Mention the topic of classic European comic strips and the names Astérix and Tintin spring instantly to mind. Previously I delved into the stupendous comic book institution that is Astérix the Gaul in the blog ‘The Astérix Series: High Comic Art with a Few Dark Shadows’ (19 November 2022). The Tintin comic strip shares with Astérix the same high pedestal of best-selling popularity, enduring iconic status and attendant cult following. Tintin is a boy reporter❶ of unspecified age with a distinctive (carrot) blond quiff of hair and trademark plus-fours who embarks on numerous adventures to exotic locations accompanied by his companions: a white wire fox terrier Snowy (Fr: Milou), Captain Haddock the good-hearted dipsomaniac seafarer and Professor Calculus, a genius if absent-minded inventor. Since the publication of the first Tintin comic book in 1929 total sales of Tintin books have clocked up more than 200 million copies, with an appeal that reaches both adults and children❷.
Hergé with a cinematic clone of his fictional boy hero࿏
Graphical style
Tintin’s creator wrote and published under the name of Hergé (real name: Georges Remi)…the Belgian cartoonist pioneered a distinctive drawing style for comic strips which later became known as Ligne claire (“Clear line”) (coined by Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte in 1977). This comprises ”uniform strong lines, flat saturated colour” and “clearly delineated shapes and volumes” (‘The Afterlife of Tintin’, Jenny Hendrix, LA Review of Books, 27-Dec-2022, www.lareviewofbooks.org).
Blighted by propaganda, racism and chauvinism Tintin was instantly and massively popular right from the cartoon’s onset—boosted by Hergé’s innovative use of speech bubbles, an American invention unfamiliar to the European comic scene at the time—despite this the comic has garnered its fair share of flak as has Hergé, the author. The first three books, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America, in particular drew the ire of critics. The first with its unsubtle anti-communist message was much disparaged as “cheap right-wing propaganda for small children” (Harry Thompson, Hergé: Tintin and his Creator (2011). The Congo and America books were pilloried in some circles for blatantly racist depictions of native populations. The youthful Hergé, swayed by a conservative Catholic upbringing, was very much a creature of the time and his crude depictions of the Black African tribes in particular reflected a prevailing Eurocentric sense of superiority and prejudice. Tintin Au Congo praises the virtues of colonialism and missionaries and expresses a wholly patronising view of the local Africans who are portrayed as primitive, lazy and infantile❸ (‘Hergé’, Lambiek Comiclopedia, www.lambiek.net). Another criticism of the Tintin comics is the charge of sexism, women are almost completely erased from the stories – the one female figure with anything like a steady presence in the books is operatic diva Bianca Castafiore who is portrayed unflatteringly as foolish and imperceptive (Hergé pointedly is on record as saying women have no part in the stories which “are all about male friendship”).
In the early Sixties there were 2 French-made film adaptations of Tintin࿏Other discordant voices against Tintin’s author surfaced during the Nazi occupation of Belgium during WWII. Hergé worked for collaborationist pro-Nazi newspapers Le Petit Vingtième and Le Soir and elements of Anti-Semitism emerged in his presentation of Jews. Unfortunately it didn’t end with the war, Jewish racial stereotypes also reappear in postwar Tintin stories, eg, Vol 714 pour Sydney (‘Flight 714 to Sydney’). A parody by Belgian cartoonist Dubus depicting a captive Tintin begging businessman Rodwell for his liberty (Source: Sydney Morning Herald)࿏
”Kidnapping” a children’s icon?
Since Hergé’s death in 1983 Tintin’s artistic providence and the author’s estate has been rigidly controlled to the nth degree by his widow Fanny Vlamynck and her second husband Nick Rodwell. Hergé’s heirs through their management firm Moulinsart S.A. Moulinsart spearheaded by an unflinching Rodwell have obsessively pursued a crusade, suing everybody who uses Hergé or Tintin’s name or image without their permission. Not content with cracking down on bootleggers, plagiarists and copyright infringers, perversely they have targeted Tintin parodists, students, collectors, fan clubs, comic stores and people auctioning original artwork as well. They even tried to block journalists from taking unauthorised photographs at the Hergé Museum opening event (Lambiek). Individuals subjected to Moulinsart’s trigger-quick lawsuits include a French novelist who reproduced a drawing of Tintin in a book with a print run of only 200 copies and an elderly artist (and friend of Hergé) who painted the image of Tintin on some old bottles (‘Meet Nick Rodwell, Tintin heir and least popular man in Belgium’, Julien Oeuillet, Sydney Morning Herald, 30-Oct-2015, www.smh.com.au). Bart Beaty, a professor of comics at the University of Calgary, described Moulinsart as being “relentless in the protection of the Tintin copyrights even to the point of discouraging academic study of the Tintin books” (‘Moulinsart Lost A Legal Case At The Hague Over Tintin Rights’, Comics Reporter, 08-Jun-2025, www.comicsreporter.com). Other detractors including Hergé’s nephew have pointed out how under Moulinsart‘s direction “a hero dedicated to children has become the lynchpin of a profit-minded machine that is stifling the enthusiasm of Tintin admirers“ (‘Fans of Tintin cry foul’, Stanley Pignal, Financial Times, 08-May-2010, www.ft.com).
Moulinsart have mined the full depths of Tintin’s merchandising potential, many spin-off items priced at the luxury high-end
Genootschap (Source: www.hergegenootschap.nl/)࿏A small win for Tintinphiles and Tintinologists
The pattern shifted a few years ago when Moulinsart and Rodwell’s attempt to prosecute a small Dutch fanzine of Tintin Hergé Genootschap (Hergé Society (or Fellowship)) for including Hergé’s strip in its newsletter backfired badly❹. In a surprise twist a Dutch court in 2015 ruled that a 1942 contract between Hergé and his publisher Ediciones Casterman presented by the defence gave Casterman, NOT Moulinsart, the rights to publish the 22 Tintin albums. The right “to exploit extracts of the books and pictures” however still belong to the Hergé heirs (‘Tintin and the Copyright Mystery, Carolina Sánchez, Lady Trademark, 06-Oct-2015, www.ladytrademark.blogspot.com).
Fmr Australian prime minster Kevin Rudd satirised as Tintin
Endnote: Imitating Tintin
Parodies and pastiches satirising Tintin have been around since the 1940s. When Hergé compromised his reputation by publishing (Tintin) in a collaborationist-run Belgium newspaper” in war-time, it provoked a satire of Tintin, ‘Tintin au Pays des Nazis’ (‘Tintin in the Land of the Nazis’). Other parodies featuring Tintin include as a disaffected working class English youth who turns to political radicalism; ‘Tintin in Lebanon’ and ‘Tintin in Iraq’, embroiling Hergé’s “golden boy” in the intractable maze of Middle East conflicts; ‘Tintin in The Shire’, Tintin as a stereotypical Sydney bogan, etc.❺
≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖
❶ though he acts more like a detective, investigating crimes and mysteries and at times carries a pistol and even makes arrests
❷ according to Tintin’s publishing house the books are marketed for “the youth between 7 and 77 years old” demographic
❸ to his credit Hergé did redress some of the crude and xenophobic representations of the earlier books in Le Lotus Bleu (‘The Blue Lotus’, 1934-35) in which Hergé depicts China and the Chinese people with more accuracy and evenness (Lambiek)
❹ Rodwell’s attempt to sue a French artist who did mash-ups of Tintin and Edward Hopper paintings was also thrown out of court with the judge determining that the artist’s works were legitimate parodies of Tintin which was fair game
❺ “most of these parodies would probably have remained obscure curiosities, if it weren’t for Moulinsart’s active attempts to hunt the makers down, giving them more publicity” (Lambiek)
Grawlix: a spiral-shaped graphic used to indicate swearing in comic strips (comprising typographical symbols, non-letter graphic characters which are encased in a word-free balloon)
~ Wiktionary, http://wiktionary.org
Etymology of the Grawlix The term Grawlix itself comes from veteran American cartoonist Addison Morton Walker. The sprightly nonagenarian better known to the world as Mort Walker has gleaned lifelong fame in the US (and elsewhere where his comics are treasured) from two of his creations, Beetle Bailey and a spin-off of sorts, Hi and Lois. Beetle Bailey is especially beloved of seriously rusted-on US comic aficionados. Beetle, a private (zero-class!) in an unnamed US Army military post, has been described as “a feckless, shirking, perpetual goof-off and straggler known for his chronic laziness and generally insubordinate attitude”. Debuting in September 1950 Beetle Bailey is among the oldest comic strips still being produced by the original creator [‘Beetle Bailey’, Wikipedia,http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Copycat grawlixing!
Walker apparently coined the term ‘grawlix’ around 1964…it appears in a tongue-in-cheek article he penned called “Let’s Get Down to Grawlixes”. A nonsense word, grawlix is the descriptor that Walker came up with to depict a cartoonist’s standard device: to show that one of his or her’s characters was uttering a “four-letter” word or words in the strip without infringing any moral codes, the cartoonist would draw a combination of typographical symbols and insert them in the dialogue balloon in place of the actual profane words. Commonly but not uniformly, the symbols used are @#$%&! or slight variations on this (whichever typographics are used, the grawlix always ends with an exclamation mark [Nordquist]). And as a way of expressing powerful, earthy emotions without having to call in the censors, it caught on within the realm of popular graphic art!”❉
Mort Walker’s catalogue of neologisms
In his Lexicon of Comicana (1980) Walker in his jocular fashion elaborates on his personal vocabulary of neologisms from the world of the cartoonist (with mock grandness he called these his Symbolia)…so in addition to grawlix the Lexicon contains many of Walker’s trademark neologisms, words coined for his own amusement, some with strange-sounding onomatopoeic names – a few of which are listed below.
In addition to grawlix, Walker devised and named three other sets of symbols and squiggles representing graphic euphemisms for the unspeakable and very taboo swear words – Quimps, Jarns and Nittles (basically hard to distinguish from grawlixes but something very similar by another name!) [World Wide Words].
Moving away the topic of obscenities Mort came up with other words to describe some of the graphics representing the range of feelings and emotions experienced by his comic personae – such as squean – squeans are starbursts and little circles above the character’s head to indicate a state of intoxication, dizziness or unwellness¤.
Other logo-inventions in the idiosyncratic Walker Lexicon are variations on the same theme – such as: Emanate – lines drawn around the head to show shock or surprise Plewds – flying sweat droplets that appear around a character’s head to indicate working hard, stressed, etc.
An indotherm – as opposed to a wafteron!
Another neologism in Walker’s ‘cartoonucopia’ is Indotherm – wavy, rising lines used to represent steam or heat; when the same shape is used to denote smell, it is called a wafteron.
Before the grawlix was the unnamed ‘grawlix’
Mort Walker gave the world a recognisable name to identify what is today a standard cartoonist’s device for representing profanity in a non-verbal way, but the use of @#$%&! wrapped in a speech bubble far predates modern comic strip practitioners like Walker. Ben Zimmer has researched early US comic strip history to find that the device features in comics goes as far back as 1902 – the work of Rudolph Dirks employed the grawlix in his strip (he just didn’t it that, or anything!). In Dirk”s “Katzenjammer Kids” for the New York Journal… the pioneering cartoonist “initiat(ed) the use of both speech balloons and…symbolic swearing”. This was emulated by a contemporary cartoonist of Dirks, Gene Carr, at about the same time (1903). Zimmer himself eschews the random ‘Grawlix’, preferring the term Obscenicon💢[Zimmer].
Grawlixes and other such graphic devices are the indispensable tools of cartoonists and comic artists looking for a way to economise with words and convey an emotion succinctly. They are non-verbal and thus all about visual cues…they can convey obscenities without recourse to the offending words themselves, or they can summarise an action or reaction instantly with an image that obviates the need for words and a lengthy explanatory sentence.
❆∺❆∺❆∺❆∺❆∺❆ ❆∺❆∺❆∺❆∺❆∺❆ ❆∺❆
Interjections
Interjection: is a part of speech using words solely designed to convey (often strong) emotions (reinforcing meaning or feeling). It conveys the emotion, sentiment or feelings of its speaker [‘What is An Interjection?’, (Your Dictionary), www.grammar.yourdictionary.com].
Another way of characterising the interjection is through its syntactic position. It is “an exclamation inserted into an utterance without grammatical connection to it” [ibid.]. Interjections are the tools of casual or creative communication, they have an informality to them, and in many cases an outright ‘slanginess’ to them (eg, ‘Jeez’, ‘Holy cow!’ (or ‘mackerel’), ‘Fiddlesticks!’, ‘Baloney!’, ‘Bingo!’, ‘Mama-Mia!’).
All contemporary engagers in social media are (over)familiar with exclamations like ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG’ (case optional) or ‘Ha-ha’ which infest the online world of communications like locusts at harvest season⊛. Interjections are exhaustive in number and heterogeneous in nature. They can be used to communicate a broad spectrum of different feelings – from anger and frustration (Argh) to sadness or sentimentality (Aw) to confusion (Huh!) to disgust (Yuck!) to mockery (Whoop-de-doo⊡) to indifference (Meh) to surprise (Wow!) to excitement (Woo-hoo!) to triumph (Yay!) not to be confused with the affirmative ‘Yea!’ [Fleming].
Interjections are usually positioned at the start of the sentence, occasionally at the end (the purpose being to maximise the message’s impact or effect). And like the sound themselves, most interjections can be strengthened by elongating them [Vidarholen] – adding one or more extra w’s to Aw gives weight to the degree of empathy you want to convey to your interlocutor; similarly using more than one Ha-ha is interjector code for turning up the laughter gauge! Putting an exclamation mark after the interjection is not mandatory but is often employed in the spirit of the lack of restraint that characterises this part of speech. After all, interjections are at their core exclamations – the appended ! goes with the territory!(Image credit: www.7esl.com)
PostScript 1: “Onomatopoeic interjections”
Onomatopoeic words or phrases are ones that imitate the sound of a thing or action, splash! is therefore onomatopoeic, it is also an interjection. Interjections represent emotion and can usually be distinguished from onomatopoeia which represents sounds, although there is clearly some overlap between the two. Another point of difference is that an interjection is syntactically isolated, it has no grammatical connection with the rest of the sentence⌽.
PostScript 2: Batman – Holy interjections with graphics!
The cult 1960s television series Batman is a veritable feast of interjections…in just about every episode Boy Wonder Robin, with excruciating monotony, specialises in uttering interjections of the “Holy ……” kind. Robin would pick the opportune moment to breathlessly interject with “Holy Switch-a-Roo”, “Holy Superlatives”, “Holy Cliche” or whatever other topical word pertaining to the “Dynamic Duo’s” particular predicament de jour [Oxford Dictionaries Blog].
The sublimely ridiculous Bat Fight scenes in the TV show are replete with interjections…as Batman and the arch-villains land thunderous blows on each other, corny graphics flash up with words representing the pugilistic action (SOCK! AIMEE! BIFF! WHAMM! KAPOW! THUNK! BANG!). Interestingly Batman’s art department incorporated some comic strip style graphics into the flashing word cards (eg, stars within the word SOCK! signifying the effects of being ‘socked’, ie, dazed, dizzy – akin to a kind of squean? KAPOW! with a bulls-eye target inside the O)
←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←→→
❉ placed in dialogue boxes above the characters’ heads (Walker calls these “Maledicta balloons”)
¤ a character with both a squean and a spurl (a vertical upward-spiralling coil) above his or her head is more than a little drunk, they’ve had a ‘skinful’ in fact! [Brownlee]
⊛ its unquantifiable definitively, but an empirical survey of the various avenues of social media would confirm an upsurge in interjection usage in everyday communications
💢 Urban Dictionary describes ‘oscenicons’ as “like a emoticon, but for profane words”
⊡ especially mocking someone who is trying to impress
⌽ the Onomatopoeia Dictionary lists a number of words that can represent both forms of expression, eg, wham, phew, shoo, shush, ha-ha, geez
╰☆╮ ╰☆╮ ╰☆╮
References:
J Brownlee, ‘Quimps, Plewds, And Grawlixes: The Secret Language Of Comic Strips’, (Co. Design), 15-Jul-2013, www.fastcodesign.com
Grace Fleming, ‘Interjections’, Thought Co, 23-Apr-2015, www.thoughtco.com
Richard Nordquist, ‘What the @#$%&! Is a Grawlix?’ (Thought Co), 02-May-2017, www.thoughtco.com
B Zimmer, ‘How did @#$%&! come to represent profanity?’, Slate, 09-Oct-2013, www.slate.com
‘Grawlixes’, (World Wide Words), www.worldwidewords.org
The lexicon of comicana’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
‘Dictionary of Interjections’, www.vidarholen.net
‘From “Gadzooks” to “Cowabunga”: some episodes in the life of the interjection’, Oxford Dictionaries, www.blog.oxforddictionaries.com Onomatopoeia Dictionary A-Z, (Written Sound), www.writtensound.com
﹍﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹍﹍﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹍﹍﹎﹎﹎﹎
As a counterweight to the surfeit of 1960s American television that comprised a large slice of my diet of home entertainment, my juvenile literary tastes back then were decidedly more Anglophile. Plunging into the graphic art world of the 1960s comic book I digested everything I came across catering for adrenalin-pumping, red-blooded British boys.
Desperate Dan, ‘The Dandy’
Among these beacons of popular culture were The Beano (which starred Dennis the Menace and Gnasher), The Dandy❈ (featuring Korky the Cat and Desperate Dan), Knockout (Billy Bunter), The Hotspur, The Rover (these two papers were prime examples of the “Boys’ Own Adventure” style of stories) and Eagle with its centrepiece inter-galactic hero ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’, not to forget Tiger which catered for British schoolboy football mania with the stellar-booted striker ‘Roy of the Rovers’. The individual comics were grouse fun but what I most enjoyed was the comic book annuals of The Beano, etc., where I could indulge myself in reading a whole end-of-year book comprising a cross-section of the comic’s different strips⚀.
At primary school in the sixties the punitive powers-that-be weren’t all that rapt in comic books as reading material…my confiscated copy of ‘Dennis the Menace Bumper Comic’ (before I had a chance to read hardly any of it!) bore witness to that. From what was on offer in the school library, the one children’s book I did take a shine to was Just William, I should say series of books because there 38 (some sources say 39) ‘William’ books in all! All of the books were collections of short stories, with the exception of one in novel form.
Author Richmal Crompton
Just William was the creation of female English author Richmal Crompton (Lamburn). As a child feverishly devouring all the William books I shared with the overwhelming bulk of readers the uncritical assumption that Richmal was a man. How wrong were we all!!! Miss Lamburn was a school mistress (ironically – in an all-girls school!) who contracted polio and spent the rest of her life writing the William series of books as well as 41 adult novels❦.
The character of William (surname: Brown) was apparently based on Richmal’s young nephew Tommy…in the books William is scruffy and untidy in appearance, and given to directness, rebellion and straight talking – which sometimes lands him in strife. He is the leader of his own small gang of school friends who go by the name of “The Outlaws” (comprising his best friend Ginger as well as two other boys, Henry and Douglas). William is 11, an age he stays at, despite the series of books stretching over a period of nearly 50 years! [‘Just William’, Wikipedia entry]
‘William the Dictator’ (1938)
Most of the books follow the ordinary run of events of William and the Outlaws entangling themselves in minor mischiefs, usually involving nothing worse than the ill-conceived idea of painting a terrier blue! But occasionally William strayed into more edgy and outright polemical territory. In the short story ‘William and the Nasties’¤ William’s band emulate Hitler and his fellow National Socialists in order to terrorise a local Jewish sweet-shop owner (featuring in the 1935 collection William the Detective [‘Five Fascinating Facts about Just William’, www.interestingliterature.com].
Just William’s topicality
A good number of the Just William books regularly reflected current events of their day. William the Conqueror (published in 1926) was resonant of European colonial power imperialism leading up to WWI. William The Dictator (1938) reflected the world’s concern with fascism and National Socialism. Similarly, William and the Evacuees (appearing in 1940) was set against the backdrop of WWII. In the post-war period, the superpowers’ preoccupation with the space race inspired new books like William and the Moon Rocket (1954) and William and the Space Animal (1956) [‘Just William’, Wikipedia entry].
Just William book spin-offs
With such popularity that the Just William books attained (12 million sales in the UK alone), they inevitably flowed through to adaptation to other forms – cinema (three films in the 1940s), two television series (one in the mid-1950s and the other in the early 1960s), radio and even theatre. As well, the schoolboy hero spawned a host of Just William merchandise…from jigsaws and board games to cigarette cards, magic painting books and figurines of William [‘Richmal Crompton’s Just William Society’, www.justwilliam.co.uk]
Celebrity fandom: Lennon as William
Some time after the Beatles visited Australasia in 1964 at the height of “Mop-top mania”, I remember hearing that John Lennon had been a fan of the fictional William in his boyhood. Lennon’s devotion to the books prompted him to form his own, real-life version of the Outlaws, moulding his friends Ivy, Nigel and Pete into a Liverpudlian boy foursome. With John of course as leader, the boys engaged in “small acts of defiance and daring” on their local turf [J Edmondson, John Lennon: A Biography (2010)]. The revelation that I had been propelled into the stratospheric company of such a youth icon as Beatle John, only served to magnify my primary school days zeal for all things William Brown!
PostScript: Continental comic book legends
My childhood taste in comics were not exclusively confined to the gold standard of British comics. Like millions of other children I was also captivated by those ancient Gallic tormentors of Roman legionnaires, Asterix and Obelix (Astérix le Gaulois by Goscinny and Uderzo). In equal measure I was in the thrall of Tintin, Hergé’s creation of a globe-roaming Belgian boy-reporter. Each comic album of The Adventures of Tintin was a lesson in political geography embroiling Tintin in high-stakes adventures in a new and exotic land. But as rewarding as the respective adventures of Asterix and Tintin were, in my book nothing quite scaled the same exalted heights of anticipation as did the prospect of dipping into the treasure trove of Just William’s world.
╼╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼╼╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼╾
❈ The originals The Beano and The Dandy were of course far superior to the highly derivative and latter imitations like The Topper and Beezer and Cor!!
⚀ not to be overshadowed, schoolgirls had their own comics and annuals such as Bunty and School Friend Annual
❦ the most accomplished of which was Leadon Hill. The tone of the adult novels was more pessimistic than the Just William series, dealing with themes of divorce and infidelity [Danuta Keen, ‘Not Just William: Richmal Crompton’s adult fiction republished’, The Guardian, 21-Apr-2017]
¤ the name ‘Nasties’ is the result of William’s mishearing of the word ‘Nazis’
Hergé with a cinematic clone of his fictional boy hero
In the early Sixties there were 2 French-made film adaptations of Tintin
A parody by Belgian cartoonist Dubus depicting a captive Tintin begging businessman Rodwell for his liberty (Source: Sydney Morning Herald)
Moulinsart have mined the full depths of Tintin’s merchandising potential, many spin-off items priced at the luxury high-end
Genootschap (Source: www.hergegenootschap.nl/)Fmr Australian prime minster Kevin Rudd satirised as Tintin
(Image credit: www.7esl.com)
‘William the Dictator’ (1938)
