Drawing on Krazy: Lunar Thoughts with Tintin

For the class of Tuesday April 2nd, 2013.

Today's class focused mostly on drawing, with a pronounced emphasis on comics and graphic novel artists, many of which from the publishing house Drawn and Quarterly. Check out this page for a delicious variety of artists published by the company.

I am a fan of graphic novels and of comics. Some of my favorites include Charles Burns, Guy Delisle, and Marc Bell. How it all began though, was probably through the series Asterix et Obelix, and Tintin.

I am still very interested in Tintin. There is a specific term for people like me: "Tintinophile", and therefore of course, internet fan clubs to match! Here's one of them. In comparison to some (this stuff gets pretty serious), I am definitely a Tintinophile Light, but I still wear my badge with honour.

In this selection from "Tintin and The Crab With The Golden Claw", the viewer's gaze is encouraged to wander along with Tintin's, as explains Fred Sanders in this great article from the Scriptorium Daily.

Personally, part of what interests me so much about Tintin is the richness of the story's narrative and of its symbolism, in combination with its ability to remain simple, clean and seemingly effortless: The testament of a true masterpiece. Tintin is an over acknowledged work, and as a comic classic has even been debated to be a literary classic by Tom McCarthy in his book Tintin and The Secret of Literature, conquering new grounds for the medium of comics in general.

I am currently reading McCarthy and loving it.
Borrow it after me if you're so inclined,
it's in Mount Allison University's library collection.

Comics are so powerful. I see the medium as an intersection between the story-telling tools of cinema and written word, incidentally on the same page as paintings, drawings, and other 2D art forms. So much can be communicated between the frames.

Themes and symbols that particularly interest me in Tintin, specifically, are those of good and evil-delegated and concentrated to specific characters-, and the themes of dreams and craziness. Here are some of my favorite examples of these enchanting follies:

1) The fast inflating and exploding mushrooms on the fallen meteorite island in The Shooting Star.

2) Dupont and Dupond's (in English Thompson and Thomson's) bubble burping and fast rainbow beard sprouting in The Land of black Gold. They are later still afflicted by this mysterious illness in Explorers on The Moon.

3) In The Shooting Star again, a mad street prophet announces a supposed upcoming apocalypse. 

Finally, seperate from the themes of dreams and craziness, I also love that Tintin goes to the moon. Two books are dedicated to the destination, Destination Moon and Explorers on The Moon. I am myself very interested in the moon and in its symbolism, as a subject of fantasy and impossibility, symbol of impossible dreams and of madness. Yet we have walked on the Moon, have done the impossible. What now? To me, it is the most beautiful and mysterious metaphor for our present time in history and our direction in the world. We have gone further than we ever thought possible. Technology has permitted the unimaginable, and yet it has also shrunk our world: We now have to pay greater attention to what we have instead of wanting more. Having looked to the stars and not found a planet as hospitable to life as ours (although I am sure it exists), we have, I hope, realized our luck and renewed our responsibility towards to fragile ecosystems on Earth. Yet despite having known it physically and "conquered" it as a human species, there is still something that makes us, and undoubtably always will make us dreamily look up at it at night... and this is one of the many things that I just love about the moon.

Earth seen from the Moon.