In Search of Lost Tintin

Unsparing, funny, moving, inventive, and intellectually engaging, this is a book about what comics do to us and for us, an autobiographical dialogue between the author and his cartooning mentors: how a childhood obsession becomes a life, and how that life becomes art.

As a boy in Rio de Janeiro, Ricardo Leite wrote a fan letter to Hergé. To his astonishment, a reply came: the creator of Tintin praised his drawings and told him he would someday be a great artist.

He spent the next forty years becoming one—not as a cartoonist, but, much to his surprise, as an award-winning designer. At the age of 26 he took a detour from his vocation as a working cartoonist to dabble in the more practical and lucrative field of graphic design and discovered that he had become a successful designer. But Leite never abandoned his dream of becoming a cartoonist. He realized, in his 60s, that it was now or never, and In Search of Lost Tintin is the culmination of that dream—finally realized in the form of a sophisticated, fabulist memoir chronicling his love affair with cartooning.

In Search of Lost Tintin is Leite's graphic memoir of his road back to his first love—comics: a semi-real, semi-dreamlike pilgrimage through the art form that shaped him. Along the way he argues craft, technique, success, and even failure with the masters who inspired him, in a cascading series of dialogues—Will Eisner, Mœbius, Frank Miller, Hugo Pratt, Robert Crumb, Jose Munoz, Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Chris Ware among them. It is both an inquiry into the nature of narrative comics and a paean to the infinite beauty and variety of the form itself.

Published to acclaim in France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, and Brazil, In Search of Lost Tintin is at last available in English, translated by Eisner and Harvey Award winners Diana Schutz and Brandon Kander.