Herg, mild-mannered father of the adventurous Tintin

In the documentary "Tintin and I," it isn't entirely clear who the "I" is. It could be Numa Sadoul, a young Belgian student who interviewed Herg,, the creator of the Tintin comics, at length in the 1970's. More likely, it is Herg, himself, who tells the story of his life and his internationally beloved creation in those interviews. But what the film, a "P.O.V." special to be shown on Tuesday night, needs is more Tintin.

European children - and in recent years, Americans too - know the character well. Created in 1929, Tintin is an idealistic, boyish reporter and explorer who has fantastic adventures travelling the globe with his plucky white terrier, Milou (a name translated into English, strangely, as Snowy), at his side.

Anders Ostergaard, the filmmaker, shows the character, with his trademark peaked blond hair, and various minor figures, like the blustery Captain Haddock and the diva Bianca Castafiore, often enough. But their appearances don't convey what has made Tintin so popular (23 books, which have sold as many as 100 million copies total, in dozens of languages). Viewers who are only vaguely aware of the character may come away unconvinced that Tintin was anything special.

What they will know is that Herg,, whose real name was Georges Remi, was something of a tortured soul. Mr. Remi, who describes his Roman Catholic childhood in Belgium as "gray and mediocre," was a young man in the advertising department of Le VingtiSme SiScle, a right-wing newspaper in Brussels, when his boss asked him to create a comic strip.

And although Mr. Remi rarely left his desk, much less his native country, he made Tintin a world traveller, an observer of cultures that his creator had never known firsthand. Some of the early works, like "Tintin au Congo," were unabashedly racist. Mr. Ostergaard and the film conclude that Mr. Remi wasn't particularly racist, even then; he was just "a bit of a sponge," absorbing whatever attitudes were prevalent at the time. (The father of Mr. Sadoul, the interviewer, was a high-ranking official in what was then the Belgian Congo.)

The strip quickly became political, though. Tintin encountered a villainous dictator named Mosstler, which was surprising, since Mr. Remi's mentor at the newspaper was a fan of both Mussolini and Hitler. After the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, they closed down the paper. Mr. Remi moved on to the Brussels daily Le Soir, but the Nazis assumed control of it, and when the war ended, he was arrested as a Nazi sympathizer.

"It was seen as treason" to have worked for Le Soir, Mr. Remi says, arguing that no one seemed to feel that way about bus drivers and waiters who also went to work every day and collected their salaries while the city was occupied.

"Tintin and I" eventually becomes a psychological portrait, as Mr. Remi talks about his nightmares, his experiences with psychiatry and the emotional difficulties that he endured in deciding to leave his first wife and remarry.

The documentary should be a treat for avid Tintin fans, who come to it with a thorough appreciation of the character and his adventures. Mr. Remi's experiences come to life with his own voice, historical black-and-white film (including a 1981 reunion with Chang Chong-jen, the Chinese artist on whom his character Chang was based) and what appear to be home movies of Mr. Remi and his wives. (He never had children.) Mr. Remi died of leukemia in 1983. He was 75.

(Yahoo News)