Abstract EN:

Hergé, Martin and Jacobs have greatly influenced the European bande dessinée of the 1930s to 1950s. What major constellations of symbols do they follow up, transform or abandon? What meaning and imaginary do they aim at through text and picture? What oscillations appear through such two-lane mechanism? The first part will deal with a three-dimensional description of the eighteen books of the corpus : a) the text, particularly its lexical, grammatical and syntaxical aspects as well as its punctuation b) the picture, particularly its shots, layout, speech bubbles and size of panels c) the narrative technique - at times - its characters, dialogues and recitatives. This will lead us to a selection of statistically significant pictures which are apt to carry the gist of the story. In the second part, the Durandian grid will be applied to this same selection of panels to interpret the imaginary. Light and darkness. Thus, in the books of Tintin, the nocturnal, the sea that either devours or comforts, appeared as early as the first book, well before Haddock the sailor. Tintin, the diurnal hero, gradually gives up his leadership to other characters. Alix goes from an impossible past family to an impossible future family, since he never finds his ascendants and, in a backlash, forgoes his descendants as well as the cyclical nocturnal. Although a diurnal character at first, Lefranc confronts the natural elements and disolves or escarpes into the nocturnal. The scary swarming of nocturnal life as examplified by Blake & Mortimer running away from evil forces in the first book, both bursts into smithereens of characters and picture frames in the last book.