I don't know if Georges Remi and Marion Morrison ever met, and they may not have had much to talk about if they did. But they had at least three things in common. They were both born 100 years ago this week; they both achieved international fame; and despite their success, both remain largely unknown by the names their parents gave them, writes Frank McNally.
The story goes that as a boy in California, Morrison was inseparable from his pet terrier, an outsized Airedale called "Big Duke". The diminutive dog owner was therefore nicknamed "Little Duke" and eventually just "Duke". Not surprisingly, he preferred this to Marion. So the title stayed with him even after he had adopted his stage name: John Wayne.
Georges Remi's rechristening was rather more prosaic. As a young cartoonist in Brussels, he signed himself by his reverse initials, "RG". This evolved into a one-word rendering of the letters' French pronunciation. And so it was that as "Hergé", Remi joined an exclusive if much-mocked list of people: world-famous Belgians.
Born where and when he was, Remi was fated to live in what the Chinese call interesting times. His earliest doodles featured German soldiers, occupiers of his country during the first World War. His most famous creation, the globe-trotting reporter Tintin, first appeared in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash. And barely a decade later, the Germans were in Brussels again.
Hergé's accommodation with the second occupation would afterwards cause him problems. He was no Nazi, so far as anyone has established. Indeed, before the war, his politically-aware Tintin had been active in the fight against fascism. Of necessity, Hergé's wartime work was almost completely apolitical.
But his crime was publishing it in Le Soir at a time when the newspaper was under Nazi control. In the confusion of post-Liberation Brussels, he was arrested by several different groups, publicly accused of collaboration, and barred for a period from working in newspapers.
Born far from benighted Europe, Marion Morrison's times were not quite so interesting. But the shadow of the second World War fell over him too, and the choices he made then also marked him for the rest of his life. Specifically, he failed to serve in the US army - a fact dramatically at odds both with his action-man persona and with the American patriotism that flowed through him to the grave.
The first part of the image was, he confessed, a strategy. Aware that he lacked some of the qualities normally required of leading men - an ability to act, for example - he cultivated the "Wayne thing": the drawl, the swagger, and the range of emotions that ran from all the way from A to B. But the "my country right or wrong" part of John Wayne was real and only deepened as he aged, from his support for McCarthyism to his role in the one Hollywood film to support the Vietnam War, the critically panned Green Berets.
If it was guilt over World War draft-evasion that fuelled his patriotism - as one of his wives claimed - he achieved some expiation via the unlikely form of Josef Stalin. Wayne didn't know it at the time. But the Soviet leader was apparently so impressed by his anti-Communist activities that he once planned to assassinate him.
While John Wayne became synonymous with the rise of the US as a superpower, Hergé chronicled the decline of European imperialism. During an era when even Belgium was a colonial power, however, he first faced a steep learning curve. In an early work, Tintin in the Congo, he had his hero introduce a geography lesson to indigenous students with the message: "Today I am going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!" He would live to be embarrassed by this world view, which was revised in subsequent editions, and his later stories took a much less sanguine view of the colonial adventure.
Even by the standards of the BBC world service, Tintin was a particularly well-travelled reporter. Indeed, he reached the moon a full 15 years before Neil Armstrong. But then, throughout his many adventures, he appears to have been free of many of the problems that journalists face daily: deadlines and editors to name just two. Only very rarely did he appear to file a story, which left him plenty of time for his main task: improving the world.
John Wayne and Hergé died within four years of each other, in 1979 and 1983 respectively. Both were assured a measure of immortality, which shows no signs of running out yet. But there is a tendency now to see John Wayne as the cartoon figure, while Tintin seems to be going in the opposite direction.
Although his fame is much greater within the Francophone world, Hergé's Tintin books have sold 200 million copies. And even Hollywood has caught up with him. Just this week, two of the world's most famous film-makers, Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson, announced plans for a Tintin trilogy, in which the hero - once a crude line-drawing - will be rendered in digital 3-D, complemented by "performance capture" technology, through which the animation is infused with real-life characteristics.