David Maybury | Blog

Hergé’s famous investigative journalist, Tintin is in the limelight again (previous revelations last year). This time he is being brought out of the closet - dragged kicking and screaming - by Matthew Parris in the Times UK. The vicious rumour is being denied by officianados of the Tintin realm but Parris presents a convincing argument:

The only unambiguously heterosexual male mammal in Tintin’s entire universe. We know that because of Snowy’s tendency to be distracted by lady dogs: a tendency in which he is consistently foiled by his master and by Hergé’s plot. Pity this dog, wretchedly straight and trapped in a ghastly web of gay human males. - Matthew Parris.

Tintin features elsewhere on the interweb today - this time on the Forbidden Planet Blog. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are to appear in the movie adaptation as Tintin’s mustached and bowler hatted friends Thompson and Thomson. Matthew Parris had this to say:

Tintin first meets the flamboyantly moustachioed couple on a cruise in 1932 (Cigars of the Pharaoh), learning to distinguish between them by their different moustaches. The Thomson and Thompson life is a fancy-dress party: the pair love dressing up in exotic costumes and are once mobbed in the street for their Chinese opera costumes (The Blue Lotus). On other occasions they are seen (often with their signature bowlers still on) in striped swimming costumes, and a variety of folkloric garbs, always absurdly over-the-top. There is no evidence that either has ever had an eye for women, let alone a girlfriend.