A French artist who imagines romantic adventures for the boy adventurer Tintin in the landscapes of Edward Hopper has been sued by the Tintin creator Hergé’s heirs, who said it was not funny to take advantage of Tintin by putting him in an erotic universe, especially as Hergé had chosen not to caricature women, reports The Guardian.
In Breton artist Xavier Marabout’s Hergé-Hopper mashups, Tintin is variously painted into Hopper’s Road and Houses, scratching his head as he greets a woman in a car; looking disgruntled in a version of Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening, 1939; and kissing a girl in a car, in a spin on Hopper’s Queensborough Bridge, 1913. On his website, Marabout describes his work as “strip art”, in which he “strips distant artistic universes to merge them together” in a style where “parody [is] omnipresent”.
But the Moulinsart company, which manages the Tintin business, disagrees, accusing Marabout of reproducing the world of Tintin without proper consent.
“Taking advantage of the reputation of a character to immerse him in an erotic universe has nothing to do with humour,” a lawyer for the company said in court in Rennes this week, where Moulinsart has sued for infringement, as reported by Ouest-France.
Hergé, the lawyer added, had “explained his choice not to involve women in his work, because he found that they are rarely comic elements”. The Belgian artist included scarcely any female characters in the Tintin comics; in Benoît Peeters’ biography Hergé, Son of Tintin, he was quoted as saying: “I love women too much to make caricatures out of them! And besides, pretty or not, women are rarely comic elements … Is it that the maternal side of women doesn’t lend itself to laughter? It is indeed strange to realise that women are absent from many comic-strip stories. Or if they are there, they are rarely funny.”
In response, Marabout’s lawyer claimed the paintings were parody, reported Ouest-France, and cited a “conflict between copyright and freedom of expression and creation”, asking: “Does an artist have the right to wonder about Tintin’s sex life?” and “what about artistic freedom?” The Rennes court will rule in May.