CARTOONISTS AND THEIR CHRISTMASSES

CHRISTMAS 
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

FROM THE CARTOONISTS

by Rick Marschall

As this site's late, beloved founder, John Adcock, occasionally planned, in the run-up to Christmas I will share some seasonal and rare artwork by cartoonists, illustrators, and animators through the years. 

In a week or two I will share custom artwork cartoonists did for me, but today I got to thinking of "ghosts" (not ghost artists!) of Christmases past. Below is card that I cherish. I was on the Christmas-card list of Hergé. This is perhaps his last, with the handwritten salutation of him and his wife Fanny. 

It got me to thinking of cards I received through the years, that ceased, somewhat logically, when the cartoonists died. On the other hand, Jeannie and the Schulz family have maintained the list, and their greetings are gratefully received: Charlie Brown Christmasses live on. Dean Young, whose Blondie -- and himself -- magnificently flourish today, still designs and mails out custom, personalized (i.e., not Hallmark/commercial) greetings. I hope not amiss to share this year's:

My ol' friend Dean (our book Blondie and Dagwood's America was the second of my 75 books...) is loyal to the iconic strip's many fans. A merrrry Christmas indeed.

So as I plan to share some other vintage and precious treasures in coming days, I will share again the Tintin card from 1982. (By the way, by my calculation, these days and dates will apply again in 2033, if you can wait to hand this above your desk (for more than the great artwork!) I used to own three original Tintin pages, so I get nostalgic over such mementos...

Joyeux Noël!

 

                                   

Hergé New Year

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Original Hergé inspired Comics Art in Cartoonmuseum Basel

 

[2013] Picture rhyme fun by Exem.

The Cartoonmuseum Basel, in Switzerland, uses this funny drawing to advertise its latest exhibition of original comics art inspired by the work of Tintin author Hergé from Belgium, opened Saturday. The art is by Swiss comics artist Exem, penname of Emmanuel Excoffier (Geneva, 1951). It shows comics art characters as well as authors who have been bombarded with the ‘clear line’ label. Exem obviously had great fun in composing this picture rhyme full of quotations of comic strip characters and their backgrounds.

Covering both sides of the white centerline, in yellow Chinese robes, are Belgian authors Remi and Jacobs. In the crowd behind them is Belgian artist Ever Meulen (‘E’), walking shoulder to shoulder with Tintin/Kuifje. Hergé biographer Huib van Opstal tells me this drawing alone can easily lead to a page-long footnote. For instance on inventor Edward N. Hines, whose genius led to white centerlines on streets and motorways, read more HERE.

Dutch artist Joost Swarte came up with the label ‘De Klare Lijn’ in 1977, as the title for a little catalogue for the Hergé inspired exhibition of original comics art ‘Kuifje in Rotterdam’ (Tintin in Rotterdam) in the Lijnbaancentrum of the Rotterdam Arts Council. A label soon translated into la ligne claire and the clear line.

The present  exhibition in Basel shows a wide range of original art by no less than fifty artists from Europe as well as America.

Visit the Cartoonmuseum Basel HERE.

St. Alban-Vorstadt 28, in Basel.

The Adventures of the Ligne claire. The Herr G. & Co. Affair.

Hergé inspired exhibition of original comics art.

October 26, 2013, to March 9, 2014.

Cartoonmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Vorstadt 28
CH-4052 Basel

Tuesday-Friday 14.00-18.00
Saturday-Sunday 11.00-18.00

♦

Comic strip reporter ‘Bourlekrane’ and his colleague ‘Tintin’

         

[1] Preview of Bourlekrane, with camera bag and pencil on the road to Morocco, 18 June 1925, les petits bonshommes.

This French comic strip character is from a forgotten children’s weekly with no capital letters in its title, les petits bonshommes (the little puppets), sub-titled ‘Paraissant tous les jeudis’ (appears every Thursday) in 1925. It was published in Paris by a company named Société Anonyme “Education”; perhaps it just set out  to educate reading — judging by the paper’s title payoff ‘…quand même!…’ which translates to: ‘even them.’

     
Artist-writer Aristide Perré (1888-1958) made several strips for this magazine in the early 1920s. Mildly humorous stories in a seemingly primitive but effective bigfoot and silly walk style.

[2]  Cover of les petits bonshommes, 8 October 1925.

Strips such as the adventures of Bourlekrane, reporter of Le Petit Bobard, for which the first announcement appeared in print in les petits bonhommes of 18 June 1925. The French ‘bobard’ means little lie. The French ‘boule crane’ means ball skull, although that may have nothing to do with the name of the comic character.

[3] Bourlekrane chez les indigènes.

  
A similar 1920s reporter featuring in comic strip adventures was Tintin, reporter of Le Petit Vingtième, created by Hergé (1907-83) on 4 January 1929. Belgian reporter Tintin (short for ‘Valentin’) started his career as primitive as his French colleague Bourlekrane. The strip appeared on Thursdays too, in Le Petit Vingtième, the weekly children’s supplement of a small Brussels newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle (the twentieth century).

[4] Bourlekrane chez les indigènes (Suite).

Update: 

Jean-Claude Michel has provided a more exact meaning for the term ‘bourlekrane’. He explains 

“In fact, “Bourlekrane” is just a name constructed about “bourre le crâne”, and this expression means something like “brainwashing”.

For instance, someone who tell (or write) false facts, but so well that many people finally believe what he says.

In other terms, the name “Bourlekrane” is very well adapted for a certain kind of journalists...”

Essay RG – most dreamlike of Hergé biographies

Huib van Opstal (from Amsterdam, the Netherlands) wrote, designed, and published this essential history ‘Essay RG; Het fenomeen Hergé’ (Essay RG; The Hergé phenomenon), the result of fourteen years labor which which hit the stands in 1994.  The original edition appeared in Dutch with a French language edition ‘Tracé RG; Le Phénomène Hergé’ (Brussels: Lefrancq), following in 1998. Van Opstal’s work is a true analysis of a most influential comic strip artist.

Reviewers called ‘Essay RG’ ‘...monumental...,’ ‘definitive...,’ ‘classic...,’ and ‘astounding...’  The fanzine of the experts, Les Amis de Hergé stated: “There is more in 10 pages of Van Opstal than in the majority of books on Hergé.”

Essay RG is about the life and work of Belgian ‘Tintin’ author Hergé (full four-part name Georges Prosper Remi Remi, Georges Remi in short, 1907-83), who composed his signature out of his reversed initials. Hergé, a Belgian, was born in Etterbeek, near Brussels, and was bilingual, speaking both French and Dutch. In his second language, in 1943, his primary comic strip hero ‘Tintin’ was named ‘Kuifje’ (‘little quiff’) in the first daily Tintin strips translated into Flemish, the Dutch spoken in the upper half of Belgium.

This most dreamlike of biographies about a comic master is a masterful blending of text and graphics taken from comic strips, cinema, and popular boys’ literature. Text is based on interviews and solid research in archival collections. Nothing is insignificant to the author — the little notice of the death of Hergé, the postal stamps, the signatures of Christophe and the many signatures of Georges Remi or Hergé, the hand-lettered art-deco designs — good designers understand that text and pictures are both graphics, and of equal importance. The cover is brilliant, no stating the obvious, but a sunny black-and-white picture of a proud and pleased Hergé arms on hips in his backyard — a still life with a garden basket from the 1920s.

I have some problems reading the text (not familiar with Dutch) but a lot of the text I typed into Google Translate, with mixed results. Sometimes the robot is uncannily accurate; othertimes baffling.

Covers of 1994 ‘Essay RG. Het fenomeen Hergé’ (Delange). The 1995 extra 16-page quire with media background reportage ‘Essay RG. De eerste reacties’ (Delange). The 1998 French edition ‘Tracé RG. Le Phénomène Hergé’ (Lefrancq).

Titles and dates printed under the images and in the text are in the original languages and the whole is admirably footnoted. The pictures are from primary sources; photographs of the cartoonist, samples of his early work, odd little strips from the twenties and thirties supplements of Le XXe Siècle and Le Vingtième Siècle, newspaper comics in black-and-white from the period of Nazi occupation, the 1960 Europress Junior logo, stills from films like The 39 Steps and the Rin Tin Tin serials, covers from Voilà, and the cemetery map to the master’s grave. The pictures are often shown in fascinating pairs or sets, titled ‘beeldrijm’ or ‘picture rhyme’ to show the amazing range of historic influences on Hergé’s work.

The author knows his comic history and here are early and often surprising influences from American and European comics, and examples of unknown work by Hergé. Hergé’s cultural influences are also explored — he grew up with Fantomas, Meliès, Paul D’ivoi, Charlie Chaplin and Baden-Powell to feed his imagination.

There is a chilling image of Hergé from the brochure ‘Galerie des Traitres’ (Gallery of Traitors) which published photographs and home addresses of the artist and 44 co-workers at the ‘stolen Le Soir’ daily newspaper of World War II. It was nothing less than a bloodcurdling call to murder. The cover of Pourquoi Pas? (Why Not?) titled ‘L’expiation’ (the atonement) graphically illustrates the climate after the war with its drawing of hanged collaborators.

The design in the Dutch first edition (all the work of the author — the book is a real one-man show) is only a little different from that of the 1998 French first edition. Each of its 256 pages is packed with information in the form of texts, graphics, photographs and illuminating footnotes and bibliographies. I would gladly trade all other current Hergé biographies in English for a chance to read ‘Essay RG’ — a stunning feast for the mind and eye — in my native language.

Tintin et Milou

The first time I laid eyes on the intrepid moon-faced reporter Tintin and his sagacious dog Snowy was in elementary school about 1959 when I delighted in finding a copy of the Methuen book Red Rackham's Treasure in the school library.

Tintin et Milou first appeared in the 11th issue of Le Petit Vingtiéme, the weekly children’s supplement to the Belgian daily newspaper Le Viengtiéme Siècle on 10 January 1929. In 1951 the strip was serialized in the British comic weekly Eagle, followed by Methuen’s English-language versions of the albums, beginning with The Black Island in 1958. Translation was by Leslie-Lonsdale Cooper and Michael Turner.

‘Tintin, Milou, and European Humanism’ was written 3 October 1957 for The Listener, and is a welcome counterpoint to scurrilous attacks on Hergé on the internet and in print. Tintin and Asterix the Gaul were in trouble in England as early as October 1983, when librarians received complaints of racism and sexism in both titles. Tintin was considered the worst offender. This brought forth a letter to the Times which said “Mr. Dunn admits that the children who frequent the library would be sorry to see the books banned: on the available evidence, so would anyone with any sense or sense of humour.”

“I never met Georges Remi. I didn't miss anything,” wrote Pierre Assouline in the introduction to his recent biography, Hergé: the Man Who Created Tintin, Oxford University Press, 2011. Actually he missed quite a lot. Assouline knows or cares nothing about comics so he ignores them almost all together. His biography is like reading about a cipher. Hergé could be a banker, a baker, or a bureaucrat, rather than one of the most famous and influential comic creators who ever lived.

I would recommend another biography in English instead: Benoît Peeters Hergé, Son of Tintin, the John Hopkins University Press, 2012. Peeters knew Hergé personally, interviewed him, and does not dissasociate the man from his work. Nor does he shy away from the more contentious aspects of wartime collaboration.