Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is one of the great masters of cartooning in any era, his work is truly sublime and transcendent. He can make stories and the semiotics of word/image combination symbiotic like Swiss clockwork (although he is Belgian!). He changed the art of comics in Europe (and perhaps the world) and what Osamu Tezuka is to Japan, or Charles Schulz (maybe Walt Disney) is to America, Hergé is to Europe.  Tintin began though as a frankly racist cartoon, with the notorious boy reporter working in Congo, with stereotyped images and caricatures made by a man who had never traveled there but benefited from the income generated there by Belgian people’s colonialist exploitation of the Congo for rubber and other goods. It took a close friend, a Chinese foreign exchange student, to influence him—if his boy reporter (or explorer, in the Nazi era to avoid the politics) was to explore the world, instead of colonizing it, he should really respect the countries and worlds he visited, learn from them and grow. This began, with the album The Blue Lotus to herald in the mature era of Tintin, with deeply moving (and symbolic allegorical) stories, made with precision and absolute exquisite expertise, stories that investigated and explored other worlds, for his many readers to suture into the avatar of Tintin and explore along with him, for the better understanding of all people and respect of different cultures and attitudes.

This was for a show I did in Brussels on my fortieth birthday called Heroes and wanted to put this into the window to appeal to Belgians, but also to espouse my love for them and their culture, especially Tintin. Tintin is kind of gay, his best friend and companion is the bear Captain Haddock, the whole cosmology is all men, except for Bianca Castafiore, the opera diva, who is like a drag queen. I think Hergé lived through a lot of his characters and enjoyed the homosocial adventures in the privacy of his own studio composing the works. When the Nazis invaded and took over Belgium, Hergé continued doing his strip. He was accused of being a sympathizer, but he would retort, “The bakers still made bread, I made my comic.” The strip became more fantastical, to avoid the censure of the Nazis, as then the character and his world spoke largely through metaphor and melodrama—allegorically about humanity as the Nazis murder and oppression wore on. These stories are full of heart and purpose, he clearly was committed to humanitarian concerns throughout his stories, which are also full of wonder and quixotic feeling and ideas.

I have taught comics, as the lead comics instructor for over twenty-five years, and now at USC, where I began a Visual Narrative Art program. Although I’m not a cartoonist, my installations have paintings that speak to one another in nonlinear visually poetic ways—the engine of my installs and painting is about comics. Suturing into the character I’m painting, I feel while I don’t become them, I communicate and channel the icons that I paint, to bring out—like a method actor—the feelings and painterly emotions of the characters I portray. I love Tintin, he was a guide through my life (along with my own dog versions of his), and it was wonderful to make this picture as I was journeying forth into my middle age.