How It's Used

"According to Mr. Dessicy, who worked in Herge's studio as a colorist from 1947 to 1953, Belgium is recognized as the birthplace of the modern European comic book. Tintin's first adventure, which appeared in the children's magazine Le Petit Vingtieme, set a standard for European artists both in its published format and in the determinedly realistic drawing style heavily influenced by popular film. Gradually, an entire industry grew up around Herge and his studio, attracting to Brussels comic book artists from France, Switzerland and elsewhere. Today, over 600 comic book titles are published regularly in Belgium in both French and Dutch, the country's two languages."

"Petit Vingtieme, where Tintin was first serialized, was a right-wing Belgian Catholic sheet for young audiences. 'Tintin au Congo,' the second album, is pure colonial paternalism. That and other albums were cleansed of incorrect details when color editions of all those then in print were printed in the 1940s and '50s: swarthy and malign Jews became swarthy and malign Europeans of indeterminate origin, black Americans became white ones."

"That may reflect in part some early right-wing connections of Herge's. 'Many of his friends as a young man were involved in extreme right groups, and many of them did collaborate with the Nazis during the war, ending up in very powerful positions,' says Pierre Assouline, Herge biographer and editor in chief of French literary magazine Lire. But, he insists, 'he himself was not a collaborator nor aided the collaborationist cause.' The early adventures may also have reflected the times--and the publishing atmosphere--more than Herge's personal politics. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, for example, was commissioned by the anti-communist Catholic priest Norbert Wallez, the editor of Le Petit Vingtieme's parent newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle. 'Tintin is one thing, Herge was another,' says Assouline. 'Herge was not involved in politics, nor interested in them apart from how they impacted his time.'"

"Some 200m Tintin albums have been sold in 58 languages since 1929. The boy reporter travelled to Eastern Europe and Scotland, the Middle East and Africa, North and South America, China, Tibet, and even the moon as he adapted to the evolving century.

"But it was only at the start of this year that the story of his earliest assignment was finally released in French in a mass-market form, and the history of Tintin in the Soviet Union is as intriguing as the contents of the album itself. The youthful Georges Remi (who inverted the initials of his name to create his pseudonym Herge) had only recently returned from his military service when he was hired as an illustrator for the Belgian newspaper Le XXe Siècle. Put in charge of the weekly children's supplement, Le Petit Vingtieme, he was just 22 when he created Tintin as a double-page black-and-white cartoon spread."

"Tintin also shaped my choice of career. Some young journalists draw inspiration from Woodward and Bernstein, who brought down Nixon, or from W. F. Deedes. It was Le Petit Vingtieme's star reporter who got me interested in writing for a living."

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