There is something about the notion of one tiny little village, where everybody knows each other, trying to hold off the dark forces of the rest of the world.
Then, as I grew up, different levels of reading opened up to me: the humour in the names, the plays on words, the illustrations. As a boy I often tried to copy it in my imaginary world, drawing a village with its timber fence, dry moat and a few houses. What I loved about Asterix was that it cut across generations. Nothing happens – but everything happens.Īs a boy I had a Dutch friend who was a fan of Tintin and Asterix, so that's how my father and I first encountered them. It's like the Finnegans Wake of the cartoon. In The Castafiore Emerald, the opera singer sings the jewel song from Faust, which is about a lowly woman banged up by a nobleman – and she sings it right in front of Sir Francis Haddock, with the captain blocking his ears. This theme played out in so many of the books. Haddock's ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock, is the illegitimate son of the French Sun King – and this mirrors what happened in Hergé's family, who liked to believe that his father was the illegitimate son of the Belgian king. For instance, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure are both about Captain Haddock's family. It deals with technology, history and politics. Asterix is charming and funny, but it's fairly one-dimensional Tintin has this massive complexity of plot, symbolic register and theme. One's witty entertainment, the other's great art. The difference between Asterix and Tintin is like the difference between a Quentin Tarantino and a David Lynch film. Author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature