Tintin’s global journey: a geographical analysis of the representation of landscapes in comics

This article examines the representation of natural landscapes in Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin as an ideological project encoded in the uniformity of his geomorphological precision. Building on W.J.T. Mitchell’s argument that landscape is never a neutral genre but a medium of cultural power, and on Mary Louise Pratt’s account of how European ‘planetary consciousness’ classified the world’s terrains within a single regime of knowledge, the analysis asks what ideological project is enacted by the uniformity of Hergé’s geomorphological fidelity across radically heterogeneous geographies. Twenty-seven landscape variables, grouped into relief, climate, hydrology and vegetation, were systematically coded across the canonical Tintin albums and assessed against geomorphological criteria. The principal empirical finding is that Hergé’s representational fidelity does not vary meaningfully with geographic distance from Brussels, with cultural distance from Belgium, or with publication date: Alpine slopes, Saharan dunes, Tibetan ranges, Caribbean coasts and Andean cordilleras are rendered with comparable geomorphological precision. The argument developed here is that this uniformity is not the by-product of Hergé’s craftsmanship but its ideological signature. The systematic application of a single European geomorphological grid to every terrain on the planet constitutes, in the comics medium, the visual analogue of the Linnaean and cartographic projects through which nineteenth-century European science rendered the world commensurable to the metropolitan observer. Hergé’s ligne claire, far from being an aesthetically neutral idiom of clarity, operationalises this universalising gaze: the uniformity of fidelity is the trace, in the panels themselves, of a sujet supposé voir whose authority is precisely its claim to see all places equally well.