Why the smiling devils in Hergé's 'The Broken Ear'?

Question

At the end of The Broken Ear (one of the Tintin adventures), the villains Alonso and Ramón are chased, presumably to hell, by a gaggle of winged, horned, merry devils.

It, as far as I can tell, is one of the few fantastic scenes ever featured in the comics; though the rate and scope of Tintin's exploits are quite improbable, they are, in the end, at least plausible. But this scene with the devils stands out.

Has Hergé ever commented on this scene and justified/explained its inclusion? Does it have some sort of deeper meaning? Was the imagery ever objected to by audiences or publishers?

Answer 1

I am not aware that Hergé commented on this scene specifically, but its incongruity has been widely noted. In Tintin: The Complete Companion, Michael Farr notes that:

as The Broken Ear nears its conclusion, Hergé allows his imagination to run away in a truly medieval manner. The villains of the adventure, the bungling Ramon Bada and Alonso Perez sink to the bottom of the sea and in the most fanciful image in all Tintin - except for dreams - Hergé portrays three winged, horned and cloven-footed demons, armed with two-pronged forks, dragging the unfortunate pair down to hell. Such treatment is more typical of a medieval illuminated manuscript than a twentieth century strip cartoon, and as such remains an anomaly in the Tintin adventures.

Farr hypothesises that this scene was included to appeal to the young readers of the comic strip. At the time (long before the strips were published in albums as comic books in their own right) Tintin was serialised in Le Petit Vingtième, a conservative, Catholic newspaper distributed in Belgium. Farr writes that:

Devils and hell, however, would have seemed to the young Roman Catholic readers of Le Petit Vingtième to be just and expected retribution for evil

The two characters were responsible for an unusually high level of crime (at least two, and possibly three murders), which possibly accounts for their special fate.

Concerning the second part of the question, "Was this imagery ever objected to?", this did happen at least once. Tintin was syndicated to a French newspaper aimed at Catholic children, called Coeurs Vaillants. In Tintin and the World of Hergé, Benoît Peeters relates how the manager of the newspaper, Abbot Courtois, visited Hergé in Brussels to complain about this strip.

[Hergé's] relations with Abbot Courtois were never simple. He often felt that Hergé's stories did not place enough emphasis on "Divine Providence"; in some cases he went so far as to edit dialogue himself. At the end of The Broken Ear, when the two bandits die, he actually asked Hergé to redraw the scene, and we see Tintin add with a faraway look on his face, "God have mercy on them."

(graphics taken from the webpage https://tintinomania.com/tintin-cv-oreille-cassee-dieu-ame )

Hergé naturally resented this kind of meddling, commenting "On the surface it cost me nothing, but that kind of addition was really difficult for me."

Answer 2

The last we saw of Ramón and Alonso is that they drowned each other under the mistaken belief that they were still fighting Tintin.

So the panel with the devils should be understood as symbolic or allegorical rather than directly representational, indicating that the villains are destined for Hell, as suggested in the question.

Symbolic panels like the one in the question are rare in the Tintin albums, but here are three from Tintin in Tibet, where angel and devil versions of the dog Snowy symbolize his superego and id respectively:

Tintin magazine sometimes had covers that were not intended to represent “real” events in the Tintin universe. In the cover below, the one-year-old Tintin in the pram symbolizes the magazine itself, which was celebrating its first anniversary of publication. Note the use of angels and a devil, parodying Christian allegorical art.