The Adventures of Tintin - Legacy

Legacy

Tintin and his creator Hergé have inspired many artists within comics. Most notably, Hergé's ligne claire style has proven influential. Contributors to the Tintin magazine have employed ligne claire, and more recently, Jacques Tardi, Yves Chaland, Jason Little, Phil Elliott, Martin Handford, Geof Darrow, Eric Heuvel, Garen Ewing, and Joost Swarte have produced works utilising it.

Tintin's legacy includes the establishment of a market for comic strip collections; the serialisation followed by collection model has been adopted by creators and publishers in France and Belgium. This system allows for greater financial stability, as creators receive money whilst working. This rivals the American and British model of work for hire. Roger Sabin has argued that this model allowed for "in theory ... a better quality product". Paul Gravett has also noted that the use of detailed reference material and a picture archive, which Hergé implemented from The Blue Lotus onwards, was "a turning point ... in the maturing of the medium as a whole".

In the wider art world, both Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein have claimed Hergé as one of their most important influences. Lichtenstein made paintings based on fragments from Tintin's comics, whilst Warhol utilised the ligne claire and even made a series of paintings with Hergé as subject. He declared: "Hergé has influenced my work in the same way as Walt Disney. For me, Hergé was more than a comic strip artist".

In music, Tintin has been the inspiration to a number of bands and musicians. A British 1980s pop band took the name Thompson Twins after the Tintin characters. Stephen Duffy, lead singer of Duran Duran before they struck fame, had a UK number 4 hit with "Kiss Me" under the name Stephen "Tintin" Duffy; he had to drop the nickname, however, under pressure of a copyright infringement suit. An Australian psychedelic rock band and an American independent progressive rock band have used the name "Tin Tin", and British electronic dance music duo Tin Tin Out was similarly inspired by the character. South African singer/songwriter Gert Vlok Nel compares Tintin to God in his Afrikaans song "Waarom ek roep na jou vanaand", presumably because Tintin is a morally pure character.

Scottish singer and actor Jimmy Somerville, as early as 1982, sported a new "look" with very short cut hair, and a kuifje ("small tuft" in Dutch) up-front, in a deliberate move to resemble Tintin character. Following this "breakthrough" in 80's fashions, lots of young gay men around the world adopted this new image for themselves, even to the point of advertising it as a Gay pride public statement.

Australian cartoonist Bill Leak often portrays Australia's round-faced former prime minister and subsequent foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, as Tintin.

Hergé has been lauded as "creating in art a powerful graphic record of the 20th century's tortured history" through his work on Tintin. whilst Maurice Horn's Encyclopaedia of World Comics declares him to have "spear-headed the post-World War II renaissance of European comic art". French philosopher Michel Serres noted that the 23 Tintin albums constituted a "chef-d'oeuvre" to which "the work of no French novelist is comparable in importance or greatness".

On 30 May 2010, a life-sized bronze statue of Tintin and Snowy, and more than 200 other Tintin items, including many original panels by Hergé, sold for 1.08 million euros ($1.3 million USD) at a Paris auction.

Charles de Gaulle once said, in 1966 : "Mon seul rival international est Tintin". But then, he added : "Nous sommes les petits qui n'avons pas peur des grands" ("My only international rival is Tintin. We are the small ones, who aren't afraid of the big ones"). This claim was spoken when De Gaulle decided to ban all NATO aircraft bases from France. The allusion to "the big ones", thus, refers to USA and USSR, just as Tintin was not afraid of Al Capone in America, nor of Colonel Sponsz in Eastern Europe

The Amazing Race 19 used the detectives of The Adventures of Tintin as a challenge to find out that the contestants were going to Panama City.