The democracy of lines mm iss27

THE DEMOCRACY OF LI(N)ES A sentimental journey along the line drawing Mitchell Miller ‘I would like to be able to draw so much. In reality I am always trying it. But nothing comes of it. It is an entirely personal pictorial writing system, the meaning of which I can’t work out myself after a certain period of time.’

Franz Kafka

STRIPS The world in lines ‘I know Tintin is no longer me, that, if he is to go on living, it will be by a sort of artificial respiration that I will have to practise constantly and which exhausts me, and will exhaust me more and more.”

Georges Remi It took me a long time to realise that Hergé was not pronounced ‘Herj’ and perhaps twice as however long that was to associate Hergé with a mere man; to my childish mind the Tintin albums were not made by human beings. Whatever Hergé was it was faceless, disembodied, magical. To say God-given would be way too many eggs for the omelette, but it makes me think of a ribbing I recently subjected poor Roland Barthes to in a text for an art catalogue. Trying, like me, to express his relationship to a set of images and convey the effect they had on him, he compared the magical quality of photography to the images that miraculously appeared in St Veronica’s napkin. I delivered a low blow where Nietzsche took the napkin and blew his nose on it. But oddly, the puerility of this joke rings true with my own sins of mystification; when it comes to Hergé I understand exactly how Barthes felt. For anyone who draws, Hergé was a miracle.

So eager was I to be initiated into Hergé’s world my younger self even ‘improved’ some of the characters in his strips, drawing on extra features and accessories, but taking care to be as exact and convincing as the master. But no matter how carefully I tried to loop a pair of biro spectacles over a character’s ears they were never as convincing as the impregnated lines on the page. These defacements would later prove to be a source of endless irritation when I leafed through the albums as an adult, but this childish vandalism meant no disrespect. I was reaching out in sympathy with the faceless maestro, desperately wanting to play my part in creating the image. The absence of Hergé as a plausible human being made it somewhat easier to justify.

As I later learned Georges Remi was a ‘private’, laconic figure whose actions and motivations, no matter how clearly expressed, always took on a tinge of mystery. For many years I did not even know what he looked like and even when a face was provided, the long dug face and Michael Aspel haircut did not seem connected to his peerless draughtsmanship. My adoration changed to hero worship, but the fervour was undimmed.

For many children in Europe Tintin has been the first demonstration of the possibilities of line drawing. The virtuosity of Hergé’s strips reverberate long into adulthood; in Anders Ostergaard’s Tintin Et Moi the filmmaker captures a sequence where every single one of his albums are pulled apart and their pages arranged flat on a floor. The resulting carpet of panels and strips were then filmed from above with a rostrum camera. People were then invited to come in and look, crouching down on this enormous playmat to inspect the dense matrix of pictures. Struck by the craft and virtuosity of the artwork the audience gaped at the sheer expanse with a strange form of reverence, and I experienced one of those rare, beautiful moments in cinema where you are in exact sympathy

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with the person onscreen. This was a startling reacquaintance with something the visitors had grown out of, but for many with an interest in illustration (now defined as ‘the made image’) Hergé has long occupied the God or rostrum spot in graphic art. It frustrated him; his attempts to move into abstract painting later in life were disparaged in comparison to the strips. Nothing – not painting, nor his other strips Jo, Zette and Jocko, Quick and Flupke, could surpass Tintin.

Hergé created this problem for himself because he imposed no hierarchies on his work. He drew a strip with the same seriousness, sweat and application as he would a fresco or a triptych, or indeed a novel or a film. He undertook painstaking documentary and visual research, engaged with his assistants in carefully blocking the mise en scène of each panel and what the characters were doing within it. His studio method developed a style famed for both clarity and richness, a union of implied opposites that was very difficult to forge. The line is the key.

Hergé possessed an exquisite understanding of how pictures and sequences functioned. He pared everything down to simple, clean lines of equal weight and thickness in exact opposition to the individualism of the variable American inking style as embodied in the great Children’s funnies of the early 20th century – Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, Charles Forbell’s Naughty Pete, Richard Houtcault’s Hogan’s Alley and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat being a discerning, rather than an exhaustive list. Hergé opted for schematised faces that were nevertheless, closely modelled on real chins and jowls coupled to simple facial features. Joost Swarte dubbed it ligne claire then elaborated it as ‘the democracy of lines’. No line is more important than the other, each has equal weight and thickness, and colours are entirely flat and one tone, so that nothing detracts from the flow of the narrative from one panel to another.

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Ligne claire is regularly attributed to Hergé but appears earlier – in America it is evident in Garret Price’s White Boy strips – but if Hergé was truly pre-empted then it was by the clean, uncluttered strokes of swipes of Chinese art he came into contact with through the friendship of Chinese artist Chang (upon whom the character in The Blue Lotus and Tintin in Tibet is based.) But the superlative examples of proto-ligne claire come from the Japanese master Hokusai, whose narrative prints and illustrations contain all of its principle elements – flat colour, schematised faces, real bodies and forms travelling in an abstracted landscape – and probably contributed immensely if indirectly, to Hergé’s style through the ‘Japonisme’ of the fin de siècle. The clearest signal of this debt may be Henri-Charles Gerard’s illustration of Japanese Lilliputians that set a gang of miniature Hokusai worthies slithering and scrambling over a delicately inked and painted French slipper. Hergé did however, take ligne claire further in symbolic terms, developing it as a directive for plot and narrative, which must always be clear and straightforward.

Hokusai also shared Hergé’s gift for creating space and scale, solid, convincing backgrounds out a few lines and flat washes. Hergé created super-detailed backgrounds that made his wireframe constructs believable, but also frequently ‘panned out’ to wide shots of a particular scene or situation that required close scrutiny by the reader and set the action in a much wider context. Hergé’s flat colours allowed the eye to concentrate on the form and the dimensions and prevented it from becoming a disorienting mess. His polar opposite in Europe, Hugo Pratt of the Corto Maltese stories, used simplicity to different effect, his worlds were composed of scratchy lines and pared down backgrounds perfectly suited to the anarchist values he shared with the titular protagonist,

a scurrilous anti-Tintin who spread change and confusion where his Belgian counterpart defended order and gradual reform.

pilgrims in the Middle East – as he remarked ‘… with the passing of the years, I feel more respect for the Other’.

Hergé’s character has always represented a form of liberal/conservative equilibrium. Thus his proportions, especially of the human form are exact, each panel of his strips positioning the character with exacting, careful reference to space and mass. They were also meticulously researched – in Prisoners of the Sun Hergé referenced dozens of photographs to recreate Peruvian landscapes and Incan architecture with autistic clarity. The Blue Lotus was similarly exacting in its portrayal of colonial China, from the international settlements to the barbwire checkpoints encrusted around Shanghai. But at the centre of it all remains Hergé, a case made persuasively by Ostergaard when he shows archive footage of Hergé demonstrating how the pose of each Tintin character was modelled on one made by Hergé himself in his studio during the sketching stages. A testament to the intensely personal core to all of Hergé’s work, and how this personal dimension was integrated into every aspect. The point is rammed home in a photograph reproduced on Pierre Assouline’s biography – a red outline of Tintin’s head and shoulders and behind it, a dapper looking Hergé completing the drawing, a projection of his ideal self.

Most Tintin aficionados would agree the addition of Haddock moved the strip into its greatest period, the captain acting as avatar to Hergé’s own battered, tainted soul. Haddock was an astonishing character to a child because he was so absolutely an adult stranded in a children’s world – albeit an astonishingly detailed one. His vices included alcohol, occasional greed and the ability to fly into glorious, incandescent rages.

His goodness was always the subject of a great struggle against his own scepticism. Where Tintin was an idealist, the Captain was always the realist who, while appreciating the purity of a specific task or quest, did not always see why this should be applied consistently across the board. When Professor Calculus is kidnapped to Peru in Prisoners of the Sun his devotion to rescuing him is as strong as Tintin’s – but when Tintin tells the grateful ruler of the Incas he cannot accept a generous gift of gold it is the Captain who mutters in the English version: ‘… unless you absolutely insist …’

So while he abstracted and simplified the world around him Vitruvian style, Hergé also gave it a powerful solidity, not so much realistic as persuasive. And these powers of persuasion were put to various uses. When les Aventures de Tintin first appeared in Le Petit Vingtieme on 29 January 1929, the Wall Street Crash was nine months away and international communism a dire threat to western capital. Naturally, In the Land of the Soviets would be ‘the boy reporter’s’ first adventure. Worse was to follow – Tintin in the Congo clumsily attempted to defend the indefensible and has not been forgiven by many left wing critics ever since. Then Hergé rallied, recapitulated and thought again. His position in Nazi-occupied Belgium was tricky but there can be no doubt that some of his strips during the period were subversive – Tintin et Moi points out that Hergé’s greatest creation, Captain Haddock, a British merchant seaman, was introduced during a period when eliciting sympathy for the British was far from popular. On the negative side of the balance Hergé inserts a horribly antiSemitic character in the follow-up, The Shooting Star. He spent the rest of his career, and the Tintin books atoning indirectly, depicting the plight of the Quecha Indians in Peru, African

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The ever-human Haddock also overcame the demon drink but lapsed frequently, and throughout the series always had to dig for his better nature, a quest complicated by his amusing and ill-starred attempts to take on a more genteel form of living. These redemptive textures meant it would be the Captain, not the note-perfect Tintin who had the greatest moral force. When in The Red Sea Sharks the characters discover that African Muslim pilgrims are being sold by European and American sailors to wealthy Arabs as part of a modern slave trade it is the Captain (initially incredulous) who is most outraged: Arab: And teeth? … come on open your mouth Sambo … Hmm not too bad …

Teeth quite sound …

Captain: Here, have you quite finished playing the cattle-dealer? This man’s not a horse, nor a slave …

Arab: Ssh! … You mustn’t say that!

‘Coke’ is the word, as you well know.

Captain: Coke!! … Blistering Barnacles!

Tintin was right! There still are slavetraders … And that’s what you’re up to, you brute! You trafficker in human flesh!

You deserve to be strung up by the mizzen yardarm!

Following a scuffle the captain and one of the African Muslims overpower and eject the slave

trader from the ship in a stream of trademark expletives: Captain: … Baboon! Carpet-seller!

Paranoiac! Pockmark! Cannibal! Duck billed platypus! Jellied eel! Bashi-Bazouk!

Anthropophagus! Cercopithecus!

Psycopath!

Tintin: No good Captain. He’s too far away now.

Captain: That’s what you think! He’s not heard the last of me!

Tintin: Where now?

Captain: (Running) On to the bridge.

Captain: (From stage left) PIRATE! ECTOPLASM! COELACANTH! VULTURE! (We see the Captain has secured a megaphone and is shouting after the retreating Sambuk) BODY SNATCHER! OSTROGOTH! VANDAL! Tintin: This time I really think he is out of earshot.

Captain: (Sweating with exertion) Yes! … more’s the pity …

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The scene injects a heady mixture of latent white guilt, outraged decency and a very complex subtext to Arab-European relations (a recurring theme of the book) into the narrative.

As a child reading the strip the moment was a powerful one, not least because it depicted a character at his most humane and righteous expressing himself in a ridiculous fashion.

Compassion, as much as vanity and hubris can make us ridiculous, but Hergé made it clear this was a risk worth taking. And in the Captain, he gave children an indication of how even the most flawed of us could and should do so, described in his clear uncluttered style.

Visually this complex character was represented through a ligne claire face but it looked much more lived in – whereas most Tintin characters had a black spot for each eye, Haddock had two circles ringed by wrinkles and firm lines in the brow, and when angry he developed a squiggle that doubled for a throbbing vein when angry, with the whole fronted by a big nose.

This nose was often meted out fierce treatment; in The Castafiore Emerald alone it is stung by a bee and bitten by a parrot. As with all grown ups, Haddock’s childishness outstripped that of actual children.

And this sense of displacement within a strip primarily aimed at children became one of the principal delights of the series.

No album would be complete without the Captain slipping on a wet log or staying awake all night in a cabin wondering whether his beard should go over or under the bedsheets. And throughout there were the incongruently wordy and erudite expletives, in themselves a linguistic adventure. But towards the end of the run Hergé turned this around; in Tintin in Tibet this clumsiness leaves the Captain dangling from a rope and Tintin struggling to hold him up. Calmly and with genuine, dignified heroism the Captain prepares to cut the rope to save at least one of them – only to fumble the knife in classic Haddock fashion. It is an oft-quoted scene and justly so; it encapsulates everything that was good and wonderful in Hergé’s work, a complex development rendered in simple tones that instructed, rather than patronised its juvenile audience.

The wear and tear of adulthood similarly underpinned the character of Paw Broon, embattled patriarch of The Broons, the long running Sunday Post strip drawn by Dudley D Watkins from 1936 to his death in 1969. Paw is the head of a huge family (himself, his wife Maw and eight children) cramped into a single end in a tenement. Granpaw Broon may be more readily iconic and Oor Wullie easier to spot, but Paw was Watkins’ greatest character, a short, balding, walrus-tached, bandy legged everyman in constant search of the small win – a spare copper for his baccy, a decent cut of steak, a cut corner, a quiet slump in his armchair – and constantly making a fool of himself in the process. As with Haddock, Paw was a simple design, defined by the drooping taches and combover haircut borrowed from DC Thomson Glasgow editor Archie Brown.

Watkins developed a version of ligne claire in his native England for the Boots staff magazine but perfected it in Dundee. His role as an interpreter of the Scottish working class through Oor Wullie and The Broons has made him the single most influential graphic artist in Scotland. As with all channels of influence the effects can run into stagnant pools (see the work of the Scottish cartoon studio’s Fizzers book – technically superb, utterly lifeless) or cascading spectacularly over the edge as in The Greens, Frank Quitely’s gloriously demented spoof of the Broons. Part of the problem was the longevity of the overall project. Like Hergé, Watkins spent over 30 years working on the strips, taking them through varying levels of quality (possibly at their highest in the late 1940s and early 50s) until his death, and then having all of his work endlessly reproduced for seven years. At their best the strips provided short vignettes of an exaggerated working class milieu – limited, small c conservative and tight-knit. It is the opposite of Tintin, where the characters are always alone, out of place and at odds with the environment they find. Watkins’ fluent line expresses how much the Broons utterly belong where they are, picking out the contours of working class Scottish neighbourhoods with the same weight and attention as given to the central characters. The same hand provided the perfect handwriting for the strangely phoneticised Scots spoken by the characters – a language peculiar to the Mancunian Watkins. From the text in the balloons to the antics of the characters, the early Watkins strips retain a remarkable sense of artistic and textual unity that compares favourably to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Contrasts drawn between these two masters

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of ligne claire are arbitrary but diverting. Hergé’s lines were clear and ordered, Watkins’ fluid and vernacular. Tintin was an almost entirely male world, with no major female characters. The world of the Broons and Oor Wullie depicted a version of femininity that was stereotyped but pervasive. Hergé depicted the entire world while never leaving Belgium, constructing it through books and magazines. Watkins was a transplant.

Hergé criticised the pre-war Nazis through the Bordurians in King Ottakar’s Sceptre and was gearing up for war in the aborted Land of Black Gold, then worked for Nazi-controlled Le Soir but rejected the Belgian fascist party and spent his life atoning for his anti-Semitic insertions into The Shooting Star. Watkins lampooned Hitler and Mussolini with such efficiency in all of his strips, the Nazis placed him on a hit list. Hergé was a political conservative who lost his faith. Watkins was a devout, zealous Christian who excelled in portraying the proletariat. Photographs of Hergé show him amiable and non-descript; Watkins looks almost crazed, sadistic, cold – a sneer seems to be curling his lip and the intensity of his gaze is deeply uncomfortable. While Hergé dreamed of settling his account with Tintin and moving into fine art, Watkins dreamed of using the strip form to describe the grand sweep of Biblical history. It is reported that he kept a huge Bible by his drawing board in which he scribbled copious notes and marginalia; his drawings of Dundonian operatives and feral children were for him, a mere practice run for a much more profound pictorial dialogue with God. He dreamed of transcribing the entire Bible into cartoon form, from Genesis to Revelation (one can only imagine his stab at the whore of Babylon; though a lust-crazed, naked and painted Daphne Broon hardly bears thinking about …). His Young Warrior strips drawn for the Worldwide Evangelicisation Crusade pioneered the Christian comic tract now dominated by the fevered, bigoted Jack Chick. Chick’s terroristic, sanctimonious tone is prophesied in the ‘mouth of babes’ dialogue between the twins Tony and Tina who mention ‘unsaved friends’ so amiably, it freezes the blood.

Another difference is geographical. Tintin traversed the globe, exporting the values he/ Hergé held most dear to everyone from the Chinese to the Latin Americans – it took many years for him even to acquire a recognisable home. If Tintin located its action with purposeful exactitude, Watkins could be much more slippery and fluid in his understanding of geography. One of the joys of Desperate Dan’s Cactusville is the loopy juxtaposition of British and American features side by side. It was never

made clear where ‘Auchenshoogle’ was but it was clearly more Dundee than anywhere else, though we never saw the town from anything higher than the level at which Wullie or Granpaw Broon were standing at that moment. The characters were always firmly located at street level and never left the confines of their notional home. 10 Glebe St was the crucible where such universal values were admitted in, considered, and translated into the phonetic, couthy speak of the family. A good example is the ‘French Polisher’ story, where the family mistakenly believe Maggie is bringing home a half-French, half-Polish boyfriend – and to their credit, go out of their way to promote international relations.

This element is present in one of the best and most unusual, Broons strips from the 50s. It is a characteristic tenement storm in a teacup. A woman from the block opposite to the Broons looks out her window and notices Paw is pulling faces at her from across the courtyard. The woman retaliates by sticking out her tongue.

Paw girns even more fiercely, as does she and it escalates until the woman’s man is ordered over to the Broons’ front door to demand an explanation. Then comes the reveal: Paw has eaten raspberry jam and the seeds have got behind his false teeth, requiring various facial exertions to get them out.

Having said that, while we never saw the Broons abroad, some of them did go with rifle and bayonet fixed. Hen and Joe pulled on a kilt and went to fight the Nazis in WWII. Paw, it is implied, fought in the First World War and Granpaw was a kiltie who could be found anywhere from Khartoum to the Transvaal. The Broons were by tradition a military family. We never saw Horace or the Twins grow up, so who knows if they would have seen action in Suez, or the Mau Mau rebellion?

With each panel doubling mimicking a window in the tenements, the raspberry seeds story sums up all of the strengths of the classic strip while sharing the strong architectural sensibilities and design of the best American funnies. It is also one of the few strips funnier on the second reading, once you understand Paw’s ever more gruesome scowls are due to his own irritation at what he thinks is his neighbour’s anti-social behaviour (the ASBO is conspicuously absent from current day Broons strips).

The Broons were at its best when the strip utilised the notional architecture of the family’s single end home (a domicile that changed shape, size and layout multiple times without the family ever having to flit). The comedy of the strip during its best years rested on a near documentary attention to the pressures of living in close quarters, nose to tip with each other (all the Broons boys, from Hen to the ither twin, shared a bed) and their neighbours, and the need to cut the cloth to meet the means of a family of 10. Remembered now somewhat disparagingly as a formulaic repetition of two or three plots (most classically a misunderstanding provoked

by The Bairn mishearing something said by the frequently delinquent Granpaw), the early strips were in fact much richer, varied and inventive.

In one of the rare continuing storylines of the early 1950s a dispossessed Granpaw moves in, and is hoisted up on the kitchen pulley to sleep.

Naturally a burning cigar against the rope tips him all over the breakfast table. Out in the close, Oor Wullie chalks bandy legs, a hobby horse and roller-skates underneath a row of window sills where neighbours lean out to talk. Close quarters, overcrowding and space constraints were dire social evils that he and the Sunday Post scripting team understood were equally the stuff of comedy. Now that tenements are desirable real estate, the spatial and architectural satire of the strips is somewhat obsolete, and entirely missing from the current incarnations.

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But the strips, which never escaped a onepage resolution, still have a reputation of being formulaic and static. Sneering at the Broons and Oor Wullie has become a standard means of sneering at the socially and politically conservative DC Thomson. It does not help that Watkins has remained a primarily parochial talent. Whereas Hergé’s characters were allowed to rest peacefully and accrue an international reputation, Watkins Scottish strips have been huckled into a decidedly undignified old age after his death in 1969. Following seven years of reprints they went to Joe Lavery, who made a game attempt to introduce running storylines amid knockabout stories of childhood and family soap opera. Ken Harrison put his own considerable draughtsmanship at Thomson’s disposal to contemporise the strips. With the addition of Primrose Paterson he was successful in turning Oor Wullie into the fun, charming strip about childhood it really should be, but left The Broons monosyllabic and bloodless. Now the strip is in a much sorrier state. The current incumbent Peter Davidson is technically competent but has no gift for strip storytelling and looks like he has been drawing on morphine. Whether Oor Wullie grimaces or laughs, his mouth looks pretty much like Gordon Brown after a bucket of straight Pernod. At Glebe Street it looks as if students have moved in downstairs and their spliff fumes have wafted upwards to progressively dope up the whole family. Frozen in anachronistic, irrelevant stasis, Watkins’ democratic line has degenerated into a sad, slow, ceremonial squiggle.

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