Let me use this thread to answer some questions asked in other threads...
Some important points have already been addressed in threads such as 'Herge's multilingualism', or 'first good biography to come'...
Let's sum up the ins and outs of the 'mysterious tracking game', though:
When by the end of his life an artist admits publicly he managed to inlay 'what he had to say' into his life's work, one may reasonably think he isn't just making a display of words, but his message is real, meant to be read one day, and deserves an empathic respect...
If this author -unlike most other artists- describes publicly his early years as terrible & complains about his infancy & if the hushed up presence of his message is finally disclosed by himself after fifty years, one may reasonably infer his message's subject is related to his early years, and he wants his message to be read...
A real message's invisible writing can't be but
steganographic, namely masked by some special means such as an invisible ink*, or literary techniques such as the one found in the intimate but nevertheless googlable letter George Sand wrote to Alfred de Musset, around 1833... ( see
http://5ko.free.fr/george_sand.html )...
The reading of such a masked message requires a purely empiric method, as mentioned in the beginning:
To rule out an invisible ink, one can try various chemical means, such as lemon juice...
No result? let's then try some physical means, such as heat...
Still no result? then let's try some literary means such as the search for repetitions, for incongruities, or frequency analysises, etc; found nothing but 'meaningless' cross-matchings implying Indians* and East Indies* (a 'childish' rendering of 'Black Island') or 'meaningless' ST faults* present in any Tintin adventure?
Nothing about such findings ever mentioned in any biography, nor in usual Tintin studies? well the '1st good biography'* is still to come, and Herge has been reported to be a multilingual* person, after all...
But how come Herge could have been so, as he confessed 'there were no books at home' and didn't attend much highschool nor university? well some Assimil methods might quite well have been available in Brussels' bookshops, or dictionaries were at his disposal at the parish's or at downtown's libraries, etc, so that he could find a good translation for his message, such as an expression potentially disguisable into various 'names' or drawable objects that could act as 'passwords' or 'avatars' capable of crossing language barriers, 'synonyms' such as Tintin = M-shaped tilted quiff*, Tin+tin = space & time, Tin+tin = duplicated rebus, Tin+tin = bird-like avatars, etc, etc, etc, that show the whole corpus is imbibed by some rebus-like presence...
But how come no archive say anything? Well, Hergé has been said to be very gifted for tongues anyway, and he might have had such an elephant memory that he didn't need to take notes, or he might have burnt them in the end, or there are still some unpublished documents, etc...
But how come such an unworldly young man did know so much about invisible writings? Well it's not so difficult to conceive a multilingual rebus when you know what syllables you want to say, as shown by the example CAT ('chat') + SPADE ('pelle') + 16, that stands for a childish 'Chapelle Sixtine'*; it's certainly much more difficult to find some foreign languages dictionaries, and to draw a work in such a way that the reader can devine it's a rebus, and it's multilingual...
Anyway, such a rebus would still remain invisible if the readers weren't given a correct clue (such as 'a famous building in Rome', or 'a terrible childhood') to devine which province of his wits must be activated, a psychical phenomenon that could be called 'thought transmission', for instance...
Just like the Rosetta stone could help the hieroglyphs' reading via external data that didn't pertain to them, Herge's 'stone' can be as external as 'Chapelle Sixtine' or any proverb able to help solving nothing but its related rebus...
A proverb (or a 'stone') is listed and can be found in some
external books...
Thus when some say Tintin is a unique world, I very much doubt it's for sarcastic purposes, or to trigger sarcasms from some sceptical readers: I'm afraid it might just be the plain truth, indeed...
* please search for related topics.