In 1954, the Cold War was less than a decade old and its imprint on pop culture in the form of the spy thriller was still in its infancy.
Ian Fleming had published the first James Bond novel a year earlier, but in post-war film and TV producers were mainly looking for escapist entertainment and historical epics as far removed from the political zeitgeist as possible. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when Bond broke into movie theaters and OOM’s man hit TV screens, that spies were getting cool, and the nuclear-powered battle between the United States and the Soviet Union was really starting to be mined for mass entertainment.
But a straightforward pop culture hero wasted no time diving into this conflict, and he did it from the pages of a French-language children’s magazine. In December 1954, young reporter Tintin embarked on an adventure that had all the hallmarks of a classic spy thriller: The Calculus Affair. It would take him to the heart of the Cold War and embroil him in a secret battle over plans for a deadly superweapon.
This was not entirely new territory for Tintin. Unlike most other comic book heroes of the mid-20th century, Tintin operated in a world based on geopolitical reality; after all, he was ostensibly a journalist and his creator, the Belgian artist Hergé, liked to be inspired by the headlines. In the 1930s, The Blue Lotus took Tintin to China during Japan’s invasion of Manchuria The Scepter of King Ottakar foreshadowed the start of World War II when Tintin helped defend Syldavia, a fictional Balkan state, against the expansionism of its fascist neighbour, Borduria.
But by the mid-1950s, both Tintin and Hergé were in different places. The Tintin comic had moved from the pages of a Belgian newspaper to its own magazine, where it was published in color. The books or “albums” that collected his adventures had become extremely popular; the series probably reached its iconic peak in the 1940s with a pair of adventures in two parts – the pirate treasure hunt of The secret of the unicorn And Treasure of Scarlet Rackhamand the mystical Aztec odyssey of The seven crystal balls And Prisoners of the Sun – that would greatly influence the founding of Indiana Jones.
A driven perfectionist prone to exhaustion and depression, Hergé became increasingly ambitious in the scope, subject matter and composition of Tintin’s escapades. In 1950, he began telling the prophetic, thoroughly researched story of Tintin’s journey to the moon. Destination Moon And Explorers on the Moon. It didn’t end until nearly three years later, after several long breaks in publication, and nearly broke the author. Two things were clear: Hergé needed a new trial and Tintin had to return to Earth.
The artist known in real life as Georges Remi (in French pronunciation “Hergé” sounds like “RG” – his initials backwards) founded the Hergé Studios, a team of artists led by the great draftsman Bob de Moor who would help him his work and collectively perfect his inimitable “clear line” style (practically without credit, it must be said). With more time to plan and conceptualize, Hergé curbed the length of his stories, but became even more obsessed with their realism. The first result was The Calculus Affaira breakneck thriller on a human scale, designed with clockwork precision, and set in a very real world.
The story begins in Marlinspike Hall, the ancestral stack where Tintin resides with his best friend, the short-tempered, drunken sailor Captain Haddock; and Professor Cuthbert Calculus, the genius inventor who orchestrated their moonshot. Without explanation, glass begins to shatter everywhere; then Calculus abruptly leaves for Switzerland and spies are found prowling around his laboratory. Thinking their friend is in danger, Tintin and Haddock follow Calculus to Geneva, where they discover a Bordurian plot to kidnap him, but just too late. It turns out that Calculus has invented a devastating sonic weapon, and both Borduria and Syldavia compete to be the first to get their hands on it.
Hergé’s two made-up Balkan states had changed roles after the 1930s – and so had Hergé. In The Calculus AffairOnce a caricature of Nazi Germany, Borduria is an aggressive member of the communist bloc whose agents are all shaven-headed thugs in dark raincoats. Its autocratic leader, Marshal Kûrvi-Tasch, has changed from Hitler to Stalin; his insignia, based on his luxurious moustache, is adorned everywhere from cigarette packs to car fenders to the circumflex accent in his name. These are undoubtedly the bad guys, though Hergé makes them more bizarre than sinister, and not immune to the charms of the decadent West. Their monocled chief of the secret police, Colonel Sponsz, pops his champagne cork at the sight of the insufferable Italian soprano Bianca Castafiore during a brilliant opera house sequence, and is so smugly smitten that he unknowingly lets Tintin and Haddock escape.
The Syldavians, now stand-ins for NATO allies, are no longer the good guys, even though they had just helped with the lunar expedition. Thinking they’re in luck, Tintin and Haddock arrive at the Bordurian embassy on Lake Geneva, where Calculus is being held, along with a Syldavian extraction team – allies at last! – but the scales fall from their eyes when the Syldavians knock out the reporter and kidnap the professor for themselves. Nine years after the end of the war, a more cynical Hergé is done taking sides. Tintin no longer has any interest in disrupting the balance of power – he just wants to save his friend. At the end of the book, Hergé has Calculus destroy the plans for his sonic invention so that it can never be used for “warlike purposes.”
This is not to say that Hergé was a political progressive. A Belgian nationalist and staunch royalist, his early work was filled with ghastly racist and colonialist caricatures. (The indefensible Tintin in the Congo (1931) remains in print, but has now been discreetly omitted from the grid of covers that grace the back of every Tintin book.) But his later stories featured world-weary rationality and a satirical contempt for the machinations of political power.
After The Calculus AffairHergé exposed modern slavery The Red Sea sharksfrom Cold War cynicism to a kind of activist thriller that deals with issues, as John Le Carré would do decades later in novels like The night manager And The constant gardener. He then eschewed the outside world and turned Tintin’s focus inward into the existential masterpiece, Tintin in Tibetand the exquisitely senseless parlor farce, The Castafiore Emerald. Hergé’s last full-length work, 1976’s Tintin and the Picaros – in which Tintin helps his old friend, General Alcazar, regain control of his Latin American state in a popular revolution – closes with a caustic final panel showing how little progress has been made; the leader’s name has changed, but the impoverished state remains. By this time, Tintin, once a cheerful colonial tourist, and usually scrupulous in his neutrality, wore the symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament on his motorcycle helmet.
The Calculus Affair was a turning point for Tintin and for Hergé that ushered in this astonishingly late series of experimental, mature, conceptually sharp books, marked by Hergé’s now total control of his (and his studio’s) craft. It’s perhaps the simplest story of that run: a linear, propulsive rescue mission, driven even more than most by the weekly publishing schedule that drops a cliffhanger at the end of every page. It’s also unfailingly funny, even amid the brutal chase scene that dominates the middle of the book, as Tintin chases the Syldavian spies across the Swiss countryside.
But The Calculus Affair‘s simple, exciting romp is transformed by the specificity of the world. Hergé and de Moor painstakingly explored real sites around Lake Geneva, even going so far as to identify a spot where a car could drive off the road into the lake, and reproduced them exactly. Hergé also deliberately avoided the usual exoticism of the series, setting the entire adventure in Europe and using recognizable annoyances, such as a Band-Aid that won’t come off or an insurance agent that won’t leave, for laughs. This was Tintin’s world (and Hergé’s; he loved to holiday at Lake Geneva) and was shaken by a secret conflict over an apocalyptic superweapon. For the first (but not the last) time in the Tintin series, the adventure had come to find the young explorer home, and it wasn’t entirely welcome.
The Calculus Affair‘s realism and political ambivalence are remarkable for the 1950s, let alone a children’s comic. Exciting yet grounded and believable, laced with a healthy mistrust of the machine of power, it’s a perfect entry into a world of espionage fiction decades ahead of its time.