The Press: Sweetness & Blight

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Sine's ire is not reserved for the military and cripples; he aims his pen at all society. "People are stupid. They are bourgeois and conservative, and that burns me. I can't stand it. So I do my best to burn them." He betrays an almost normal streak in a strip of hula hooping (see cut) and in his droll The French Cat, a series of cartoons based on or built around elaborate puns on chat, e.g., chat teaubriant, a smug-faced cat on a platter, cut up like a filet. But such lapses do not hide the man who gets inspiration by decorating his cluttered workroom with a picture of a legless ex-serviceman being held at attention by two policemen for La Marseillaise.

The simultaneous success of the light-hearted Herge and the blight-hearted Sine proves that the public will take its cartoons sweet or sharp—if the cartoonist is clever enough.