Finished reading Pierre Assouline's Herge: The Man Who Created TinTin, a gift John gave me for the New Year. I enjoyed reading this book, though I confess that I plodded through the passages on the Nazis, on the First World War, on Belgian history and culture, on publication intrigues, and on the estabishment of Herge Studios. The pith of the book, to me, is the creation of all 23 TinTin adventures in sequence, the research and preparation it took to produce them, the real-life characters they were based on, and the detailed synopsis the biographer provides each adventure.
The depiction of Herge's (George Remi's) life itself is bland. Though its narration includes his marriage, an affair, a divorce, and his death resulting from leukemia, all characters lack the three-dimensionality that one usually finds in definitive biographies, such as that of Pablo Picasso. Like the TinTin characters themselves, actually, and maybe that was the point. Herge is depicted as an obsessive-compulsive depressive whose main frustration was being unable to surpass the success of TinTin with other successes.
There were many interesting details nice to know, however. Such as that Herge wrote a children's play titled TinTin in India: The Mystery of the Blue Diamond. That he was influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock. That he included a self-portrait in the second panel of one of his comic books. That he and his wife, Germaine, and associates appear in the celebration illustrated in TinTin and King Ottokar's Sceptre. That in 1950 scientists named an asteroid Castafiore and in 1953 a small planet, Herge. And that he had an actual friend named Chang Chong-Chen with whom he was reunited in his old age, and that TinTin in Tibet could very well be his most autobiographical work.
A Jungian, Herge recorded his dreams, and two of them are in this book. He consulted fortune-tellers and heeded auguries before making major decisions. He collected paintings, African art, and Chinese vases. Toward the end of his life he ventured into painting and created 37 pieces.
The book ends with the film adaptations of his books and a long-drawn planning session with Steven Spielberg; it also mentions how Spielberg ended up borrowing, consciously or subconsciously, elements from the TinTin series in creating his Indiana Jones movies.
This is a must-read for all Herge and TinTin fans.
The depiction of Herge's (George Remi's) life itself is bland. Though its narration includes his marriage, an affair, a divorce, and his death resulting from leukemia, all characters lack the three-dimensionality that one usually finds in definitive biographies, such as that of Pablo Picasso. Like the TinTin characters themselves, actually, and maybe that was the point. Herge is depicted as an obsessive-compulsive depressive whose main frustration was being unable to surpass the success of TinTin with other successes.
There were many interesting details nice to know, however. Such as that Herge wrote a children's play titled TinTin in India: The Mystery of the Blue Diamond. That he was influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock. That he included a self-portrait in the second panel of one of his comic books. That he and his wife, Germaine, and associates appear in the celebration illustrated in TinTin and King Ottokar's Sceptre. That in 1950 scientists named an asteroid Castafiore and in 1953 a small planet, Herge. And that he had an actual friend named Chang Chong-Chen with whom he was reunited in his old age, and that TinTin in Tibet could very well be his most autobiographical work.
A Jungian, Herge recorded his dreams, and two of them are in this book. He consulted fortune-tellers and heeded auguries before making major decisions. He collected paintings, African art, and Chinese vases. Toward the end of his life he ventured into painting and created 37 pieces.
The book ends with the film adaptations of his books and a long-drawn planning session with Steven Spielberg; it also mentions how Spielberg ended up borrowing, consciously or subconsciously, elements from the TinTin series in creating his Indiana Jones movies.
This is a must-read for all Herge and TinTin fans.
No comments:
Post a Comment