The swashbuckling comic-book hero and boy-journalist extraordinaire Tintin is ageless, and now researchers know the reason why.
It appears that his perennially prepubescent look is due to a growth-hormone deficiency and hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, conditions likely brought on by repeated blows to the head.
"We believe that the multiple traumas Tintin sustained could be the first case of traumatic pituitary injury described in the literature," said Claude Cyr, an associate professor of medicine at the Université de Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Que.
His lighthearted research is published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal's annual holiday edition, which has a tradition of diagnosing fictional characters with real medical conditions.
In the course of Tintin's 23 published adventures, the character lost consciousness at least 50 times, including 43 incidents in which he suffered a severe blow to the head.
Between 1929 and 1973, the boy reporter was hit with a rake, a brick, a whisky bottle, an oar, a giant apple, a camel femur, a block of ice, and countless punches and clubs.
Tintin was choked, thrown down stairs, tossed from a train, poisoned with chloroform, mauled by a lion, shot and hurled a great distance by an explosion, events that may have also caused neurological damage.
The unlikely result was that in 46 years of active publication, and for decades since, he has not aged a wit.
"Even though he has reached adulthood, Tintin has no beard or grey hair, and he exhibits no sign of pubertal development," Dr. Cyr noted.
The researcher noted that Tintin also suffered from "delayed statural growth" (he is about the same height as an average seven-year-old) and an apparent lack of libido.
"Throughout his adventures, he has no girlfriend or marriage plans to curtail his activities," Dr. Cyr said.
The research was conducted by Dr. Cyr and his two sons, five-year-old Antoine and seven-year-old Louis-Olivier.
The boys systematically pored through the 16 Tintin books they owned, identifying pictures in which Tintin tombait dans les pommes (literally, "fell into the apples," a French expression for having lost consciousness).
The mean time of loss of consciousness was 7.5 comic-book frames; on average, 7.5 objects (usually stars and candles) revolved around Tintin's head after he had been clocked, according to the research team.
The researchers noted that one shortcoming of their study was an inability to perform brain imaging to confirm the diagnosis. But, according to researcher Louis-Olivier: "That's alright."
Tintin first appeared in the weekly children's newspaper Le Petit Vingtieme, on Jan. 19, 1929. The character's creator was Georges Rémi, the Belgian artist better known as Hergé.
The strips were collated into book form, books that have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide. Before his death in 1983, Hergé demanded that no new adventures of Tintin be published posthumously.
André Picard