Joe Sutliff Sanders (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781496807267
- eISBN:
- 9781496807304
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496807267.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is one of the most important and influential figures in the history of comics. His style popularized what has become known as the “clear line” in cartooning, but these ...
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Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is one of the most important and influential figures in the history of comics. His style popularized what has become known as the “clear line” in cartooning, but these thirteen scholars show how his life and art were actually very complicated.
The book includes analyses of Hergé’s aesthetic techniques, including studies of his efforts to comprehend and represent absence and the rhythm of mundanity between panels of action. Broad views of his career explain how Hergé navigated changing ideas of air travel, and narrow readings of his life and work during Nazi occupation explain how the changing demands of the occupied press transformed his understanding of what comics could do. Other chapters explore the fraught lines between high and low art. By reading the late masterpieces of the Tintin series, these comics scholars from around the world attempt to answer a question Hergé himself never could: where his own legacy would fall between high art and low art. The book also reexamines Hergé’s place in the history of cartooning, considering how the clear line style has been reinterpreted around the world, from contemporary Francophone writers to a widely praised Chinese-American cartoonist and on to Turkey, where Tintin has been reinvented into something more specifically meaningful to an audience Hergé probably never anticipated.
With authors from five continents drawing on a variety of critical methods, the chapters of The Comics of Hergé show how rich comics can become when the lines blur.Less
Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is one of the most important and influential figures in the history of comics. His style popularized what has become known as the “clear line” in cartooning, but these thirteen scholars show how his life and art were actually very complicated.
The book includes analyses of Hergé’s aesthetic techniques, including studies of his efforts to comprehend and represent absence and the rhythm of mundanity between panels of action. Broad views of his career explain how Hergé navigated changing ideas of air travel, and narrow readings of his life and work during Nazi occupation explain how the changing demands of the occupied press transformed his understanding of what comics could do. Other chapters explore the fraught lines between high and low art. By reading the late masterpieces of the Tintin series, these comics scholars from around the world attempt to answer a question Hergé himself never could: where his own legacy would fall between high art and low art. The book also reexamines Hergé’s place in the history of cartooning, considering how the clear line style has been reinterpreted around the world, from contemporary Francophone writers to a widely praised Chinese-American cartoonist and on to Turkey, where Tintin has been reinvented into something more specifically meaningful to an audience Hergé probably never anticipated.
With authors from five continents drawing on a variety of critical methods, the chapters of The Comics of Hergé show how rich comics can become when the lines blur.
