French Literature Reviews - 2026
The Tintin Archipelago
Art and Visual Culture
Albert Algoud
Jean-Marie Apostolidès
Dominique Cerbelaud
Benoît Peeters
Pierre Sterckx
The Tintin Archipelago
essays
Les Impressions Nouvelles, Paris-Brussels
Series: Réflexions faites
120 pages, 16 x 24 cm
retail price: 14 euros
published 10/01/2004
THE BOOK
Twenty years after Hergé's passing, Tintin still has not revealed all of his secrets. In this volume, five of the foremost Hergé scholars offer a series of fresh perspectives on The Adventures of Tintin.
This collection of stimulating and insight-rich texts is published in January 2004, marking the 75th anniversary of Tintin and the incorporation of the twenty-fourth album into the Adventures series, Tintin and Alph-Art.
THE TEXTS
Cyrille Mozgovine: Preface
Benoît Peeters: Tintin: The Invention of a Myth
Dominique Cerbelaud: The Christic Hero
Jean-Marie Apostolidès: Inside the Belly of the Unicorn: The Organization of Tintin's World
Albert Algoud: And Light There Was... An Intermittent Character: Rastapopoulos? No, Jolyon Wagg
Pierre Sterckx: The Places of the Myth
THE AUTHORS
Cyrille Mozgovine is the mysterious author of the Dictionary of Proper Names in Tintin (from Abdallah to Zorrino), recently reissued by Casterman.
Benoît Peeters, writer, comic book scriptwriter, and filmmaker, is notably the author of two reference works: The World of Hergé (Casterman, 1983) and Hergé, Son of Tintin (Flammarion, 2002).
Dominique Cerbelaud, a Dominican friar, hosted the meetings held on March 1st and 2nd at the Couvent de la Tourette. A renowned theologian, he is also the author of "Tintin in the Land of the Bible" in Théophilyon no. 5 (2000).
Jean-Marie Apostolidès, theater director, writer, and professor at Stanford University in California, is the author of The Metamorphoses of Tintin (recently reissued by Exils). He has recently published Tintin et le mythe du Surenfant with Moulinsart.
Albert Algoud, formerly a broadcaster on Canal+ and France-Inter, is currently the editor-in-chief of Fluide Glacial. He is the author of Tintinolâtrie, Le Haddock illustré, Le Tournesol illustré (Casterman), and Le Dupondt sans peine (Canal+ éditions).
Pierre Sterckx, a close friend of Hergé, is an art critic and professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He has published Hergé: A Biographical Portrait (in collaboration with Thierry Smolderen) with Casterman, and Tintin et les Médias with Le Hêtre Pourpre.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 10 AT 6:00 PM
A book-signing event with the authors of The Tintin Archipelago will take place on Saturday, January 10, 2004—the exact date of Tintin's 75th anniversary—at the L'Incipit bookstore, 78 rue de la Tour, 75116 Paris.
The critical study of bande dessinée has established itself as a branch of cultural and literary analysis, examining the interplay of graphic and narrative techniques within sequential art. Within this broader tradition, Hergé's creation has attracted scholarly attention, yielding critical volumes and monographs that explore the structural and thematic dimensions of the famous series. This volume gathers essays by specialists including Benoît Peeters and Jean-Marie Apostolidès, addressing various facets of the fictional universe and its cultural footprint.
The texts collected in The Tintin Archipelago examine specific dimensions of the series, addressing the invention of the central myth, the organization of the narrative world, recurring character types, and the significance of recurrent locations. Readers interested in francophone comics scholarship and dedicated critical approaches to Hergé's work may find this collection relevant to their investigations into the albums.