Comic Cuts
Belgium produces 30 million comic-strip books annually, and exports 75% of them. On the Continent, comic strips have a higher status than in the U.S. General De Gaulle once described Tintin as his greatest rival. Novelist Françoise Sagan was photographed in a bed littered with comic-strip books, and academics publish serious studies of the art form in highbrow periodicals.
The Tintin books have sold more than 200 million copies since the youthful adventurer first appeared in 1929, created by the Belgian Georges Rémi, better known as Hergé (the initials of his name reversed and written as they would be pronounced in French). Like all good comic-strip characters, Tintin and his companions, the dog Snowy, short-fused Captain Haddock, and absent-minded Professor Calculus, are ageless. In 2001 Tintin's publishers pulled Tintin in Tibet from bookshelves in China after the Chinese insisted on retitling it Tintin in Chinese Tibet.
Lucky Luke, the cowpoke who beats his shadow to the draw and whose horse Jolly Jumper plays a mean hand at poker, stars in more than 80 adventures -- each of which ends with the hero riding into the sunset singing "I'm a poor lonesome cowboy," and has been adapted for television and computer games. His creator, illustrator Morris (real name Maurice de Bevere), a native of Kortrijk in West Flanders, died at age 77 in 2001.
Themes of displacement and anomie run through the stories in Thorgal, a Belgian series with an international following, though the attractions of a good fight are not passed up. Thorgal Aegirsson, born in space and sent to Earth by his mother after his father and grandfather quarreled over whether to invade the planet, lives during the Viking era and knows how to use broadsword and battleaxe to defend himself, his beautiful wife Aarcia, and their two children. He has the Norse gods on his case and must contend against them along with a gallery of cruel human enemies.
But there's a darker side to comic strips: It's called Bande Dessinée Erotique. A close look at the titles in Brussels bookstores shows among many harmlessly titillating offerings others that feature graphic images of rape, bestiality, torture, and what verges disturbingly close to pedophilia. And not all of these are roped off in the adult section, but can often easily be perused by kids who came in for Star Wars or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
