Take a look at Tintin’s eyebrows. They are two, single-line half circles, above eyes that are no more than blank holes in a round face. Yet these are some of the most expressive eyebrows ever drawn. Mostly they are raised in permanently enthusiastic expectation; when Tintin is on a mission, they rise and flatten very slightly; when he is amused, one lifts a little higher than the other. The same breadth of expression is true of Captain Haddock’s beard, Snowy’s tail and Professor Calculus’s hat. Even Tintin’s tuft is eloquent.

George Remi, alias Hergé, was one of the greatest and least-hailed artists of the 20th century, able to convey meaning through image with an economy of style that was entirely his own. A new exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris celebrating Hergé’s work proves what most genuine Tintinophiles have always known: the genius is in the pictures.

Ever since the intrepid boy reporter with the ginger quiff first appeared in the children’s section of a Belgian newspaper in 1929, Tintin’s every word has been explored and dissected. The literary critics are all over him like a rash. As early as 1963 French critics were claiming that The Castafiore Emerald was reminiscent of Proust; as a novelist, he has been compared to Dickens and Hugo. Barthes, Derrida, and inevitably Freud have all been wheeled out to work over poor Tintin. The most recent book insists that we read Tintin through Barthes’s structuralist analysis of Balzac’s short story Sarrasine.

The historians have also been busy. Hergé has been accused of being anti-Semitic, a wartime collaborator and a peddler of imperialist bigotry. Then came the psychologists, demanding to know why are there so few women in the Tintin stories. Why is this attractive young man apparently being kept by a wealthy, drunken, much-older sailor in a large country house? Tintin cries only once. He has no family. He evidently needs therapy.

Everyone wants a piece of Tintin. He was born Belgian, but the French annexed him years ago. For some he is the ultimate Boy Scout, but for others he represents something else entirely. “Tintin, c’est moi,” declared Leon Degrelle, founder of the Belgian Fascist party and reviled leader of its SS division. When American astronauts walked on the moon, Zaire’s dictator Mobuto Sese Seko wrote to John F. Kennedy pointing out that Tintin had got there earlier in Explorers on the Moon — and since Tintin had famously visited the Congo in 1930, he was practically an honorary Zairean (never mind that he treated the Congolese as idiot children and shot everything in sight). Last year the Dalai Lama awarded Hergé a Light of Truth Award for Tintin in Tibet (1960).

Even we journalists like to lay a claim to the boy reporter, although Tintin’s journalism is of a very particular sort. In the course of 24 books he files only one story. He has no deadlines, no editorial supervision and limitless expenses. Clearly, he works for The New Yorker.

Most of this Tintinography is a load of blistering barnacles in a thundering typhoon. Hergé was not an active collaborator, and if some of the prejudices from his conservative Roman Catholic upbringing seep into his stories that is hardly surprising, and hardly relevant. Nor was he a novelist. Indeed, the plots of the Tintin stories tend to be meagre and sometimes quite baffling. Individuals change character from one volume to the next without explanation. The humour is often clunky slapstick; there is none of the linguistic magic of, say, Asterix.

Hergé was closer to being a journalist than a novelist. After the flawed early works — which simply reproduced what he had been told — he was painstaking in his research, leaving behind no less than 30,000 newspaper clippings. “The goal is to tell the story in the clearest way, whether it is moving, sad, or funny,” he said.

The delight of Tintin is not the words but in the images. Unassuming as he was, Hergé knew he was more than just a skilled technician. The plates from The Blue Lotus, now on display in Paris in their entirety for the first time, show his extraordinary versatility. As a pioneer of the ligne claire (clear line) style of drawing, Hergé’s pen-strokes are almost uniform in thickness and emphasis. Every individual emerges from just a few deft lines. A glance at the endpapers of any Tintin book, the gallery of his huge cast of characters, reveals how intimately Hergé understood the contours of the human face.

With his sheer blocks of colour and utter precision, Hergé influenced both Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. He understood that all people, not merely children, remember in bold, uniform colour, rather than in shades of light and dark. Tintin’s is a world without shadows.

It seems only right that next year’s celebration of the centenary of Hergé’s birth should begin with a full-scale appreciation of his Pop Artistry, on the same level as that accorded to a Picasso or a Matisse.

Hergé’s nom de plume came from the French pronunciation of his initials in reverse, and for too long George Remi has been read backwards — as a moralist, a novelist and a reflection of his own troubled times — rather than for what he was, an exceptionally gifted maker of beautiful pictures from simple lines and bold colours.

Tintin seems an unlikely modern hero. He cannot leap buildings in a single bound. He has a bad haircut, and wears a tie and plus-fours of a type that went out of fashion long before the war. He has few one-liners, no real job and he never, ever gets the girl.

Yet Tintin remains beloved of every new generation, because he can tell a story, in the clearest way, through an eyebrow raised with a simple, single stroke of a pen.

Times Recommends

• Graveyard of empires could claim more careers
• Would you live on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall?
• At last we’re getting our heads out of the sand