Dear little, always-in-motion Tintin turned 96 on January 10! The Adventures of Tintin, one of the most loved European comics of the 20th century, toasted its historic debut nearly a century ago.
Belgian illustrator and cartoonist Georges Prosper Remi, who hailed from Brussels and was renowned under his pen name Hergé, captivated his audience when he initially published the comic series in 1929 within the pages of Le Petit Vingtième, a youth section of the Belgian communist newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.
After the success of his strip, Remi eventually converted it into 24 comic albums. The first, in 1929, was titled Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, and was witty, sharp satire that captured the intense conflicts and dynamics of the climate of the times.
The character of Tintin is believed to be inspired by Palle Huld, a young Dane, who set out on a funded 44-day journey around the world at the young age of 15 in 1928 after winning a newspaper competition. He reached even the Soviet Union, Japan, Korea and China. He later reported and wrote about it.
Numerous Tintin stories ingeniously reflected or mirrored real events. For instance, The Shooting Star was about a meteorite rushing towards Earth, just months prior to a similar astronomical happening in 1930. Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon imagined space travel years before NASA’s Apollo missions.
In 1950, Hergé began Studios Hergé with the aim of infusing life into Tintin’s adventures with the help of a bunch of collaborators. This teamwork allowed for a keen focus on detail and helped establish the ligne claire or clear line drawing style, which ultimately became Hergé's hallmark.
Hergé’s comic stories had quite a selection of enemies or bad guys, like Japanese imperialists during World War II, American Big Business doing in poor American Indians for oil, and arms traders (Greek dealer Basil Zaharoff).