The
Adventures of Tintin (French: Les
Aventures de Tintin
is a series of 24 bande
dessinée albums created by Belgian cartoonist
Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé.
The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century.
By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth in 1907, Tintin had been
published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies,
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 led to serialized 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 11 Tintin albums.
The
series is set during a largely realistic 20th century. Its protagonist is Tintin,
a courageous young Belgian reporter and adventurer aided by his faithful dog Snowy (Milou in the original
French edition). Other allies include the brash and cynical Captain Haddock, the intelligent but
hearing-impaired Professor
Calculus (French: Professeur
Tournesol),
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. Its well-researched plots straddle the
action-adventure and mystery genres and draw upon themes of politics, history,
culture and technology, offset by moments of slapstick comedy.