Cartoon character created by the Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi, 1907-83), whose mastery of the immediately legible image and of unflagging narrative made him the father of the modern bande dessinée. Tintin first appeared in ‘Tintin au pays des Soviets’ (1929), in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième, the weekly children's supplement of Le Vingtième Siècle. Thereafter, in a succession of journals, appeared the further 22 albums which go to make up Les Aventures de Tintin. In the guise of a roving reporter, Tintin maintained many of his original boy-scout traits: celibacy, indefatigable adventurousness, clean-living candour, eternal youth, resourcefulness. Always accompanied by his uncannily human dog, Milou, Tintin gradually finds himself surrounded by entertaining auxiliaries: the pratfalling, word-playing pseudo-twins, the Dupond/t (Les Cigares du Pharaon, 1932-4); the miles gloriosus in maritime guise, Haddock (Le Crabe aux pinces d'or, 1940-1); the wilfully and serenely hard-of-hearing Professor Tournesol (Les Sept Boules de cristal, 1943-6); and the forbidding diva Bianca Castafiore (L'Affaire Tournesol 1954-6), conceited and egocentric. These characters tend to steal Tintin's thunder and deprive him of his heroic isolation, making him just one character among many in a male-orientated roman d'aventures.
[Clive Scott]
