Tintin

Tintin

When news that Steven Spielberg planned to make a movie of Tintin, the Belgian comic-book hero, first circulated a few years ago, responses among critics ranged from leeriness to undisguised confusion. "I fear this well-financed new imagining of Tintin will smother my own lifelong construct," fretted Charles Trueheart in the Weekly Standard. "Spielberg Takes On Tintin, but Why?" a headline in the New York Observer asked. Tintin—a young, adventure-prone reporter created in the late 1920s by Georges Remi, aka "Hergé"—has sold more than 200 million books in more than 50 languages, yet the character remains, to American eyes, a product on par with the likes of ABBA or the metric system: odd, limited, and, for all its global pop charisma, something of an offbeat interest on our own, warier cultural shores.