Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>The Adventures of Tintin

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

The Adventures of Tintin

by John McGee

Are comics fine art? A recent article in the "International Herald Tribune" covered how an art museum at the University of Nebraska—"a temple to high modernism," according to the article—dealt with a donation of 120 pieces of original comic strip art from a former chairman of the university's art history department: They put them on display. And the museum curator plans to exhibit the collection regularly, exploring "how this genre impacted and is impacted by the whole tradition of Western art." 

Tintin and Snowy, by Hergé
(© Hergé/Moulinsart 2002)

In Japan, fine art and illustration are historically less divided than in the West. This ambiguity is perhaps what earned Tintin his first exhibition in Japan at the Bunkamura Museum. It is also perhaps the reason that the show avoids the issues addressed by the Nebraska museum and instead settles into simple product promotion. 

Tintin is the globe-trotting Belgian reporter with the Kewpie hairstyle and the high-water pants (plus fours) who is well-loved by European kids and, apparently, Japanese women in their 20s. But Rube Goldberg, not JTB, plans his trips. Tintin, his white fox terrier Snowy, and a menagerie of characters—gruff Captain Haddock, absent-minded Cuthbert Calculus, and twin cops Thompson and Thomson—stumble from one incredible Indiana Jones misadventure to the next en route to discovering the mysteries of the Black Isle and the Blue Lotus. 

Artist Georges Remi (1907-83), working under the pen-name Hergé, first created Tintin for the children's corner of the Belgian Catholic newspaper "Le Vingtieme Siecle" in 1929. The subsequent 23 volumes of Tintin's adventures have been translated into 40 languages and made into videos, T-shirts and towels. 

With specialty shops already open in Hiroo, Daikanyama, Harajuku and Odaiba, Tintin needs no introduction to Tokyo. So why hold this exhibition? To uncover how the "father of the modern European comic book" influenced generations of young artists with his rich colors and easy-reading storyboards? To dig into Hergé's portrayal of the complicated politics of WWII (e.g., in Tintin's journey to Japanese-occupied China in "The Blue Lotus") or of foreign cultures (Tintin's buffoonish, big-lipped black companion in the Congo)? 

Bianca Castafiore
(© Hergé/Moulinsart 2002)

No, to treat Tintin as a matinee idol. Viewers enter the fictional character's adventures via poorly realized anthropology museum-style dioramas. A real Willy's jeep parked on a sand pile is just like the car that inspired the one Tintin drove in the desert adventure, "Land of Black Gold." A full-scale model of Tintin's shark submarine from "Tintin and the Lake of Sharks" is surrounded by watery blue lights and an old-fashioned diving suit. There's a moon rock next to a model of Tintin's moon rocket. 

This show is really "The Mystery of the Magnetic Newsman." Why are young women, but not manga fans, attracted to Tintin? Is it the style, the color, the trips abroad? Tight-lipped Tintin, pictured here as an idealized young boy-husband, both son and lover (he's curiously absent from the full-scale rendition of his living room, perhaps to echo the stereotypical salariman father?), offers no answer. 

Tintin is undeniably a product. But Bunkamura ("culture village") is an art, not wax, museum. It's disappointing they didn't devote more space to how the Tintin books fit into the history of visual culture. As it is, the exhibition's best section has a series of panels tracing the production process, from rough sketches to black and white drawings and color proofs. 

Tintin followed his reporter's nose for things unusual or out of place. He peeped, creeped and overheard. He unearthed enigmas and righted wrongs. His curiosity was the source, means and end of his adventures. He wasn't a traveling salesman.

The Adventures of Tintin was held Mar-May 2002 at Bunkamura Museum of Art in Shibuya, Tokyo.

©2007 John McGee

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