“For an artist, being accused of being a cheater, a copier, that’s what’s worse,” laments Christophe Tixier, alias Peppone, before the trial before the Marseille court that brought him the company responsible for the commercial exploitation of Hergé’s work.
The almost fifty-year-old, living in Aix-en-Provence, is reproached by the widow of the cartoonist Fanny Vlamynck, Hergé’s legatee, and the SA Moulinsart, headed by her second husband Nick Rodwell, for the achievement of some 90 Resin busts of the famous journalist with the powder puff.
The company, which had been dismissed from its action by the criminal court in May 2018, is this time claiming some 200,000 euros in civil damages, in particular against the artist and the return of his sculptures.
It also attacks a Parisian gallery which had exhibited these works high from around thirty centimeters to 2.10 meters.
Contacted, the Belgian company which has led several legal offensives in the past around the rights to the work of Hergé, did not wish to answer AFP’s questions.
Peppone, who also makes casts of other characters linked to childhood such as Snoopy, Mickey or Papa Smurf, denounces Moulinsart’s “relentlessness”.
“When you are an artist, you spend your time taking inspiration from each other. Nobody says that Picasso plagiarized African art?”, He defends himself to AFP.
His lawyer Me Delphine Cô goes further and questions with an assumed provocation about the paternity of the adventurous journalist. “Was it really Hergé who created the character of Tintin?” She says.
The lawyer recalls that the French illustrator Benjamin Rabier had published in an 1898 album the stories of “Tintin-Lutin”, a character dressed in golf pants and a blond puff.
“However, to claim the copyright of a character, the work must be original for it to be protected”, defends Me Cô.
Moreover, for there to be an infringement, Moulinsart would have to sell busts of Tintin, which she does not provide proof of, argues the lawyer.
The busts of Peppone representing a thoughtful Tintin, hand on the chin, are inspired by the albums “Les 7 boules de cristal” and “Objectif Lune”. According to the lawyer of the plastic surgeon, the Moulinsart company “has neither publishing rights nor derivative rights”, unlike the historical publisher Casterman, who does not sue the artist.
Convinced that it is “the hero of his childhood who took him to travel abroad for twenty years”, Christophe Tixier says he is “sad” at the image sent back by the heirs of the intrepid character internationally known.
In May 2019, Pascal Somon, cartoonist from Reims, was sentenced to ten months suspended imprisonment and two years probation for having counterfeit works by Hergé. He was also forced to pay 32,000 euros in damages to the Belgian company and to Fanny Vlamynck, holder of the rights since Hergé’s death in 1983.
In 2011, a Belgian restaurateur was ordered by Moulinsart to remove from his window objects inspired by the world of Tintin.
On May 10, the Rennes court will deliver a judgment in a case where Moulinsart attacked the Breton artist Xavier Marabout, accused of counterfeiting and infringement of Hergé’s moral rights for having involved Tintin – without the consent of the beneficiaries. – to the world of the American painter Edward Hopper by wondering about the loves of the comic book character.
“If I was sentenced, it would be worrying for freedom of expression and what we can do as an artist,” said Xavier Marabout to AFP.
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