| Summary: | After five decades of critical discussions on Hergé and Tintin, is there anything left to say on the most famous French-language comics creator and his acclaimed body of work? The Comics of Hergé answers the challenge of venturing new interpretations of a classic yet endlessly inspiring corpus. Drawing from multiple fields of enquiry - philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, narratology, history, poetics, musicology, sociology, film studies, art history, myth analysis, politics, and comics theory - the contributions included in Sanders's collection re-examine the visual, ideological, and storytelling devices at play in one of the most 'iconic' creations in comics history and their influence on post-Hergéan ligne claire experimentations. The chapters with a thematic approach (appraising the recurrence of motifs ranging from the nothingness prevalent in Tintin in Tibet to the mechanical modernity and narrative acceleration of Hergé's airplanes) complement those that offer new considerations on Hergé's aesthetics (his stylistic evolution, his narrative patterns, his representation of violence, his late predilection for simulacra and reflexivity), as well as those that explore the posterity of Hergéan tropes and iconography. As a whole, this collection sheds new light on an author whose work emerges here once again not as a critical terminus, but as a source of enduring fascination.
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