The success of Tintin is due to how Herge created a real but magical world

When Herge started drawing Tintin, it simply himself and a blank piece of paper. He worked quickly to fill the page and meet the publication schedule of the newspaper he worked for. As her got older and Tintin more famous, his methods changed and the familiar Tintin style developed.

The first major change was on The Blue Lotus. Chang Ch’ung-jen, a chinese art student introduced Tintin to the intricacies of chinese culture. Herge, having previously treated all the foreign cultures in his books as unimportant, suddenly grasped how shallow the comics were. From this point on in his career, Herge drew Tintin’s world as a place full of accurate details. Mostly these were taken from reference books but at times were based on Herge’s own first hand experiences. It wasn’t until after the second world war that Herge published his early work in album form and he redrew large parts of them to make them more consistent with the later, more detailed work.

It was at this port-war stage that Herge started to colour his work. The detailed nature and complex colours of Tintin made it too much work for one man so Herge formed a studio. Originally with his wife and then with others including Edgar Pierre Jacobs and Fanny Vlaminck, who later became his second wife.

As well as the attention to detail and the strong use of colour, the most striking thing about Herge’s style is the use of Ligne Claire (Clear Line). This style of drawing treats each line as equal and thus each has the same thickness and weight. It leads to strong outlines, especially to foreground characters and when combined with Herge’s colour it develops into a distinctive Tintin look.

You can get all of Tintin’s adventures from the Tintin Movie Store and see where Tintin’s adventures took place on the Tintin Map