Tintin is grandly uninterested in money. He is indifferent when—on occasion—he is offered large sums for accounts of catching some villain. Hergé’s disdain for transatlantic capitalism is portrayed in the 1931 “Tintin in America”, in which businessmen bid each other up to offer Tintin $100,000 for an oil well. When the young reporter explains the well is on Blackfoot Indian land, the businessmen steal the land from the Indians.

European snobbery about money permeates the books. Villains are frequently showy arrivistes. Old money is good. A gift (as opposed to gainful employment) allows his best friend, Captain Haddock, to buy back his family’s ancestral mansion. The captain takes to castle life with relish. Enriched by a treasure find, he swaps his seaman’s uniform for an increasingly Wodehousian wardrobe involving cravats, tweeds and at one point a monocle.

Hergé did not share his creation’s lack of interest in money. He paid minute attention to marketing (in total, some 200m albums have been sold) and the production of puzzles, colouring books and toys. Though Hergé is routinely voted onto lists of “10 famous Belgians”, he had no illusions about his homeland’s limitations as a market. He quickly began excising references to Tintin’s Belgian roots to boost his appeal on the French and Swiss markets, referring to him in 1935 as a “young European reporter”. He was happy for English-language editions to leave the impression that Tintin was British.

The 1930 story “Tintin in the Congo” has done much to feed Hergé’s reputation for racism. Its Africans are crude caricatures: child-men with wide eyes and bloated lips who prostrate themselves before Tintin (as well as Snowy his dog), after he shows off such magic as an electromagnet, or quinine pills for malaria. (…)

The book remains popular in Africa, Hergé defenders like to assert. But, in truth, it has lost any charm it ever possessed. It is a work of propaganda—not for “colonialism”, as is often said—but more narrowly for Belgian missionaries, one of whom keeps saving Tintin’s life in evermore ludicrous ways: first dispatching a half dozen crocodiles with a rifle then rescuing him from a roaring waterfall, seemingly unhindered by his advanced age and ankle-length soutane. Hergé’s reputation is also marked by charges of anti-Semitism. He received many complaints about one of his villains, the hook-nosed New York financier, “Mr Blumenstein”. It does not help that this caricature appeared in “The Shooting Star”, an adventure written in 1941 while living in Brussels under Nazi occupation. In the field of devout Tintinologists, much effort has been put to explaining this “lapse” away. Michael Farr, a British expert on Tintin, is typical, writing in 2001 that as soon as Hergé realised that his character was “liable to misunderstanding”, he gave Blumenstein a different name and a new nationality, having him hail from “São Rico”. (…)

Alas, none of those arguments survive a reading of a biography of Hergé by Philippe Goddin, published in 2007. Mr Goddin’s honesty is commendable: his is an official biography, based on Hergé’s large collection of private papers.

Mr Goddin returns to “The Shooting Star”, and its initial newspaper serialisation in Le Soir. This included a strip about the panic unleashed when it seemed a giant meteorite would hit the earth. In one frame, he writes, Hergé drew two Jews rejoicing that if the world ended, they would not have to pay back their creditors. At that same moment in Belgium, Mr Goddin notes, Jews were being ordered to move to the country’s largest cities and remove their children from ordinary schools. They were also banned from owning radios, and were subject to a curfew. In the news pages of Le Soir, these measures were described as indispensable preparations for an orderly “emigration” of Jews. A year later, Hergé deleted the drawing of the Jews of his own accord, when the serialised “The Shooting Star” became an album. Mr Goddin demolishes the excuse of naivety, thanks to papers found in Hergé’s files. As early as October 1940, he records, Hergé received an anonymous letter accusing him of luring Belgian children to read German propaganda, by publishing Tintin in Le Soir’s youth supplement. A few months later, Hergé had a bitter argument with an old friend, Philippe Gérard. In a letter, Gérard demanded Hergé either endorse the “odious propaganda” of Le Soir or make his disagreement with the German occupation known. Saying it was just “a job” would not do, his friend concluded.