Art For Art’s Sake #128: Alternative Tintin

by Richard Bruton

Art For Art’s Sake – this week we’re having a look at Hergé’s boy reporter, although not exactly Hergé’s version. Over the years there have been many, many different Tintin pastiches out there, the majority of them wonderfully warm and loving renditions of Tintin et al. Some… not so much. But they’re all worth looking at…

Let’s start with a couple of HUGE names…

Moebius does Tintin doing a portrait of Hergé…

André Juillard –

Claude Mirande – Tintin; everybody’s got a thing…

Emmanuel Excoffier –

Simon Roussin –

Kim Jung Gi – Tintin homage

Dan Schkade – Le Petit Vigilantè

Luc Jacamont –

Joost Verkamp –

Something a little Lovecraftian – via Muzski (Murray Groat) –

Dan Hipp’s been known to done the occasional Tintin version…

Xiphos –

Yves Rodier –

Dran –

And this one, written by Paul Tobin, with art from Dustin Weaver – Fantastic Four Giant-Size Adventures (One-Shot) – ‘The Adventures of Thing Thing: The Blue Cheese Affair’ (2009) – Ben Grimm has a strange, strange dream…

And then, of course, there’s The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free, an anarchist parody that first appeared in 1988 from Attack International where the boy reporter is recast as one the ’80s disaffected youths of Thatcher’s Britain, shifting from dole-ite kid to revolutionary leader.

Now, in the past, I’ve done this sort of thing at various other places I’ve written for and … boom… within a few days there’s an email from Moulinsart (The Hergé Foundation) with a takedown notice. They are REALLY protective over what they own. Never mind the idea of fair use and satire, they’re all over you with the legal notices.

Case in point – the recent fuss about the French artist Xavier Marabout, who’s already been to court defending his right to create his Hergé – Hopper mashup series imagining Tintin in the landscapes of Edward Hopper.

Marabout created 21 pieces from 2013-2017 in his Hergé – Hopper series that imagined the boy reporter and other Tintin characters inhabiting the lonely, isolated world of Edward Hopper’s landscapes of American culture…