Comics of Hergé

Joe Sutliff Sanders is associate professor in the children's literature track of the English Department at Kansas State University. He is author of A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child and Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story, coeditor of a collection of essays on The Secret Garden, and former Fulbright Fellow at the University of Luxembourg.

After five decades of critical discussions on Hergé and Tintin, is there anything left to say on the most famous French-language comics creator and his acclaimed body of work? The Comics of Hergé answers the challenge of venturing new interpretations of a classic yet endlessly inspiring corpus. Drawing from multiple fields of enquiry--philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, narratology, history, poetics, musicology, sociology, film studies, art history, myth analysis, politics, and comics theory--the contributions included in Sanders's collection re-examine the visual, ideological, and storytelling devices at play in one of the most 'iconic' creations in comics history and their influence on post-Hergéan ligne claire experimentations. The chapters with a thematic approach (appraising the recurrence of motifs ranging from the nothingness prevalent in Tintin in Tibet to the mechanical modernity and narrative acceleration of Hergé's airplanes) complement those that offer new considerations on Hergé's aesthetics (his stylistic evolution, his narrative patterns, his representation of violence, his late predilection for simulacra and reflexivity), as well as those that explore the posterity of Hergéan tropes and iconography. As a whole, this collection sheds new light on an author whose work emerges here once again not as a critical terminus, but as a source of enduring fascination.""- Fabrice Leroy, professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, comics scholar, and author of Sfar So Far: Identity, History, Fantasy, and Mimesis in Joann Sfar's Graphic Novels