Dialogue Usage in Tin Tin

Hergé’s choices when it comes to his characters’ dialogue in the first few stories are interesting for a number of reasons: They serve to differentiate characters through speech patterns, indicate his knowledge and familiarity of his subjects (or lack thereof), and allow Hergé to explore ways to communicate how his characters “speak” aloud. 

In “Tin Tin in America,” each individual character has a distinguishing speech pattern that allows the reader to associate certain phrases or words with that character.  Tin Tin himself is well-spoken and speaks in a similar way to how the publisher’s target American readers must have spoken when the book was translated into English.  He is articulate, friendly, and doesn’t curse or use bad language except to throw insults at bad guys.  His canine companion, Snowy, is also very well-spoken and has a distinctive “woah” noise that he makes.  In one scene, this noise causes Tin Tin to mistake a wailing baby for Snowy and the reader assumes it is the missing dog along with Tin Tin up until we see the crying baby.  The gangsters Bobby Smiles, Al Capone, and their underlings in the city of Chicago all have a very distinct, brusque accent meant to invoke the mobsters Hergé watched in American films.  The Native Americans Tin Tin encounters in his travels speak in an infantilized, broken English that one could assume indicates lack of proper education.  These speech styles are so indicative and unique to their respective characters, that you could almost take away the visuals all together and  be able to identify who is saying which sentence.

In “Tin Tin in America,” the main characters such as Tin Tin and Bobby Smiles are well spoken individuals.  Even Snowy the dog is extremely articulate.  However, when Hergé decides to depict Native Americans and Chicago mobsters, his choice for how they speak indicates a lack of prior knowledge.  Not every Native American spoke in a simplified, almost dumbed-down version of the English language, but that was what Hergé’s limited knowledge from American adventure books and movies indicated to him.  So that’s how he decided to portray every Native American’s speech pattern.  Although the Chicago mobsters were eloquent and coherent, their accent is occasionally overplayed in the same way without differentiation.  Hergé’s choice here is also based on an assumption that one speech pattern is the way all Chicago mobsters speak.

While reading through the pages and watching how the characters speak, I was very impressed with Hergé’s usage of punctuation to emphasize how his characters communicate.  His usage of ellipsis in particular interested me, as he used it to indicate pauses as a character was speaking.  As opposed to simply putting in periods or breaking up attached speech bubbles into separate thoughts within the same panel, he included ellipsis to force the reader to pause…then continue with the character’s dialogue in the same speech bubble.  Hergé also occasionally incorporated the story’s background into his dialogue in a way that furthered the narrative.  In “Cigars of the Pharaoh,” Tin Tin is floating on a sarcophagus in the ocean where it is extremely windy.  He spies Sophocles Sarcophagus floating a few yards away and calls out to him.  We the readers can understand Tin Tin’s dialogue clearly, almost as though we are floating right beside him, but when Sophocles answers Tin Tin the wind breaks up his message.  Both Tin Tin and the readers can only make out a few detached words and sentence fragments, indicating the strength of the gusts between the characters.  Hergé’s usage of dialogue through incorporating punctuation and the story’s setting is extremely well done in ways that allow readers to more effectively experience the story.