The world is divided, of course, into two cultural camps, and the chasm, perhaps, will now only deepen. I refer not to any religious or political arguments that might be plaguing the globe. No, I mean simply this: Tintin or Asterix? You can’t love both. You have to choose. That’s the way I’ve always seen it, anyway; and up until recently it seemed as if the Asterixers might be in the lead, what with The Mirror World of Asterix, a vast exhibition of the work of Goscinny and Uderzo held in Brussels last year.

But now we Tintinites (or Tintinophiles, or Hergélogues, as we are sometimes called) can hold our heads high. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, home of France’s Musée National d’Art Moderne — its collection including works by Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse, Miró, you know the drill — has chosen to mark its 30th anniversary with a show of another 20thcentury master: Georges Remi, who reversed his initials to become (say it with a French accent) Hergé. Next year, as it happens, also marks the centenary of Remi’s birth, a happy coincidence for the museum and for the Fondation Hergé, the coorganiser of the exhibition. A happy coincidence for visitors, too: for the exhibition will be free.

There are some readers who might think that things have come to a pretty pass when comic strips, as Hergé’s work might simply be called, get shown at the Pompidou. There was some fuss, you may recall, when an exhibition of the art of Walt Disney, Il était une fois Walt Disney, opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in September (it runs until January, just like the Velázquez and the Holbein in London). Never mind the French casting away their usual scorn for American “culture”, what was on display were cartoons. Is this art? We may refer to the Leonardo cartoon, but we don’t mean it that way. We don’t mean talking mice. This kind of thing can only show that the end times, artistically speaking, are nigh.

So some might say, but it’s hard to get away from the fact that what’s now increasingly called graphic art (though not necessarily by the artists who practise it; they generally prefer to call them comics) has an increasingly respectable profile. For many non-specialist readers, Art Spiegelman’s Maus led the way. A depiction of Spiegelman’s father’s experience of the Holocaust, and the author’s own troubled relationship with his father, this was a memoir like no other. Published as a book in 1986, its second volume won its author a Pulitzer Prize six years later. It was Spiegelman, surely, who led the way for artist-writers such as Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, whose illustrated memoirs transcend any genres.

But where does that all leave Tintin, quiff-headed boy journalist? He was not, it must be said, Hergé’s first creation, and the Pompidou exhibition covers the artist’s entire career. So fans of Totor (who appeared in the Belgian magazine Le Boy-Scout in the 1920s) will not be disappointed, nor those of Quick and Flupke, two troublemaking boys who also graced the pages of the journal that was the first home of Tintin, Le Petit Vingtième. But the Tintinophiles are probably the most numerous among the Hergélogues, those, such as I, who discovered as children the world of Moulinsart. I read Red Rackham’s Treasure, The Seven Crystal Balls, The Castafiore Emerald first in English and then in French, because it was good practice. Mille milliards de mille sabords! And while I never thought of it as “art”, why should anyone think of anything they enjoy as fitting into any particular category? Recently, it’s true, Tintin has been the subject of an amusingly arcane treatise, Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature (Granta), which looks at the books from a literary standpoint and finds comparisons with Austen, James and Dickens. Yes, really.

Such demarcations didn’t enter into the head of Laurent LeBon, the curator of this exhibition. “I had a look at the collection for next year, and I was looking over our 60,000 works of art,” he tells me as he stands (I learn) waiting for a train at Avignon (lucky you, I say. No, he says: it’s raining). “I was looking at all the different media, and I was wondering why something born one century ago — the comic strip form — was not in our collection. So I proposed to make a survey of artists in the field, and then the Fondation Hergé was very interested to work with us. So that was the beginning of the story, more than a year ago.”

Certainly, Hergé’s style, known as ligne claire, is beautiful to look at, simple in the very best sense of the word. It facilitated the precision he sought after his significant encounter with the young artist he immortalised in the books as Chang — Zhang Chongren, a Chinese student at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels. It was Zhang who persuaded Hergé to be scrupulous in his representation of the countries to which he dispatched his hero. The results of this scrupulousness can be seen in The Blue Lotus (Le lotus bleu), first published in 1936 and seen as a turning point in the artist’s career. For the first time in 20 years, all 124 original plates of The Blue Lotus will be on display at the Pompidou; and what better way to let the public judge the artist on his own merits? “This is the first time such drawings will have been on show in a museum of modern art,” says LeBon. “It’s my goal to say that Hergé exists also, not only Matisse and all the rest. I didn’t want to make any kind of 3-D agrandissement of the drawings, but simply to focus on the originals. If you look at them with an open mind, you will see something interesting. There are more than 500 original drawings in the show; it’s a chronological survey of his work from the 1920s to 1980s. We have the very first drawing in which Tintin appears, also Captain Haddock and Snowy,” he says.

LeBon is at pains to point out that he is not, himself, an Hergélogue, something he regards as a strength; he comes at the work from the outside and sees its qualities stand clear. He points out that there’s an exhibition running (also into January) at the Jewish Museum in New York, Masters of American Comics; Mark Rodwell, of the Fondation Hergé, notes that in Belgium there has never been any true distinction between art and “comic-strip art”. The Royal Belgian Library held the first exhibition of comic strip art as early as 1968.

Georges Remi died in 1983; his second wife, Fanny, survives him. When asked recently if her husband was aware of the importance of his work, she said: “I don’t think so. He rarely spoke about his work. He was punctilious and ultra-professional, but he was more of an admirer of the talents of other people. He even collected the works of artists he admired. At one time he was interested in abstract painting and wanted to emulate it. He soon realised that this was not for him. He was very lucid about himself. He had the good sense to stop. He simply concluded: I’m a cartoonist. That’s all.”

But in simplicity is survival. My son, who is 6, has just discovered the art of Hergé, and I am sure will continue to enjoy it at 16, at 36 and 66. And I’m glad to be able to tell him that mummy’s a journalist . . . just like Tintin. So it’s on with our plus-fours and off to the Centre Pompidou.

Hergé, Centre Pompidou, Paris (www.centrepompidou.fr 0033- 14478 1233), Dec 20-Feb 19

HERGÉ'S ADVENTURE

1907 Georges Remi born in Brussels to middle-class parents.

1925 Starts work for Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siècle, and takes over the supplement for children, Le Petit Vingtième.

1929 Tintin In the Land of the Soviets is his first Tintin strip.

1932 Marries Germaine Klieckens, newspaper’s secretary. 1940 Le Petit Vingtième shut by war. Tintin moves to Le Soir.

1946 Tintin magazine launched.

1958 Starts Tintin in Tibet, his favourite Tintin adventure.

1977 Marries again to Fanny Vlaminck, an artist in his studio.

1983 Dies leaving 24th Tintin adventure unfinished.