Tintin means, literally, “Nothing”. His face, round as an O with two pinpricks for eyes, is what Hergé himself described as “the degree zero of typeage” – a typographic vanishing point. Tintin is also the degree zero of personage. He has no past, no sexual identity, no complexities. Like Cocteau’s Orphée, who spends much of the film in the negative space or dead world on the far side of the mirror, he is a writer who does not write.
— Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (excerpted in the Guardian)
Mark Larson 