Tintin Forums

I was just wondering on people's opinions to this. I'm not sure, but I think every character that appears in each Tintin book has a unique face (apart from people far away etc). Is this even possible though, given the limited nature of ligne-claire (I mean limited in terms of detail). I notice a lot of characters are very similar, especially minor characters and women, but even then, I think they are distinguishable from each other. Oh, of course there is the obvious exception of the Thompsons. They are indistinguishable, apart from their moustaches (but that is not really a facial feature).

Are the characters in Tintin, like real human beings, distinguishable from each other? I think so, but barely (but this is also true of real people).

Also, have you ever thought what different famous people or people you know would look like drawn in the Hergé style? It would be a real test for this style to make them recognisable and distinguishable from each other.

Even minor villains that appeared only once in the entire series were different from each other. For example, in the "Blue Lotus", we have relatively few frames with the Japanese Army in depth, although it is quite clear by the way they talk and think that their motives for their actions against Tintin are somewhat different from those with Mitsuhirato.

Also, the Maharajah of Gaipajama and the Emir of Khemed are different by the way they have interacted with Tintin, etc.

The list seems to go on and on...

Actually I was merely reffering to the artwork, that is, their faces.

But your point about their personalities is valid also.

I generally had the impression that the faces that are the most closest to the foreground are unique, but they are somewhat lost as you look farther back (in some cases, they are just mere circles, as in one of the final scenes in "The Blue Lotus"). But in the scene where the Chinese crowd follows the Thompsons in the same story, unique faces can seen up to quite far back in the picture.

It is worth noting that Herge's cameo was also never too close to the foreground in "King Ottokar's Sceptre"!

It is amazing that such a seemingly simple cartoon style can still produce an infinite amount of individual faces, but actually I don't think it's at all that hard. What is actually hard, and a testament to Hergé's skill, is that individual characters look the same from panel to panel!

Although, in a way it's a trick played on your mind by the lines. You see the hair style, the shape of the face, the proportional distance between eyes, nose, mouth and chin, the clothes (established in a character's early scenes), height, body shape and graphic colouring and you recognise the same character from panel to panel. If you actually closely examine the cartoons without this 'panel memory' you can often see inconsistencies, especially in Hergé's earlier books.

On a related note, if you try and draw photographically, it can sometimes look wrong. Have you ever had a photo of yourself and thought 'that doesn't look like me!'. Obviously it is you, but sometimes the angle, lighting and early morning hair style will conspire to make you look less like the 'average you'. Sometimes you can look really different! Simple cartooning can put less stress on the panel-memory (I made that term up, but I hope you know what I mean by it) by simplifying the graphic elements with which to recognise a character.

It is amazing that such a seemingly simple cartoon style can still produce an infinite amount of individual faces, but actually I don't think it's at all that hard. What is actually hard, and a testament to Hergé's skill, is that individual characters look the same from panel to panel!

Exactly. When I tried to draw comics my characters looked different from panel to panel.

Also, I admire comics artists for being able to put up with drawing the same character over and over and over again (guess that's why Tintin is so 'simple' looking).

BTW, I loved your style in your comic, tybaldstone!

Thanks, Claro! Nice of you to say so.

Another factor of the 'simple-looking' cartoon, according to the philospohy of McCloud (Scott), is that the less detailed the art, the blanker the canvas (if you like), the more the reader is able to identify personally with that character due to its lack of specific identification.

tybaltstone:
the less detailed the art, the blanker the canvas (if you like), the more the reader is able to identify personally with that character due to its lack of specific identification.

I’m not sure that I agree with McCloud on that one - it sounds like it should be so, I grant you, but I think it is too general; there will be highly detailed art which is involving (I’d offer Little Nemo as an example), and simple art which has pretty unengaging characters (for which I hold up McCloud’s very own Zot! as a case in point).

In regards to your earlier point of the real trick being making the characters look the same, I once many years ago at a comic con, got into an unresolved “debate” (all right, it was very nearly an argument) with Marv Wolfman that one of the oddities to me is that although Clark Kent has as clearly defined a look and appearance as Superman, there has never been a definitive rendering of how Bruce Wayne looks; I felt that you could take Clark out of any book in the Superman series, and even the casual reader would know who they were of - regardless that they were drawn by different artists, and that the early books are simpler in approach than the work of say Curt Swan. However, if you took pictures of Bruce Wayne out across the forty odd years (at the time), he wouldn’t be readily identifiable just by how he looked - sometimes he has a lantern jaw, sometimes he has a pointy chin; sometimes he has smooth features, sometimes craggy, etc. Marv Wolfman didn’t agree…

Hergé undoubtedly kept Tintin in the “Clark” class - even the simple drawings of Tintin in Soviets pressage the chap we see in Picaros.

...I think it is too general; there will be highly detailed art which is involving (I'd offer Little Nemo as an example), and simple art which has pretty unengaging characters (for which I hold up McCloud's very own Zot! as a case in point).

I don't totally agree with McCloud either, but the theory has some merit. As for Little Nemo, he is a very simply drawn character, even if the world he inhabits is more detailed. Nemo's facial features are just as sparse as Tintin's (except for his Chaplinesque hair).

Of course it is not just a simply drawn character that will invite empathy, the story, and other factors, have to be engaging - but that is to leave the subject of cartoon facial features.

The whole idea of the drawn line is one that allows the reader to interact more fully with a story than a photograph (including film) would...there's just something about it..!

P.S: you and me versus Marv Wolfman then - I agree with you on the Wayne thing. But I have a soft spot for Marv after his early eighties incarnation of the Teen Titans.

In reading back my post after your response, I can see that I erred in not sticking to the question of recognition of characters, and wandered off into detail in general, so apologies for the needless digression! I tried (unsuccessfully) to read McCloud’s Zot! recently, and gave up because a) the story was pretty poor, and b) the characters have such poorly rendered expressions that I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be feeling (the hero looks like a constipated hamster throughout); so guess I was just venting my frustration…