The Adventures of Tintin

• 1. Introduction

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  The Adventures of Tintin first reached readers on the 10th of January 1929, in the youth supplement of a Belgian newspaper. Its creator was the cartoonist Hergé, a pen name for Georges Remi. By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth, the series had been published in more than 70 languages and had sold over 200 million copies. Radio, television, theatre and film had all taken it up.

  The series runs to 24 albums about a young Belgian reporter, his white dog and a widening circle of friends. It is set in the contemporary world and mixes adventure, mystery, political thriller and science fiction. How did a strip launched under a conservative editor grow into one of Europe's best-loved comics? What did a world war, new publishers and a studio of assistants do to it? And why do a few early pages still provoke courtroom complaints and parliamentary debate?

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• 2. The Abbé's Newspaper

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  The Abbé Norbert Wallez ran Le Vingtième Siècle, a Brussels paper that billed itself as a "Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information". It was staunchly conservative and pushed a fascist viewpoint. Hergé worked there as an illustrator. Wallez put him in charge of a new Thursday youth supplement, Le Petit Vingtième, which passed Wallez's politics on to its young readers. It carried explicitly pro-fascist and antisemitic sentiment.

  Hergé was also illustrating L'extraordinaire aventure de Flup, Nénesse, Poussette et Cochonnet, a strip written by someone on the sports staff. He disliked the arrangement and wanted a strip of his own. He was not starting from nothing. From July 1926 he had written Les Aventures de Totor, about a Boy Scout patrol leader, for the Scouting paper Le Boy Scout Belge. Hergé described Tintin as Totor's younger brother. The writers Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier judged the two "virtually identical" in their drawing, apart from the uniform.

  Copies of Bringing up Father, Krazy Kat and the Katzenjammer Kids arrived from Mexico, sent by the paper's reporter Léon Degrelle. Hergé was fascinated by the way these American comics used speech bubbles throughout.

  Tintin in the Land of the Soviets ran from January 1929 to May 1930, though not by Hergé's choice. He had hoped to send his hero to the United States. Wallez ordered the Soviet Union instead, as antisocialist propaganda for children. The story was popular in French-speaking Belgium. Wallez staged a publicity stunt at the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris and then arranged a book edition. Rising sales won Hergé two assistants.

  For his Bolshevik villains, Hergé leaned on Moscow Unveiled by Joseph Douillet, a former Belgian consul in Russia and a fierce critic of the Soviet regime. Hergé later explained that in devout Catholic Belgium, "anything Bolshevik was atheist". The Economist called the book "crude" but said the "land of hunger and tyranny painted by Hergé was uncannily accurate."

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• 3. Occupation and the Studio

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  In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium. Hergé briefly fled to France but chose to go home to the occupied country. The Nazi authorities closed Le Vingtième Siècle for political reasons, which left him without work. Le Soir, Belgium's leading newspaper, kept publishing under German management and hired him as an illustrator. On the 17th of October 1940 he became editor of its children's supplement, Le Soir Jeunesse.

  Under the threat of arrest by the Gestapo, Hergé could no longer put politics into his stories. Harry Thompson observed that Tintin stopped being a reporter and became an explorer. Land of Black Gold, which had been running just before the invasion, was put on hold until 1948. Six other stories appeared in the meantime, with no explicit political plot or commentary. With politics off the table, Hergé poured his energy into characters, and the colourful supporting cast took shape in these years.

  In September 1944 the Allies entered Brussels and Hergé's German employers fled. Le Soir was shut down and Tintin went quiet. One of the earliest parodies, Tintin au pays de nazis, appeared soon after in the newspaper La Patrie. This short, crudely drawn strip mocked Hergé for having worked at a Nazi-run paper.

  In 1946 the Belgian publisher Raymond Leblanc invited Hergé to continue the series in his new Le journal de Tintin, published by Le Lombard. Hergé quickly found he had lost the independence he preferred. The magazine demanded two coloured pages a week, a tall order for one man.

  His answer came in 1950, when he founded Studios Hergé in a large house on Avenue Louise. He recruited the best staff from the magazine. Bob De Moor imitated Hergé's style and did half the work. Guy Dessicy coloured the pages and Marcel DeHaye acted as secretary. Jacques Martin also imitated Hergé's style, while Roger Leloup supplied detailed, realistic drawings. Eugène Evany later became chief of the studios, Michel Demaret did the lettering and Baudouin Van Den Branden served as another secretary.

  Thompson described the aim as a "veritable production line, the artwork passing from person to person, everyone knowing their part, like an artistic orchestra with Hergé conducting". The studio made eight new albums for the magazine and coloured and reformatted two old ones. Hergé died in 1983. In 1986 an unfinished 24th album was released, the studios were disbanded, and their assets passed to the Hergé Foundation.

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• 4. The Cast

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  Tintin is a reporter who is seldom shown actually filing a story. Readers and critics have noted how little backstory he has and how neutral his personality is. That blankness lets him mirror the folly around him. He never abandons his Boy Scout ideals, which were Hergé's own. His simple cartoon face against realistic backgrounds invites readers to step inside him. Scott McCloud said it "allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world".

  Snowy, a white Wire Fox Terrier, is his loyal companion. He shares Captain Haddock's taste for Loch Lomond Scotch whisky, and his drinking often lands him in trouble. His one fear is spiders.

  Captain Archibald Haddock arrives in The Crab with the Golden Claws as a weak, alcoholic merchant marine captain. A treasure left by his ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock, helps him grow into a genuine hero and even a socialite. He answers the boy reporter's idealism with dry sarcasm. His hot temper produces insults such as "billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles!" and "ten thousand thundering typhoons!"

  Professor Cuthbert Calculus makes his entrance in Red Rackham's Treasure. He is an absent-minded, partially deaf physicist, drawn partly from the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard.

  Thomson and Thompson debut in Cigars of the Pharaoh. They are two detectives who look like identical twins and differ only in the shape of their moustaches. They suffer from chronic spoonerisms and usually try to arrest the wrong person. Abroad, they put on stereotypical national costume that makes them stand out. Hergé based them partly on his father Alexis and his uncle Léon, identical twins who walked together in matching bowler hats and carrying matching walking sticks.

  Bianca Castafiore, the opera singer Haddock dreads, first sings in King Ottokar's Sceptre. She turns up wherever the heroes travel, with her maid Irma and her pianist Igor Wagner. Her speciality is the Jewel Song from Gounod's Faust, which she sings at the slightest excuse. She cannot get Haddock's name right and calls him "Paddock", "Stopcock" or "Hopscotch". Her own name means "white and chaste flower", and Calculus once names a white rose after her. Hergé drew her from his impression of opera divas, from his Aunt Ninie, who was known for shrill opera singing, and, in the post-war books, from Maria Callas.

  Critics have compared the depth of these supporting characters with Charles Dickens's creations. Even minor figures return. Cutts the butcher, for example, keeps being rung up on a number that is easily mistaken for Haddock's.

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• 5. Maps and Research

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  Syldavia comes with its own history, customs and language. In King Ottokar's Sceptre Hergé invites readers to tour it through a travel brochure slipped into the story. Its Slavic-looking language is really a transcript of Marols, a working-class Brussels dialect. Hergé set the kingdom in the Balkans, and accounts differ on whether he modelled it on Albania or Montenegro. Its neighbour Borduria threatens it with annexation, echoing the Anschluss of 1938. Borduria's leader Müsstler takes his name from Hitler and Mussolini. Years later Syldavia gains the Sprodj Atomic Centre, which launches the first rocket to the Moon.

  San Theodoros is a prototypical banana republic in South America, where US-based companies and Borduria's "military advisors" compete for influence. Its capital, Los Dopicos, is later renamed Tapiocapolis. In The Broken Ear it goes to war with neighbouring Nuevo Rico over oil. That conflict mirrors the 1930s Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia. Nuevo Rico's capital, Sanfacion, is a play on Asunción.

  The research habit began with The Blue Lotus. Hergé said: "it was from that time that I undertook research and really interested myself in the people and countries to which I sent Tintin, out of a sense of responsibility to my readers". Chinese and Japanese illustration and woodcuts left a mark, and the seascapes recall Hokusai and Hiroshige.

  Months of preparation went into the Moon voyage told across Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. New Scientist later noted that Hergé came very close to the space suit used in later lunar exploration, though his rocket was a long way off the mark. The rocket was based on the German V-2.

  Earlier influences were more personal. Hergé admired Benjamin Rabier and saw his hand in the animals of the Soviets story. Of the Art Deco designer René Vincent, he said: "His influence can be detected at the beginning of the Soviets, where my drawings are designed along a decorative line, like an 'S'". He borrowed round noses from George McManus "without scruples". His admiration for Mark Twain may have misled him in Prisoners of the Sun, where the Incas are unaware of a coming solar eclipse. T. F. Mills read that scene as an attempt to show Incas in awe of a latter-day "Connecticut Yankee".

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• 6. Lost in Translation

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  Tintin first appeared in English in 1951, in the British weekly children's comic Eagle, with the story King Ottokar's Sceptre. The introduction described him as "a French boy", and Snowy still went by his French name, Milou.

  In 1958 the British publisher Methuen commissioned a proper English version. Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner led the work and consulted Hergé closely. The series is full of puns, including jokes built on Professor Calculus's partial deafness, so a literal rendering was never the aim. They set out to make jokes and idioms that stood on their own. They also anglicised the books. Milou became Snowy at their discretion, and Captain Haddock's Le château de Moulinsart became Marlinspike Hall.

  The Black Island was set in Britain, so Methuen redrew the entire book. It had compiled a list of 131 errors of detail, including the need to show unarmed British police. The redrawn 1966 album is the version most commonly available today. Egmont publishes the books in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

  In the United States, Tintin has never been as popular. In the 1950s Golden Books, a branch of the Western Publishing Company, translated the albums and blanked some panels, leaving only the speech balloons. The aim was to remove drunkenness and the free mixing of races. Only six albums appeared, in mixed order, and they sold poorly. Hergé later redrew those blanked areas, and that is how the albums appear around the world today.

  From 1966 to 1979, Children's Digest ran monthly instalments, introducing many thousands of American readers to the series. In the 1970s Atlantic Monthly Press, working with Little, Brown and Company, republished the albums from the British translations. They swapped words such as gaol, tyre, saloon and spanner for American equivalents.

  The English books carried handwritten lettering by the cartographer Neil Hyslop, starting with The Crab with the Golden Claws in 1958. He wrote his script on clear cellophane-like material laid over Hergé's artwork with blank panels. In the early 2000s, Egmont stopped using his lettering. Casterman and Hergé's estate managers at Moulinsart wanted a single computer font for every Tintin title worldwide.

  On the 5th of June 2015 the official Tintin app in Apple's App Store launched with a digital Tintin in the Congo. It offered brand new English translations by the Tintin expert Michael Farr.

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• 7. Reckoning With Prejudice

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  Hergé himself said: "I was fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me". The earliest stories have been criticised for animal cruelty, colonialism, violence and caricatured portrayals of non-Europeans. The Hergé Foundation has presented the criticism as a reflection of naïveté. Harry Thompson argued that "Hergé did what he was told by the Abbé Wallez". In 1999, Tintin's politics were debated in the French parliament.

  In the original Tintin in the Congo, Tintin stands at a blackboard and tells African schoolchildren: "My dear friends. I am going to talk to you today about your fatherland: Belgium". In 1946 Hergé redrew the scene as a mathematics lesson. He later admitted the story's flaws and said he had drawn Africans "according to... this purely paternalistic spirit of the time". In 1988 Sue Buswell, Tintin's editor at Methuen, summed up the problems as "all to do with rubbery lips and heaps of dead animals". Thompson noted she may have been quoted out of context.

  The hunting scenes drew on André Maurois's Les Silences du colonel Bramble. Tintin accidentally kills fifteen antelope when one would have fed the camp. Scandinavian publishers asked for changes over the number of dead animals. One page showed Tintin killing a rhinoceros with dynamite. Hergé replaced it with a page in which the rhino accidentally fires Tintin's rifle while he sleeps.

  In 2007 the UK's Commission for Racial Equality asked for the book to be pulled from shelves after a complaint. Its statement read: "It beggars belief that in this day and age Borders would think it acceptable to sell and display Tintin in the Congo." That August a Congolese student filed a complaint in Brussels, calling the book an insult to the Congolese people. Prosecutors investigated and a criminal case began, but it moved to a civil court. Belgium's Centre for Equal Opportunities warned against "over-reaction and hyper political correctness".

  Other albums were quietly altered, usually at publishers' demand. For his American publishers, Hergé re-coloured many African characters in Tintin in America so that they looked Caucasian or ambiguous. The Shooting Star originally had an American villain named Blumenstein, drawn with exaggerated, stereotypically Jewish traits. The name became Bohlwinkel in later editions, and then the villain became a South American from a fictional country, São Rico. Hergé later discovered that Bohlwinkel was also a Jewish name.

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• 8. Screens and Afterlife

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  Belvision Studios made its first production in 1957, an animated adaptation of ten of Hergé's books. It ran to 103 five-minute episodes, written by the future Tintin magazine editor Greg. The stories often strayed far from the albums. A more successful series followed in 1991-92 from Ellipse in France and Nelvana in Canada. It adapted twenty-one books so faithfully that original panels were often moved straight onto the screen. It aired in over fifty countries, including the United States on HBO.

  On BBC Radio 5 in 1992-93, Richard Pearce played Tintin and Andrew Sachs voiced Snowy. Leo McKern played Haddock in the first series and Lionel Jeffries took over in the second.

  Steven Spielberg's 2011 motion capture film, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, drew on three albums. They were The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure. Peter Jackson's company Weta Digital supplied the animation and effects. Reviews were positive and the box office was strong. Five features had come before it, beginning with a 1947 stop-motion version of The Crab with the Golden Claws. The 1961 film Tintin and the Golden Fleece was the first in live action, built on an original script.

  In 1941 Hergé helped the humourist Jacques Van Melkebeke create two stage plays for the Théâtre Royal des Galeries in Brussels. Their scripts are lost. Video games began with Infogrames's Tintin on the Moon in 1989. Microids released Tintin Reporter - Cigars of the Pharaoh in 2023.

  Tom McCarthy's 2006 book Tintin and the Secret of Literature was the first English-language work of literary criticism devoted to the series. McCarthy compared Hergé with Aeschylus, Balzac, Conrad and Henry James. Toby Clements, reviewing it in The Telegraph, warned that such analysis came "perilously close" to feeding the appetite of those who cross the line between enthusiast and obsessive. The French philosopher Michel Serres called the twenty-three completed albums a "chef-d'oeuvre" that no French novelist's work could match.

  Breaking Free, published in 1989 under the pseudonym Jack Daniels, turned Tintin into a working-class Englishman opposing Margaret Thatcher's government. One paper greeted it with the headline "Commie nutters turn Tintin into picket yob!" Nick Rodwell of the Hergé Foundation said none of the copyists were true fans, since Hergé wanted no one else to draw Tintin's adventures. As of the 1st of January 2025, the 1929 characters entered the public domain in the United States. Belgium's date is 2054, though the foundation's lawyer Alain Berenboom argues for 2034 under the Berne Convention.

  In 1966, Charles de Gaulle remarked: "Basically, you know, my only international rival is Tintin!" Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein both named Hergé as a major influence. Artists including Jacques Tardi, Yves Chaland, Joost Swarte and Garen Ewing have worked in his ligne claire, or clear line, style. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris showed some 300 of his boards and drawings from the 20th of December 2006 until the 19th of February 2007. That included all 124 original plates of The Blue Lotus. The Hergé Museum opened in Louvain-la-Neuve in 2009. On the 1st of June 2006, the Dalai Lama gave the International Campaign for Tibet's Light of Truth Award to the Hergé Foundation for Tintin in Tibet.

  In 2024 the Royal Belgian Football Association unveiled a light blue and brown Tintin-inspired kit. The national team wore it for away fixtures at UEFA Euro 2024.

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