To really write for children, you have to think like a child. And to read a children’s book, you probably have to let go of grown-up reasoning. These thoughts occurred to me as I read two newly-translated books about Tintin and his creator, Georges Remi, better known to the world as Hergé. (The pen name is composed of Remi’s initials backwards, pronounced as in French.) There is much to be learned from these studies and others by “Tintinologists”—about Hergé, about the “world” of Tintin, even about twentieth-century politics. But as I read Pierre Assouline’s well-written biography of Hergé and Jean-Marie Apostolidès’s erudite study of the Tintin books, a version of the question we Jews love to ask kept coming to mind: Are they good for Tintin?

As Assouline admits in the preface to his book, Georges Remi is not the easiest subject for a biography. Born in Brussels in 1907, he had a conventional bourgeois childhood, only temporarily interrupted by World War I. He fully and unquestioningly imbibed the right-wing Catholic politics of that milieu. In adulthood, he was a workaholic and a private man: he left behind no personal journal and his letters, which Assouline employs liberally, offer little insight into his inner life. He lived even his most passionate love affairs with a quiet complacency. And he rarely left Belgium before the last decades of his life. A reader cannot help but feel a deep blandness in Remi.

Assouline, a journalist, makes the best of the grey-all-over Georges Remi by exploring the contrasts between his life and the colorful figures he invented, Tintin and Hergé. The boy reporter, unlike Remi, is virtually stateless and always ready to set out across the globe on a new adventure. They were physical opposites as well: fans who met the lanky, long-faced Remi were sometimes surprised to find that he did not have Tintin’s round face, small stature, or tuft of blond hair. But the most extreme contrast between them, as Assouline tells it, was moral. Although Remi and Tintin had a similar moral code, rooted in the Catholic scout movement of Remi’s childhood, they felt and acted in very different ways. Remi seemed to experience injustice only obliquely and he very rarely took action against it. Tintin, on the other hand, always leaps to the defense of an injured party and metes out instant, rough justice.

The moral divide between Remi and Tintin-Hergé yawned widest during and after World War II. Remi chose to spend the war in his German-occupied homeland, where he continued to work unmolested, thanks to longtime links to right-wing figures. The help of powerful collaborators enabled him to publish new adventures in spite of a severe wartime paper shortage. Most damningly, he accepted work with a Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, which had been confiscated by the authorities to serve as a propaganda organ. The German-controlled paper published, among other things, defenses of fascism and anti-Semitic screeds. Hergé’s cartoons provided a great boost to the paper’s popularity in the face of a boycott of its pages by many well-known Belgian writers and artists. Indeed, his role led the resistance, on the eve of the liberation, to brand him one of the forty leading journalist collaborators.

After the war, as he sought to defend himself from charges of incivisme (which may be roughly translated as “disloyalty”), Remi explained his conduct during the war as a kind of aesthetic quietism. Artists such as himself, he argued, had no special obligation to take a stand against political evil: they had a higher calling. This stance did not prevent him from being arrested, nor did it get him out of jail—his fame as the father of Tintin eventually got the charges dropped—but it did apparently assuage his own conscience. To the end of his life, he took virtually no responsibility for his wartime behavior.