The New World: or, How Frederic Tuten Discovered a Continent

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In France everyone knows who Tintin is; in America he may require an introduction. Created by a self-taught Belgian illustrator named Georges Rémi, who early on took the pen name Hergé,¹ Tintin is a boy reporter whose adventures appeared first in the right-of-center Belgian newspaper, the XXe Siècle, and later in albums of his own, twenty-three of them, from Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930) to Tintin and the Picaros (1976). Accompanied by his white terrier Snowy, Tintin solved mysteries and caught criminals on five continents, in the Arctic Ocean, and on the moon; he saved the life of his friend Captain Haddock more than once, found signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and endured the singing of the doughty soprano Bianca Castafiore. He is, in other words, the hero of a comic book, but not only the hero of a comic book. Like Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, and a few characters from Jane Austen, Tintin’s fame is so great that it has given him an existence independent of his creator, something almost like a real life. There are people in France who deliver papers and write scholarly articles on the genealogy of Haddock, and debate whether Tintin lived on the second or third floor of No. 26, Rue du Labrador, in Brussels. His face adorns T-shirts and coffee bowls; there are Tintin statuettes, Tintin calendars, Tintin keychains.

Frederic Tuten’s face has yet to appear on a keychain or a coffee mug, though it might look good there. It is an iconic face, with big square glasses and a shock of white hair à la Beckett. Tuten has travelled almost as much as Tintin: he studied pre-Columbian art in Mexico, and lived for years in Brazil, Paris, Italy, and Berlin. He has been a correspondent for the New York Times, Vogue, and Artforum, a résumé any reporter might be proud of. He is the author of five novels: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988), Tintin in the New World (1993), Van Gogh’s Bad Café: A Romance (1997) and The Green Hour (2002). His work has been admired by Susan Sontag, John Updike, Jonathan Coe, Richard Howard, Iris Murdoch, Harry Mathews, Julián Ríos, and even the great literary gamester Raymond Queneau—a distinguished group if ever there was one. And yet, despite their eloquent, insistent praise, Tuten remains something of a secret in the wider world of popular culture. Until it is republished by Black Classic Press next month, Tintin in the New World is hard to...