Finding Tintin in Brussels

08 January 2012 - 02:16 By Carlos Amato
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Carlos Amato goes looking for the boy reporter in Hergé's home town

IT figures that two of the three most famous Belgians - Tintin and Hercules Poirot - are fictional characters. Belgium is damn near fictional itself: an increasingly theoretical country, straddling two cultures that don't much like each other, with a future as baffling as a René Magritte painting.

With the notable exception of Jean-Claude van Damme, real-life Belgians are not so good at Tintin-style action. For instance, they've lacked a central government for more than 500 days: the major Flemish and Wallonian parties have yet to strike a coalition deal since last year's elections. Not that anybody on the street gives a frite. Life carries on regardless, in a pleasant blur of gourmet beer, hard work, comic books and wry humour.

Belgium's nagging identity crisis is most keenly felt in the ethnically mixed capital, Brussels, which is majority Wallonian but also the economic heart of Flanders. Without the Brussels problem, the country would likely have split by now.

It's an odd city, long derided abroad as a nest of grey-minded, meddlesome Eurocrats who spawned the unholy economic storm currently raging across the continent.

And it's also been unfairly cast as a deeply boring place to visit, largely on the grounds that its best-known tourist attraction, a tiny statue of a peeing toddler, is famous for no good reason.

But Brussels is actually cool, and offers much more to visitors than Manneken Pis. Think of it as a budget Paris: elegant but unpretentious, and crammed with simple culinary pleasures, being home to the world's best beer, chocolate, waffles and chips.

The city's art and fashion scenes are increasingly hip, with expat artists (including the South African conceptualist Kendell Geers) attracted by its cheap rents and relaxed creative culture. French remains the majority tongue, but English is now the lingua franca among immigrants, who make up more than half the population.

And thanks to a Hollywood-induced global attack of Tintin-mania, Brussels is revelling in its status as the home of the quiffed reporter and his genius creator, Georges Remi, aka Hergé.

Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock are icons of Brussels culture, and several tour companies offer Tintin-themed walking tours through the city centre, taking in murals, museums, restaurants and settings from the comic books and Steven Spielberg's film adaptation.

We met our guide Didier, a rotund, garrulous comics freak, at the city tourism office on Grand-Place, near the Bourse metro stop. Two blocks away, on the rue d'Etuvé, we got our first dose of Tintinography: a wonderful trompe l'oeil mural depicting Tintin and Haddock rushing down a fire escape, reproducing a classic panel from The Calculus Affair. It's one of about 50 murals of various Belgian comics characters in the city.

The next shrine on the Tintin pilgrimage was the Place du Jeu de Balle flea market (Vossenplein in Flemish). Deep in the bohemian Les Marolles district, it's a shabby sea of antiques, books, vinyl records, typewriters and sublimely useless junk - and provides the setting for the opening sequence of The Secret of the Unicorn.

In one of the film's handful of truly clever moments, Hergé himself appears as a street artist, and mutters while sketching Tintin, "Haven't I drawn you before?" Like Tintin, we found a model sailing ship for sale at Vossenplein. Sadly, we had no cause to yell "Great snakes!" or "Thundering typhoons!", as the mast did not contain a treasure-related parchment.

Never mind: two fantastic Hergé murals awaited us. At the Gare Midi, there's a vast blow-up of a panel from the original Tintin adventure, the virulently anti-communist Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929). And then on rue Haute, a classic scene from Quick & Flupke, the cult strip that Hergé drew until Tintin's massive international success killed it off.

Soon we tramped back into the heart of Brussels, and gawped at King LeopoldII's megalomaniac royal palace, which provided the architectural model for the Syldavian royal palace in King Ottokar's Sceptre.

The Tintin trail rounds off with visits to two fascinating comics museums: the Museum of Original Figurines, housing resin models of great French and Belgian comics icons, and the Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Arts, on rue Fauble.

But if you're a hard-core Tintinophile, you shouldn't stop there. Make an outing to the Stockel metro station in east Brussels, where all 140 Tintin characters star in a Hergé-designed mural spanning the length of both platforms.

And the new Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve, a small town 30km from Brussels, is a spectacular tribute to the great man's work. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Christian de Portzamparc, it was built at the eye-watering cost of $20-million in 2009, with the bill entirely footed by Fanny Rodwell, the artist's widow and one-time colourist. The choice of location was odd, however, as the distance from Brussels limits visitor numbers.

Our lunch featured hefty burgers and delicious Chimay Trappist beer, courtesy of the Comics Cafe in the chic Sablon district. Surrounded by rare editioned prints of Tintin pages, we tackled the politics of Tintin with Didier.

For the last four years, a Congolese student, Mbutu Bienvenu, has fought a court battle for the banning of the undeniably racist second adventure, Tintin in the Congo (1931) - or failing that, the use of parental warning stickers on the cover. In November, a Belgian court ruled against a ban, but did banish it to the adult shelves of bookshops.

"In the 1930s everybody was racist and nobody was," says Didier. "But Hergé was quite right-wing in his youth. The early Tintin strips were published in the Catholic newspaper Le Petit Vingtieme, whose editor, Abbé Wallez, was later a Nazi collaborator. But Hergé's politics evolved quickly as he grew older."

Indeed, by the final completed adventure, Tintin and the Picaros (1977), the hero and Haddock throw their lot behind General Alcazar's seemingly leftist guerilla army in the fictional Latin American republic of San Theodoros.

That said, politics played a small role in Hergé's whimsical imagination. Shortly before he died in 1983, Hergé saw Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and loved it so much he anointed Spielberg as the man to bring Tintin to celluloid life.

It's no surprise that many nostalgic Tintin freaks loathe Spielberg and Peter Jackson's slick, but somewhat soulless, adaptation. But the Belgian public has been pleased by the Hollywoodisation of their national treasure.

They are not so forgiving of Nick Rodwell, the British businessman who married Fanny in 1996 and took control of Hergé's estate. Rodwell's ruthless approach has reaped tens of millions every year from the Tintin brand, in part by overzealously protecting the copyright with hordes of lawyers and charging extortionate merchandise prices. "He is one of the most-hated men in Belgium," says Didier.

Luckily, the spirit of Tintin in Brussels is deep and charming enough to withstand the corporatisation of his image, and Hergé's genius is undimmed.

  •  The Adventures of Tintin is on circuit in South Africa
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