Contents page Hergé Biography 2



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A Young Vic Production

HERGÉ’S ADVENTURES OF

TINTIN

Co-produced by BITE: 05, Barbican


Resource Pack



CONTENTS

Page

1. Hergé Biography 2

2. Tintin Biography 8

3. Family Circle Biographies 9

4. Tibet 11

5. The Yeti 14

6. Mysticism 18

7. Tibetan Buddhism 21

8. A Brief History of the Comic Book 22

9. Cast and Creative Team 26

10. Synopsis 27

11. Assistant Director’s Rehearsal Room Diary 29

12. Interview with Co-writer, David Greig 45

13. Interview with Designer, Ian MacNeil 47

14. Interview with Sound Designer, Paul Arditti 48

15. Interview with Composer, Orlando Gough 49

16. Songs 51

17. Further Reading 53

18. Interview: The Daily Telegraph 54
If you have any questions or comments about this Resource Pack please contact us:

The Young Vic, 2nd floor Chester House, 1 – 3 Brixton Road, London, SW9 6DE

t: 020 7820 3350 f: 020 7820 3355 e: info@youngvic.org

Written by: Joe Hill-Gibbins Additional Material: Lucinka Eisler


Young Vic 2005
First performed at the Barbican on 1 December 2005

1. HERGÉ BIOGRAPHY
‘Hergé’ is the pen name of Georges Remi, the Belgian comics writer and artist who found international fame through his creation, The Adventures of Tintin. Taking his pseudonym from the French pronunciation of RG, the reverse of his initials, Remi wrote and illustrated the Tintin books from 1929 up until his death in 1983. The notable qualities of the Tintin stories include their human warmth, a realistic feel (created by Hergé's meticulous and wide-ranging research) and the artist’s ligne claire drawing style (see below). There are twenty-three Tintin adventures in total (not including the unfinished Tintin and Alph-art, which Hergé was working on at the time of his death).

Childhood


Georges Remi was born in 1907 in Etterbeek, near Brussels, Belgium. His parents, Alexis and Elisabeth Remi, were a middle-class couple who met and lived in Brussels. His four years of primary schooling coincided with World War One (19141918), during which the city was occupied by the German Empire. Georges, who displayed an early affinity for drawing, filled the margins of his earliest schoolbooks with doodles of the German invaders. Except for a few drawing lessons which he would later take at Ecole Saint-Luc, he never had any formal training in the visual arts.
In 1920, he began studying in the Collège Saint-Boniface, a secondary school where the teachers were catholic priests. Georges joined the school’s Boy Scouts troop, where he was given the totemic name Renard Curieux (Curious Fox). His first drawings were published in Jamais Assez, the school's scout paper, and, from 1923, in Le Boy-Scout Belge, the scout monthly magazine. It was in 1924 that he began to sign his illustrations using the pseudonym Hergé.
His subsequent comics work would be heavily influenced by the ethics of the scouting movement, as well as the early travel experiences he made with his scout troop.
Early Career

On finishing school in 1925, Georges worked at the Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siècle. The following year, he published his first cartoon series, The Adventures of Totor, in the scouting magazine Le Boy-Scout Belge. In 1928, he was put in charge of producing material for the Le XXe Siècle's new weekly supplement for children, Le Petit Vingtième. He began illustrating The Adventures of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette, and Cochonnet, a strip written by a member of the newspaper's sports staff, but soon became dissatisfied with this series. He decided to create a comic strip of his own, which would adopt the recent American innovation of using speech balloons to depict words coming out of the characters' mouths. Previously lines of dialogue had appeared like subtitles, outside of the panel of artwork.


Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, by Hergé, appeared in black and white in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième in January 1929, and ran until May 1930. The strip chronicles the adventures of a young reporter named Tintin and his pet fox terrier Snowy (named Milou in the original French version) as they journey through the Soviet Union. The character of Tintin was inspired by Georges' brother Paul Remi, an officer in the Belgian army.
In January 1930, Hergé created Quick & Flupke a new comic strip about two street urchins from Brussels, for the pages of Le Petit Vingtième. For many years, Hergé would continue to produce this less well-known series in parallel with his Tintin stories. In June, he began the second Tintin adventure, Tintin in the Congo (then the colony of Belgian Congo), followed by Tintin in America and Cigars of the Pharaoh.
In 1932, he married Germaine Kieckens, the secretary of the director of the Le XXe Siècle. They had no children,

and would later divorce in 1975 when Hergé began a relationship with a young illustrator, Fanny Vlamynck.


The early Tintin adventures each took about a year to complete, upon which they were released in book form by the Casterman publishing house. Years later Hergé would express embarrassment over the old fashioned, colonial attitudes expressed in these early works. For instance, an infamous sequence in Tintin in the Congo has Tintin giving a geography lesson to native students in a missionary school. "My dear friends," exclaims Tintin, "today I am going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!" In a later edition, the scene was changed into an arithmetic lesson. Hergé would continue revising his stories in subsequent editions, including a later conversion to colour.
World War Two

The Second World War broke out on September 1st, 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. Hergé was mobilized as a reserve lieutenant, and had to interrupt Tintin's adventures in the middle of Land of Black Gold. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1940, Belgium had fallen to Germany with the rest of Continental Europe and Le Petit Vingtième, in which Tintin's adventures had hitherto been published, was shut down by the German occupation. However, Hergé accepted an offer to produce a new Tintin strip in Le Soir, Brussels' leading French daily, which had been appropriated as the mouthpiece of the occupation forces. He had to leave The Land of the Black Gold unfinished, due to its anti-fascist overtones, launching instead into The Crab with the Golden Claws, the first of six Tintin stories which he would produce during the war.


As the war progressed, two factors arose that led to a revolution in Hergé's style. Firstly, paper shortages forced Tintin to be published in a daily three or four-frame strip, rather than two full pages every week which had been the practice on Le Petit Vingtième. In order to create tension at the end of each strip rather than the end of each page, Hergé had to introduce more frequent gags and faster-paced action. Secondly, Hergé had to move the focus of Tintin's adventures away from current affairs, in order to avoid controversy. He turned to stories with an escapist flavour: an expedition to a meteorite (The Shooting Star), a treasure hunt (The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure), and a quest to undo an ancient Inca curse (The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun).
In these stories, Hergé placed more emphasis on characterization than on the plot, and indeed Tintin's most memorable companions, Captain Haddock and Cuthbert Calculus (in French, Professeur Tryphon Tournesol), were introduced at this time. Haddock debuted in The Crab with the Golden Claws and Calculus in Red Rackham's Treasure. The impact of these changes were not lost on the readers; in reprint, these stories have proven to be amongst the most popular.
In 1943, Hergé met Edgar Pierre Jacobs, another comics artist, whom he hired to help revise the early Tintin albums. Jacob's most significant contribution would be his redrawing of the costumes and backgrounds in the revised edition of King Ottokar's Sceptre. He also began collaborating with Hergé on the new Tintin adventure, The Seven Crystal Balls.
Post War

The occupation of Brussels ended on September 3rd, 1944 and Tintin's adventures were interrupted toward the end of The Seven Crystal Balls when the Allied authorities shut down Le Soir. During the chaotic post-occupation period, Hergé was arrested four times by different groups. He was publicly accused of being a German sympathizer, a claim which was largely unfounded, as the Tintin adventures published during the war were scrupulously free of politics (the only dubious point occurring in The Shooting Star, which showed a rival scientific expedition flying the Flag of the United States). In fact, the stories published before the war had been unequivocally critical of fascism; most prominently, King Ottokar's Sceptre showed Tintin working to defeat a thinly-veiled allegory of Nazi Germany's takeover of Austria. Nevertheless, like other former employees of the Nazi-controlled press, Hergé found himself barred from newspaper work. He spent the next two years working with Jacobs, as well as a new assistant, Alice Devos, adapting many of the early Tintin adventures into colour.


Tintin's exile ended on September 6th, 1946. The publisher and wartime resistance fighter Raymond Leblanc provided the financial support and anti-Nazi credentials to launch Tintin Magazine with Hergé. The weekly publication featured two pages of Tintin's adventures, beginning with the remainder of The Seven Crystal Balls, as well as other comic strips and assorted articles. It became highly successful, with circulation surpassing 100,000 every week.
Tintin had always been credited as simply ‘by Hergé’, without mention of Edgar Pierre Jacobs and Hergé's other assistants. As Jacobs' contribution to the production of the strip increased, he began demanding a joint credit. Hergé refused and ended their hitherto fruitful collaboration. Jacobs then went on to produce his own comics for Tintin Magazine, including the widely-acclaimed Blake and Mortimer.
Hergé started out drawing in a much looser, rougher style which was influenced partially by the great American comic strip artists of the late 1920s and 1930s. It was only after World War Two that his drawing style evolved into the famous ligne claire style. Literally meaning the clear line, ligne claire is a style of drawing which uses simple strong lines, all with the same thickness and importance (rather than different widths and colours being used to emphasize certain objects or for shading. For this reason it is sometimes also called the democracy of lines). Additionally, the style often features strong colours and cartoonish characters against a realistic background.
Personal Crisis

The increased demands which Tintin Magazine placed on Hergé began to take their toll. In 1949, while working on the new version of Land of Black Gold (the first version had been left unfinished by the outbreak of World War Two), Hergé suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to take an abrupt four month-long break. He suffered another breakdown in early 1950, while working on Destination Moon.


In order to lighten Hergé's workload, the Hergé Studios was set up on April 6th, 1950. The studio employed a variety of assistants to help Hergé in producing The Adventures of Tintin. Foremost amongst these was the artist Bob De Moor, who would collaborate with Hergé on the remaining Tintin adventures, filling in details and backgrounds such as the spectacular lunar landscapes in Explorers on the Moon. With the aid of the studio, Hergé managed to produce The Calculus Affair (regarded by some as his most polished work) in 1954, followed by The Red Sea Sharks in 1956.

Last Years


The last three complete Tintin adventures were produced at a much reduced pace: The Castafiore Emerald in 1961, Flight 714 in 1966, and Tintin and the Picaros only in 1975. However, by this time Tintin had begun to move into other media. From the start of Tintin Magazine, Raymond Leblanc had used Tintin for merchandising and advertisements. In 1961, the first Tintin movie was made: Tintin and the Golden Fleece, with Jean-Pierre Talbot as Tintin. Several Tintin animated cartoons have also been made, beginning with Prisoners of the Sun in 1969.
Tintin's financial success allowed Hergé to devote more of his time to travel. He travelled widely across Europe, and in 1971 visited America for the first time, meeting some of the Native Americans whose culture had long been a source of fascination for him. In 1973, he visited Taiwan, accepting an invitation offered three decades earlier by the Kuomintang government, in appreciation of The Blue Lotus.
Hergé died on March 3, 1983, aged 75, due to complications arising from anemia, which he had suffered from for several years. He left the twenty-fourth Tintin adventure, Tintin and Alph-Art
, unfinished. Following his expressed desire not to have Tintin handled by another artist, it was published posthumously as a set of sketches and notes in 1986. In 1987 Remi closed Hergé Studios and replaced it with the Hergé Foundation – shifting the focus of the Hergé estate from production to promotion of existing work.



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