In 1971, a French hippie traveled to Brussels to profile several comic-book artists. He knocked on the front door of his hero Hergé—creator of Tintin, the virtuous boy reporter who travels the world fighting dictators, mob bosses, and common bullies—to ask for an interview. The French hippie wasn't hopeful: Hergé was both famous and famously reticent. To both of their surprise, he said yes.

The two talked for 14 hours over four days, discussing Hergé's broken Catholicism, broken marriage, his characters, his meticulous research, and his long evolution from a naive, right-wing propagandist to world-weary secular humanist. Tintin et Moi is a 75-minute record of that conversation, annotated with additional interviews, historical footage, and critical analysis of individual frames of the Tintin comics.

Hergé devotees already know that The Adventures of Tintin—23 works published from 1929 to 1976—are more than just comic books. They are also anthropology, political satire, and reportage: The Blue Lotus (1934) is an excellent primer on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; Tintin and the Picaros (1976) is a satire of the proxy wars in Latin America between the U.S. and the USSR. Tintin was also a pop-art fountainhead that influenced Lichtenstein and Warhol. Tintin et Moi should be titled Tintin et Nous.