I can think of other writers who probably shouldn't write either

“The Tintin books announce themselves on their front covers as ‘adventures’. This, plus their action-packed nature, might suggest that they are dominated by what Roland Barthes calls the ‘proairetic code’ – that is, the code of action. But, in fact, another code is equally, if not more, dominant: the code Barthes calls the ‘herme-neutic’.

What does the hermeneutic do? It is made up, Barthes tells us, of all the aspects of a text that ‘constitute an enigma and lead to its solution’… Tintin, means literally, ‘nothing’. His face, round as an O with two pinpricks for eyes, is what Herge himself described as ‘the degree zero of typeage’ – a typographic vanishing point.

Tintin is also the degree zero of personage. He has no past, no sexual identity, no complexities. Like Cocteau’s Orphee, who spends much of the film in the negative space or dead world on the far side of the mirror, he is a writer who does not write. ”

- Tom McCarthy, ‘Tintin and the Secret of Literature', Guardian (via Private Eye)