And so to the old pub poser: how many famous Belgians can you name? Eddy Merckx ... Plastic Bertrand ... does Hercule Poirot count? Perhaps it was Charles de Gaulle’s pronouncement, “My only international rival is Tintin”, that perpetuated the myth that the intrepid boy reporter hailed from la belle France. That, and the reading habits of a legion of glum exchange school-kids from Normandy.

Whisper it softly in Belgium, of course. There, Tintin and his creator, Georges Remi (whose initials, GR, were reversed to form the pen name Hergé), are national treasures. When an Englishman, Nick Rodwell, a former seller of Tintin souvenirs in Covent Garden, became director of Moulinsart, keeper of the Tintin copyright, and, in 1993, married Fanny, the former Mrs Hergé (some years his senior), it was regarded as akin to flogging off the family silver. Ten years later, when Tintin’s publisher, Casterman, was swallowed by a French (bah!) conglomerate, it was seen as another attempt to annex Belgium’s cultural icon. Don’t even mention the title Tintin in Thailand, the illegal porn parody that had the gendarmes swooping on a maverick design den in Antwerp.

Tintin is venerated by the Dalai Lama, and was celebrated on the London stage in 2005. You mess with him at your peril. When, in the penultimate story, Tintin and the Picaros (1976), Hergé swapped his hero’s plus-fours for jeans and a Ban the Bomb sticker, the howl of indignation was so loud that the author was forced to whisk the tweeds out of mothballs. Taking in Russia, China, darkest Africa, Egypt, South America and Scotland, Tintin romped through 23 adventures between 1929 and 1976, with a 24th story, Tintin and Alph-Art, incomplete when his creator died in 1983. Hergé had acknowledged the adoration. In his will, he specified that there should be no new illustrated adventures after his passing.

What to make, then, of the seismic jolt that came on May 15, just a week short of what would have been Hergé’s 100th birthday – the announcement that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson would be translating three existing Tintin stories to the silver screen? “Hergé would be terribly excited. He was a great movie buff,” enthuses Michael Farr, author of Tintin: The Complete Companion and a man who knew Hergé personally. “Even in the 1970s, he was terribly with it. He didn’t miss a film. He thought Spielberg was the only person who could ever do Tintin justice. That’s why we should be pleased about it.” A glance at any of the fan websites (try tintinologist.org) suggests that the deal has not met with universal acclaim. But Spielberg and Jackson are not going to be swayed by a bit of heckling. Shot back to back for logistical and financial expediency, the films will come rattling off the production line in 2009.

It’s a wonder it’s taken so long. Though it is restricted to exploiting the back catalogue, sales have rocketed for the product of Moulinsart/Studios Hergé. Four in 10 French homes are said to hold a copy of at least one Tintin book. Worldwide, 200m Tintin adventures have been sold. Translated into 60 languages, he still sells upwards of 2m copies a year – 600,000 of them in China, which, like much of Asia, has proved an expanding and lucrative market. It’s an unlikely turn-up for a quiffed, nerdy chap whose cohorts include an upstart terrier (Snowy), a drunken sailor (Captain Haddock), a deaf scientist (Professor Calculus) and a couple of bumbling detectives (the Thompson twins, before they entered the 1980s pop scene).

DreamWorks will have noted with extreme prejudice the other book-to-screen successes of recent years. The Harry Potter films have made $4 billion at the box office, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings cycle $3 billion, with as much again to be gained on merchandising. And there is an added incentive. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein may have cited Hergé’s ligne claireillustrations as an influence on the pop-art scene, but it remains the case that Tintin has never broken America. “It’s wide open,” exclaims Marvin Levy, Spielberg’s DreamWorks spokesman, with glee. “Tintin is a home-town boy.”

Part of the delay seems to be down to the fact that the technology hadn’t previously existed to allow Tintin to be rendered in a satisfactory manner. Hergé hated the live-action films and the animated TV series, all from the 1960s (and, naturellement, French). “We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film,” Spielberg declares. “Yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honour the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created.” (Don’t anyone mention the Spielberg-produced Flintstones movie.)

Hergé’s characters will be created on screen with the computerised motion-capture technique that turned the actor Andy Serkis into both Gollum and King Kong. Jackson has been beavering away for a year at his Weta effects house in New Zealand, finally knocking up a 20-minute demo that wowed the backers. “We’re making the characters look photorealistic – the fibres of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair,” Jackson says. “It’s possible that the work, certainly on the first one, could well be starting this year,” Levy adds – once Spielberg has finished Indiana Jones 4 and Jackson his adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.

Until now, Tintin has remained a continental creation. “The reason Tintin isn’t as well known in America is that he is three months younger than Mickey Mouse,” Rodwell points out. “The Americans didn’t need to import this European cartoon character.” As time wore on, America seemed an irrelevance. Hergé did not visit the United States until 1971; Tintin’s one Stateside adventure (Tintin in America, 1931) is a confusing portrait in which he battles Al Capone and saves the American Indian from evil land-grabbers. It has all fed into the usual antiAmerican cultural snobbery – worldliness and sophistication v wham-bang-kapow! “Tintin is not a superhero, nor does he possess special powers,” the DreamWorks press release cautions, lest there be any misapprehensions.

But Old Europe has some skeletons rattling in its closet. In recent times, there has been a resurfacing of allegations about Hergé’s collaboration during the wartime occupation of Belgium (Hergé continued to work for the Brussels paper Le Soir under Nazi proprietorship, creating such grotesques as Blumenstein, the evil Jewish banker whom Tintin took on in 1941’s Tintin and the Shooting Star). But not even the question of Hergé’s culpability is going to derail the Spielberg express. “Apparently, it’s been pretty well discredited,” Levy says. “I wouldn’t want to fan that flame, not with the sensitivity that Steven has.”

As a boyhood fan of Tintin, Spielberg is not your typical Yanqui. Indeed, the recent film announcement is not so much a progression of the deal first struck in 2002 as a culmination of a 25-year mission. Fuelled by admiration for the young director, Hergé sent emissaries to seek out Spielberg as long ago as 1982, resulting in a three-year option for Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment in 1984. Spielberg, hot off the back of ET, reportedly employed Melissa Mathison (the writer of ET, and at the time Harrison Ford’s wife) to craft an African adventure in which Tintin thwarted ivory-hunters (a reversal for Tintin, who, in a previous big-game-hunting yarn, had gleefully blown up a rhinoceros with a stick of dynamite). “We’d see it as a film for the future lists for a long time, then it would get quiet,” Levy says.

Unconvinced that he had the technology to pull it off, Spielberg turned to his next project, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (It is said that storyboarded scenes from his aborted Tintin movie were incorporated into it.) Spielberg has long hinted that the Indiana Jones chronicles were greatly influenced by Tintin’s boy-scout ethos. No mere coincidence, surely, that Tintin has resurfaced now that Spielberg is again immersed in Indy.

The rumours about personnel have abounded over the years: first there was Henry Thomas, from ET, playing Tintin, then a young Leonardo DiCaprio and even the unlikely prospects of Christopher Lambert and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and Richard Gere, meanwhile, were all mooted for Haddock. Courtney Love was a later suggestion for the opera diva Bianca Castafiore, the only (some say suspiciously) significant female in the entire canon. But all that, Levy says, is just tittle-tattle. “We never got to that point where we were gonna make it,” he empha-sises. “We’d just smile every day.”

What is true is that, as Spielberg let his interest lapse, the director Claude Berri (who had produced a successful live-action version of Asterix) came into the equation, as, apparently, did Roman Polanski. Warner Brothers became a heavyweight suitor, but failed to give the Hergé Foundation sufficient guarantees about creative integrity. It was with Warner’s departure that Spielberg appeared again.

It is hard to believe any film-maker, especially one as eminent as Spielberg, would sign anything that curtailed his artistic freedom. “I’d be surprised if there were creative restrictions anywhere,” Levy remarks. But if they are going to stick to existing stories, as is the letter of the law, the Tintin die-hards may rest assured that Spielberg and Jackson are about as faithfully fan-boy as you’re going to get. “There’s a feeling,” Farr says, “that there’ll be no mucking about.” They will hardly tolerate the anachronisms of Hergé’s antiBolshevik adventure, Tintin and The Soviets (1929), nor the imperial/racist agenda of Tintin in the Congo (1930), though it would be a shame if such issues as opium, cocaine and cannabis – drugs being a recurring theme in Tintin’s world – were expunged completely. The whisky-toting Captain Haddock at AA? Don’t discount anything from the man who retrospectively airbrushed out the handguns from a rerelease of ET, replacing them with walkie-talkies. “That probably will be a question when they get the first script and sort out the ideas for it,” Levy says.

Curiously, it is in those contentious war years, once Hergé got his nose down and settled into a less political groove, that he is judged to have produced his best work. The makers are hedging their bets as to which three tales will be filmed first (“We cannot comment on which stories have been selected,” Rod-well says. “There are 23 complete adventures, so, if the films are successful, there is plenty of material for additional films”), but it is not impossible, Farr reckons, to make a deduction.

They will most likely be the three double-instalment episodes from Hergé’s middle period: the pirate/submarine yarn The Secret of the Unicorn and its sequel, Red Rackham’s Treasure (1943-44); the Inca diptych The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun (1948-49); and the postwar Destination Moon/Explorers on the Moon (1953-54), in which the pesky Walloon hack reaches the lunar surface two decades ahead of Neil Armstrong, albeit in what looks alarmingly like a V-2 rocket. The individual adventures elsewhere “are a bit slender”, Farr explains. More important, he says, “you pretty much have the entire cast of characters by then. If you do anything before 1940, you don’t have Captain Haddock”.

Spielberg and Jackson have yet to sort out which ones they will work on, but already the casting speculation has been rebooted. Rupert Grint is the latest to be mooted as Tintin. But one insider warns: “There’ll be a few surprises. It may not even be a male actor.” Gwyneth Paltrow is one name that has recurred, with Tom Hanks a good bet to play Haddock.

But you can’t win them all. The day of the announcement, a blogger remarked: “Tintin is just some camp ginger kid poking his nose where it shouldn’t be.”

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