It won’t reach American screens until December, but Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” opened this week in the U.K., where its dramatically quiffed protagonist is a more iconic figure. For a children’s adventure film, it has provoked some startlingly intense reactions in the British press. Writing in the Guardian last week, the literary critic Nicholas Lezard made plain his distaste with Spielberg’s 3-D motion capture adaptation of Hergé’s classic comic-book series. Walking out of the screening, he writes, “I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape.” Lezard’s rape accusation seems to have been an attempt at comic hyperbole—he was alluding to the barely watchable “South Park” episode in which Indiana Jones is savagely and repeatedly sexually assaulted by Spielberg and George Lucas—but he’s deadly serious about his anger at what he sees as the unforgivable betrayal of a work of “great subtlety, beauty, and artfully deceptive complexity.” Even those reviewers less traumatised by the experience have accused Spielberg of doing a disservice to his source material. Xan Brooks, the regular film critic for the Guardian, took issue with the way in which the movie presents a version of the comics “with the ambiguities ironed out.” Though simple enough on the surface to engage their intended young readership, Hergé’s books contain enough geopolitical intricacy and psychological depth to keep adults absorbed, and critics theorizing.

It remains to be seen whether American reviewers will respond with anything like the moral outrage of some of their U.K. counterparts. (The response in Hergé’s native Belgium has been far more chipper.) Unusually for a product of Francophone culture, Hergé’s heroic teen investigative reporter—who first appeared more than eighty years ago in the children’s section of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle—is something of a British national treasure. In an essay for the magazine in 2007, Anthony Lane remarked upon the high regard in which Tintin is held in England, and in Europe as a whole:

I once heard Hugh Grant declare on a radio program that if he could take only one book to a desert island it would be “King Ottokar’s Sceptre” (1939). The same work, which takes place in the imaginary kingdom of Syldavia, was described to me by Timothy Garton Ash, a British historian steeped in the culture of the Balkans, as one of the most acute parodies ever written—or drawn—of the region’s nationalist politics. General de Gaulle declared that Tintin was his only international rival—he was envious, perhaps, not just of Tintin’s fame but of the defiantly positive attitude that he came to represent. (Both figures can be recognized by silhouette alone.)

He may not be as big as Spiderman or Batman, but the emotional and intellectual intensity Tintin inspires in his readers is far greater than your typical comic-book heavyweight. There is even an established area of cultural studies known as Tintinology. Earlier in the week, Britain’s Channel 4 News featured an interview with Michael Farr, who was introduced as “the world’s most prominent Tintinologist.” The anchor pointed out his marked resemblance to a grown-up Tintin (a fine example of the peculiar phenomenon of scholars coming to resemble their subjects over time, as owners do their dogs), and it was a comparison he seemed happy to take as a compliment. For his part, Farr was breezily upbeat about Spielberg’s adaptation, commending it as a “cracking film” that will bring new readers to Tintin and, by extension, to Tintinology. As he remarked to the BBC News Web site, Hergé was keen for Spielberg to direct the adaptation, and met with him shortly before his death in 1983. He also made the point that Hergé himself, who was “terribly interested in new technology and a film buff”, would have been “very excited by the new film.”

For those unfamiliar with the Tintin books, the idea of sustained intellectual engagement with a children’s comic book in which a cub reporter and his small dog solve mysteries might seem odd, but some serious work has been done in the area. Farr is probably the most prolific figure, having published over a dozen books on Tintin (among them “Tintin: The Complete Companion” and a number of short studies of individual characters such as Snowy, Captain Haddock, and Professor Calculus), several translations, and a biography of Hergé. In 2009, Stanford University Press published an English translation of “The Metamorphosis of Tintin: or Tintin for Adults,” Jean-Marie Apostolides’s “foundational” work in the field. The book, first published in French in 1984, presents a psychoanalytic examination of characters, themes, and motifs in the comics. In the early books, Apostolides argues, Tintin’s moral framework is strictly Manichean (he sees the world in terms of a radical division into, and an ongoing struggle between, good and evil) and, therefore, authoritarian. But as the comics progress and as Tintin matures, he begins to construct a kind of de facto “family” around himself, and the moral ambiguities and compromises necessary in order to live peacefully with others lead him into a modern liberal ideology. (Take that, Charlie Brown.)

Even the rigorously empirical discipline of neurology is not immune to Tintinological influences. In 2004, the journal of the Canadian Medical Association published “Acquired Growth Hormone Deficiency and Hypogonadotropic Hypogonadism in a Subject with Repeated Head Trauma, or Tintin Goes to the Neurologist.” I’m no brain surgeon, but the article appears to be a deadpan medical jeu d’esprit, attempting to explain why Tintin never reaches puberty despite a career that spans several decades. The authors conclude that Tintin suffers “growth hormone deficiency and hypogonadotropic hypogonadism from repeated trauma” which explains his “delayed statural growth, delayed onset of puberty and lack of libido.” All those blows to the head over the years, in other words, have taken their toll on Tintin’s testosterone production.