Hergé

(1907-1983)

   Hergé is the pseudonym of Georges Rémi, the initials "G" and "R" being reversed and spelled out. Born in Brussels into a middle-class family on 22 May 1907, he displayed an aptitude for drawing while very young but he acquired no formal training except for a few school courses. In 1925, he began working for the Catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, and, in the following year, he published his first cartoon series The Adventures of Totor. Resolved to create a comic strip of his own using the recent American innovation of using "speech balloons" within which to display words being spoken by characters, Hergé published Tintin in the Land of the Soviets in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième on 10 January 1929. It ran until 8 May 1930. In January 1930, he introduced Quick and Flupke, a strip about street urchins in Brussels. In June 1930, Tintin in the Congo appeared followed by Tintin in America. Each adventure ran about one year after which it was released in book form. Later in the decade, The Blue Lotus, an adventure set in China, marked a noted change in both adhering to accurate place settings and reflecting a sensitivity to local culture.

   During World War II, Hergé worked for Le Soir, a collaborationist paper. He produced six Tintin adventures, wartime realities necessitating that he employ escapist and fantasy themes (The Secret of the Unicorn, The Shooting Star). Following the liberation, he was arrested four times, accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, and his reputation remained suspect until, on 6 September 1946, publisher and wartime resistance fighter Raymond Leblanc lent his financial support and anti-Nazi credentials to launch the Journal de Tintin (Tintin Magazine), a weekly that featured two pages of Tintin's adventures. A nervous breakdown from overwork led to the creation, on 6 April 1950, of Hergé Studios, which employed several assistants to aid production. Postwar works include The Calculus Affair (1954), Tintin in Tibet (1958-1959), The Castefiore Emerald (1961), Flight 714 (1966), and Tintin and the Picaros (1975).

   Hergé traveled widely in his later years. He died on 3 March 1983. At his death, the 26th adventure, Tintin and Alph Art, remained unfinished. Following his wish that Tintin not be crafted by another artist, the story was published as a set of sketches and notes in 1986. Hergé Studios closed in 1987, replaced by the Hergé Foundation. In 1988, the Journal de Tintin was discontinued.