Sweetness & Blight

Both cartoonists have hordes of loyal fans; both draw moonfaced characters; both go by a single name. There ends the resemblance between Belgium's Herge and France's Sine, two of Europe's finest cartoonists. To win an audience, Herge sees mostly the sweetness, Sine sees mostly the blight.

Ingenuous, Ingenious. Herge's sunny creation is an ingenuous, ingenious teenage adventurer named Tintin, who acts like a Rover Boy, looks like the early Skeezix with his upswept lock of hair, and is easily Europe's most popular comic-strip character. French children once named him their favorite hero in a magazine poll, gave him nearly three times as many votes as Napoleon. Compared to U.S. characters, Tintin has a close kinship to Little Orphan Annie in his devotion to morality. Like Annie, oddly enough, Tintin has undeveloped eyes, e.g., she has circles but no dots; he has dots but no circles.

Tintin (pronounced roughly: Tantan) has been scotching evil since 1929, now appears in dozens of papers and magazines across Europe. A Tintin comic book sells 250,000 copies a week; Tintin hard-cover book sales have reached 8,000,000. French stores sell Tintin soap, underwear and pajamas; null heads of the boy and his dog disconcertingly survey Brussels from the top of a nine-story building built by Herge's publisher.

So stirring are Tintin's wholesome feats --fighting saboteurs, thwarting jewelry thieves, foiling dope smugglers--that both King Baudouin and French Novelist Francoise (A Certain Smile) Sagan are listed as fans. Tintin has made a millionaire of Herge (real name: Georges Remi), 51, who was a schoolboy when he started to draw Tintin's precursor as a boy spy during the German occupation of World War I.

Gallery of Horrors. In startling contrast to the sweetness of Tintin are the cartoons in the Paris weekly L'Express by Sine (real name: Maurice Sinet), 29, France's highest-paid freelance artist (posters, stage sets, animated ads). Sine's more innocent drawings include murders --a wife eating her husband's brains after dicing his skull like a melon. His really mordant streak is reserved for legless cripples who leave their carts outside Moslem temples beside the shoes of other visitors and boy scouts who thumb rides from Christ as he walks with his cross.

How Sine got this way not even Sine can fully explain. But some of his spleen seemingly stems from his year in the army. He was a military misfit, spent months in jail. When he got out, Sine was fighting mad. ''I took up judo to get even with those s.o.b.s if I ever met any again. I hate all military paraphernalia, blustering ex-servicemen wearing medals, and by extension, every kind of cripple, however blameless."

Sine's ire is not reserved for the military and cripples; he aims his pen at all society. "People are stupid. They are bourgeois and conservative, and that burns me. I can't stand it. So I do my best to burn them." He betrays an almost normal streak in a strip of hula hooping (see cut) and in his droll The French Cat, a series of cartoons based on or built around elaborate puns on chat, e.g., chat teaubriant, a smug-faced cat on a platter, cut up like a filet. But such lapses do not hide the man who gets inspiration by decorating his cluttered workroom with a picture of a legless ex-serviceman being held at attention by two policemen for La Marseillaise.

The simultaneous success of the light-hearted Herge and the blight-hearted Sine proves that the public will take its cartoons sweet or sharp--if the cartoonist is clever enough.

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