The man behind Tintin

Herge, creator of Tintin, was born Georges Prosper Remi in 1907 in a suburb of Brussels in Belgium. As a boy he showed an early love of art, filling his school books with doodles. Despite this love of art, Herge never took any formal art lessons. In the 1920’s, Herge was studying at a strict catholic secondary school. There he joined the Boy Scout Movement and had his first published work in the a boy scout paper. He continued to write and draw for various boy scout publications and in 1924 started to sign his work Herge. The nickname had developed from the French pronunciation of “R.G.”, his initials reversed.

Herge progressed to working for a catholic newspaper and produced a lot of material for the paper’s children’s section. He had been drawing many cartoons and illustrating a strip written by another member of staff. Dissatisfied he started work on his own comic, using the recent American innovation of speech bubbles. Tintin was born and first appeared on January 10th 1929.

Over the next ten years his work would mature, artistically and politically, as well as become more and more popular. However Tintin looked doomed when Nazi Germany invaded. King Ottokar’s Sceptre, published in 1938-39 had been a thinly veiled parody of Nazi Germany’s activities in Austria and the Sudetenland and Herge was warned by the Nazi’s that nothing else political should appear in his strips. Shortly after the newspaper he worked for closed down. He managed to find a new home for Tintin on a pro-German paper and the stories produced during this era are more fanciful than before and avoid anything political.

Post war, Herge was able to find another home for Tintin and the series became ever more popular both in his native Begium and around the world. During this time, Herge suffered two breakdowns from the stress of producing the strips and in 1950, he and his wife formed Herge Studios to help lighten the load. However by the late fifties, Herge was again suffering health problems. His marriage was breaking apart and he was falling in love with Fanny Vlaminck, a young artist who had recently joined the studios. Racked by nightmares that were filled with whiteness, Herge ignore Doctors advice to rest and instead went on to write what is probably his best work, Tintin in Tibet. Page after page filled with snowy wasteland proved the perfect cathartic cure to his nightmares.

Between 1960 and 1975, Herge only produce three books as his interests moved to other media. Merchandising, comics and animation all filled his time. He also travelled widely, getting to visit many of the place he had drawn many years before. He died in 1983 of complications arising from anemia caused by bone cancer. He left one unfinished work, Tintin and Alph-Art.

Enjoy all of Tintin’s adventures from the Tintin Movie Store and see Tintin’s adventures journeys around the world on the Tintin Map.