The Adventures of Tintin (
French:
Les Aventures de Tintin;
[lez‿avɑ̃tyʁ də tɛ̃tɛ̃]) is a series of 24
comic albums created by
Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name
Hergé. The series was one of the most popular
European comicsof the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth in 1907,
[1] Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies,
[2] and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film.
The series first appeared in French on 10 January 1929 in
Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth), a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper
Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century). The success of the series saw the
serialised strips published in Belgium's leading newspaper
Le Soir (The Evening) and spun into a successful
Tintin magazine. In 1950, Hergé created
Studios Hergé, which produced the canonical versions of ten
Tintin albums.
The series is set during a largely realistic
[3] 20th century. Its hero is
Tintin, a courageous young Belgian reporter and adventurer. He is aided by his faithful dog
Snowy (
Milou in the original French edition). Other protagonists include the brash and cynical
Captain Haddock and the intelligent but hearing-impaired
Professor Calculus (French:
Professeur Tournesol), as well as the incompetent detectives
Thomson and Thompson (French:
Dupont et Dupond) and the opera diva
Bianca Castafiore.
The series has been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature
ligne claire ("clear line") style.
[4] Its well-researched
[5] plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories feature slapstick humour, offset by dashes of sophisticated satire and political or cultural commentary.
