Trees, eagles, bears, turrets and towers: passport designs used to follow certain conventions. Not any more. From Monday, all new Belgian passports will feature Tintin, the Smurfs and other heroes of Belgian comic-strip art.
With a 34-page standard passport, Belgian travellers will be accompanied by Lucky Luke, Blake and Mortimer, and Bob and Bobette. Many images are from the original strips, such as the 1954 Tintin serial, Explorers on the Moon, where the intrepid boy reporter took his first steps on the lunar surface 15 years before Neil Armstrong. Others were specially designed for the passport, such as a Smurf contemplating a globe, with its knapsack and maps spread on the ground.
“We have chosen a design that represents well our country, its arts and culture, with a touch of talent, expertise, humour and humility,” Belgium’s foreign minister, Sophie Wilmès, told the Francophone national broadcaster RTBF.
Comic strips, or bande dessinée, celebrated in Belgium and France as “the ninth art”’, remain wildly popular, although no longer get the same space in daily newspapers as they did during their postwar heyday. Tintin, created by Georges Remi under the penname Hergé in 1929, was the first big hit. Soon after the second world war came Blake and Mortimer, an MI5 agent and nuclear physicist, two British gentleman in a permanent quest to outsmart the dastardly Colonel Olrik. In 1958 arrived a band of little blue people living in a mushroom village, dreamed up after the artist Pierre Culliford, who used the pseudonym Peyo, couldn’t remember the word for salt during a meal with a fellow cartoonist and asked for le schtroumpf, translated into English as “smurf”.
Michel Kichka, a celebrated Belgian-Israeli cartoonist, said it was a wonderful idea to put comic-book characters into the passport. “These characters, and the spirit that they represent, are close to the heart of the Belgians,” he told the Observer. “They are a part of the way I draw today.”
Growing up in the city of Liège, he dreamed of being a cowboy like Lucky Luke, whose wild west adventures featured in the bestselling Spirou magazine. “At a time when TV and screens were not so strong, I spent so many hours reading comics.”
The classic Belgian comics had a particular look, even when compared to the French ones, he said. “In the golden age of Belgian comics in the 1960s, all the characters were cute and friendly, they were with humour and they were drawn in a soft style, which is different to the style today.”
Border guards will be treated to the full richness of the Belgian passport. While the naked eye sees a silhouette of a scene, other details, such as facial expressions and textures are revealed only under UV light, a security feature.
“There is a little bit of Belgian humour here,” Wouter Poels, a foreign ministry spokesman said. “It’s always nice if you can link what is functionable to something that is enjoyable. But a passport is and remains an administrative document,” he said referring to 48 new security features, such as barcodes, laser-engraved photographs and the polycarbonate ID page.
The passport scenes are inspired by travel and unsurprisingly avoid controversies, such as Tintin in the Congo, which is no longer sold in children’s sections of bookstores in the UK over its racist stereotypes. Nor does Lucky Luke smoke a cigarette. The cowboy, created in 1947 by Maurice de Bevere, also known as Morris, quit in 1988.
Passport expert Tom Topol said: “Until the early 21st century passports were boring… [but] in the last 20 years passport design is becoming fancier.”
Estonia’s passport features a night sky that twinkles under a UV ray; Finland’s has a moose that runs as pages flick; Japan’s latest document features the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series by Katsushika Hokusai, the renowned artist of the “floating world” school.
“Yes, they look prettier, but the critical factor remains security,” Topol said, adding that it’s harder to forge or doctor complex designs. “Nowadays, a passport design with monotone graphic elements is just too simple.”
But it is the design that has captured imaginations. “A reason to become Belgian,” tweeted one senior EU official in Brussels.
