them, more battered than anything else on that shelf, was a copy of Destination Moon, its cover half detached, that my mother had apparently gifted my father years before I existed, an inscription in her hand still visible on the title page in fading red ink, undated, uncharacteristically sentimental for two people who did not otherwise go in for uncharacteristic sentimentality with each other.

What held me from the very first page, though, was not the plot so much as the drawing itself: Herg's ligne claire, every object rendered in the same confident, unbroken line whether it was a teacup or a battleship, so that a reader's eye trusted the fictional geography of Syldavia exactly as much as it trusted the real geography of a space station two panels earlier.

It would be years before I understood that this trust was precisely the point, and precisely the danger. Herg drew invented countries with the same fastidious accuracy he gave to real ones, uniforms researched down to the button, invented currencies given invented exchange rates.

Nowhere is that fastidiousness more visible, or more consequential, than in The Blue Lotus, the album Herg researched so seriously that he tracked down a young Chinese art student in Brussels, Zhang Chongren, and let him correct every detail of the Shanghai he had never actually seen. The friendship between Tintin and the fictional Chang in that book, warm and unusually equal for a comic of its era, was Herg's own quiet rebuke to the era's casual racism, a correction he made even as he continued, elsewhere, to draw the very caricatures he was correcting against.

The plot itself sits on real ground: Japan's staged bombing of a railway near Mukden in 1931, used as pretext to invade Manchuria, appears in the book almost unaltered, along with a League of Nations too toothless to do anything but issue a strongly worded report while the occupation proceeded regardless.

Reading it as a child, I understood only that the Japanese officer Mitsuhirato looked appropriately villainous and that Chang was clearly meant to be liked. Reading it now, what stays with me is how precisely Herg mapped the gap between an international body's condemnation and an international body's power, a gap that has not, in the intervening ninety years, closed by very much.

In The Broken Ear, that same gap opens up again, this time in South America, where Tintin lands in the middle of a war between San Theodoros and Nuevo-Rico over a patch of worthless desert that turns out to sit on oil. I remember, distinctly, the panel of two rival arms dealers, each secretly representing a different oil company, shaking hands with whichever side happened to be losing that week.

As a child the joke read as simple cynicism about businessmen. As an adult it reads as an almost documentary account of the Chaco War, fought between Bolivia and Paraguay through the nineteen-thirties over land believed, wrongly as it turned out, to hold oil, and shadowed the entire time by Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell, each quietly backing a different side.

The banana-republic coup that installs a new San Theodoros dictator midway through the book, financed by whichever foreign company currently prefers him, remains a fair description of how several small, resource-rich states have changed governments since.

By the time of The Calculus Affair, Syldavia and Borduria were back, older and colder, competing this time not for territory but for a scientist. Professor Calculus, having stumbled onto a sound wave capable of shattering glass and, by clear implication, far more than glass, becomes a prize to be kidnapped rather than a man to be reasoned with.

I did not, at ten, know what a Cold War was. I only knew that Captain Haddock's fury at Bordurian soldiers felt satisfying in a way I couldn't name. I recognise it now as an early, comic-strip education in the idea that a single piece of knowledge could be worth invading a country for, an idea that fights just as hard over semiconductors and algorithms today as it once did over uranium.

By the nineteen-fifties, Herg had Tintin travelling to the moon in Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, a full decade before Apollo 11, complete with a fuel crisis and a saboteur working for a rival power desperate to steal the technology first. Our copy of the first book, the one with my mother's fading inscription, had been read so many times the cover had come away from the spine entirely.

The second book, sitting right beside it on the same shelf, looked oddly untouched, as if someone in that house had gotten just far enough into the story to be handed the sequel and then simply moved on to other things, marriage among them. The Cold War's actual space race had barely begun when these albums were published, yet Herg had already sketched its emotional temperature: paranoia about who reaches the frontier first, and sabotage disguised as accident.

Herg returned to San Theodoros one final time in Tintin and the Picaros, by then visibly tired of the whole business, and the tiredness turns out to be the point. General Alcazar, the same dictator from The Broken Ear, has since been overthrown and restored so many times that a coup has stopped meaning very much to anyone in the book, least of all the population, who greet the latest change of government with the same shrug they might give a change in bus timings.

The revolutionaries drink Coca-Cola under a sponsorship arrangement, and foreign journalists arrive mainly for the photographs. The whole affair resolves less through ideology than through the convenient discovery of a case of whisky.

Reading it now, decades after reading it as a child purely for Haddock's drunken slapstick, the satire feels aimed less at any one country than at the entire performance of revolution as a media event, uniforms changing while very little else does, a joke that travels uncomfortably well to newsrooms covering any number of coups since.

None of this nostalgia should paper over the albums that have aged far worse. Tintin in the Congo, drawn early in Herg's career for a conservative Belgian Catholic newspaper, presents Congolese characters as childlike caricatures in a way that reflected, and reinforced, the colonial attitudes of its moment; my own childhood copy, part of that same inherited shelf, was a later, softened edition, and it was years before I learned, with real discomfort, what the original had looked like.

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets sits closer to anti-Bolshevik propaganda than to reportage. Herg revised his most egregious material over the following decades and later expressed regret about his early work, shaped as it was by an environment that gave him little reason to know better.

The same imagination that could anticipate a war over oil or a race to the moon could also, in its youth, simply repeat the prejudices handed to it. Reading Tintin now means holding both of these facts at once, often within the same afternoon of reading.

What remains, once the caricatures are set aside and the prophecies are counted up, is a strange kind of comfort: proof that a comic drawn for children, about a reporter who almost never actually files a story, understood something about power that most adults still refuse to. Small countries get treated as poker chips, and oil turns border disputes into wars that outlast the oil itself.

Even a moon can become just another patch of desert once two rival flags want to plant themselves on it. I think, still, of that shelf built from two separate collections, my mother's neater Methuen spines and my father's dog-eared Mammoths, and of how a boy reporter who never seemed to age taught a whole generation of us, and apparently the generation before us too, to read a map before we ever needed one.

Herg invented Syldavia and San Theodoros mainly to avoid being sued by real governments, and ended up, almost by accident, drawing a map of the world that still fits.

- Ends