The Origins of Hergé and Tintin
The platforms on Gore du Nord train station were overcrowded by hundreds of eager faces, all excitedly awaiting the return of a reporter from the “land of the Soviets.” The reporter was a young boy with a cheerful sounding name composed of just two simple syllables, Tintin. His exploits had been appearing in the weekly comic newspaper supplement, Le Petit Vingtième, for a little over a year. As a way to rally readers, the editorial staff dreamed up the welcome home event for their daring fictional foreign correspondent. They hired 15 year old Boy Scout Lucien Pepermans to play the comic strip character. Tintin arrived home in Brussels on May 8, 1930. Nothing could have prepared the young boy for the crowd that awaited him.
As Pepermans stepped off the train, dressed in Russian garb and accompanied by a small white dog, he was instantly consumed by the crowd. Amidst greetings and attaboys, Pepermans had a baby placed in his arms by a young mother to be kissed by the returning hero. No sooner was the baby handed to Pepermans, the crowd overtook them, the baby’s mother vanishing among a sea of excited fans. It was like a gag right out of a Tintin adventure. Eventually, Pepermans succeeded in heroically reuniting mother with child, leaving the train station to cheers and applause. It was a scene that seemed a million miles away from the character and his creator’s humble beginnings.
George Remi was born on May 22, 1907 to a bilingual house in Etterbeek, a suburb of Brussels, Belgium. His father, Alexis, was a French speaking Walloon factory worker with an identical twin brother which would eventually provide inspiration for two of Tintin’s future supporting cast members. His mother, Elisabeth, was a Flemish housewife suffering from mental illness and clinical depression which would provide one of the recurrent themes in Remi’s work.
As a boy growing up during World War I, Remi would draw constantly, scribbling on anything and everything he could get his hands on, from scrap paper to the margins of textbooks. Ironically, the boy who would one day be an internationally acclaimed artist often received below average grades in his art classes. He would spend his time trying to escape from his day to day life into worlds of fantasy. Remi would get swept up in adventure stories that would no doubt one day inspire his own tales, reading and rereading books like Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island. Perhaps his two favorite means of escape, however, were the movies, where he fell in love with Gertie the Dinosaur, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, as well as scouting, where he earned the rank of Eagle Scout and was given his first opportunity to be a published artist.
Remi’s Scoutmaster, René Weverbergh, would be the first to publish one of his drawings in the newsletter of the Saint-Boniface Scouts, Jamais Assez (Never Enough). When Weverbergh later got involved in publication of Le Boy-Scout Belge (The Belgian Boy Scout) he brought along Remi.
The monthly newsletter would become Remi’s testing ground. There he would see the publication of his first cartoon, cover drawing, woodcut, and editorial illustration. Le Boy-Scout Belge would also be the location of Remi’s f irst signed work which would appear in the fifth issue dated 1922 and signed as “G. Remi.”
The “G. Remi” moniker would disappear less than two years later, transforming into “Jérémie.” This would soon morph into “Jérémiades” as the young Remi sought out a proper artist pseudonym. As Remi saw it, “A self respecting artist needed a pseudonym.” Remi found his initials (G.R.) uninspiring, but when he reversed them and pronounced them in French, something magical happened. Hergé first appeared in the December 1924 edition of Le Boy-Scout Belge, it would be the name that would come to define Remi for the rest of his life.
Feeling confident in his abilities and in need of a job after finishing school, Remi met with the director of the catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century) in hopes of landing a job as an illustrator. Unfortunately, the paper already had a regular illustrator. Remi did, however, snag a vacant position in the subscriptions department and started working at the paper on September 1, 1925. Remi would find his new job dull, copying and recopying lists of names and addresses all day. He’d spend most of his time at work doodling and fantasizing about life as an investigative reporter.
Come 1926, things would turn around for Remi in his cartooning career when Le Boy-Scout Belge commissioned him to create his first ongoing comic strip series, The Adventures of Totor, Chief Scout of the Cockchafers. Remi would craft a story that followed a Belgian Boy Scout patrol leader named Totor who travels to visit his aunt and uncle in the far off land of Texas, United States. Once there, he finds himself in various misadventures involving hostile Native American tribes and gangsters before finally returning to Belgium. Totor was extremely fragmented as its basic goal was not plot so much as to string together gags and as many fight scenes as possible. It was clear that Remi was learning his craft on the job, but the series was a clear precursor to Tintin.
Unfortunately, Totor wasn’t enough to drown out the boredom and disenchantment he felt at his day job. This led Remi to enlist in the military, reporting for duty on August 16, 1926. Remi’s hope was that the army would be a sort of extension of the Boy Scouts. He was deeply saddened to find the same boredom and disenchantment waiting for him.
However, as Remi’s military service neared its end, he would have a chance encounter with the director of the Societe Nouvelle Presse et Librairie (New Society of Publishers and Bookstores), Norbert Wallez, who published Le Vingtième Siècle. It was a meeting that would soon change the young twenty year old’s life forever.
Remi would start his career as a professional illustrator in August, 1927, just days after entering civilian life again. He would be put to work drawing everything from educational cards to stopgap illustrations, usually unsigned. Later, he would recall that at this point in his career he was learning on the job and would draw “anything and everything” for the paper.
During his off hours at Le Vingtième Siècle, Remi would continue to create Totor comics for Le Boy-Scout Belge. The comic would last until 1929 when Remi was recruited by Wallez to help produce a new 8-page children’s supplement, like a mini magazine only filled with comics. Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth) would appear every Thursday within the pages of Le Vingtième Siècle starting on November 1, 1928. Wallez would commission Remi to create a comic about an adolescent and his dog that was “imbued in the spirit of catholic virtues.”
Utilizing a character concept he had originally intended to use for Totor’s younger brother and remembering his youthful aspirations of becoming a reporter, Hergé dreamed up Tintin. Joining him on his globetrotting adventures would be his faithful white fox terrier, Snowy or Milou in French, named after Remi’s first girlfriend.
Tintin and Snowy first appeared among the pages of Le Petit Vingtième on January 10, 1929 under the title “Adventures of Tintin, the Petit Vingtiéme Reporter, in the Land of the Soviets.” This debut story saw the young reporter bound for Moscow to expose the “Evils of Bolshevism.” Tintin’s popularity was instant. Doubling the main newspaper’s circulation on Thursdays, then tripling, then sextupling.
Tintin and Snowy’s adventures would take them far and wide, from the Congo, America, Egypt, and even all the way to the Moon. Eventually, Remi’s work was published in 24 volumes (one unfinished) and received countless awards and adaptations. Tintin would become his life’s work and would make him just as famous as his creation. The two would become so synonymous that when Remi died in 1983 from leukaemia, newspapers around the world adopted Tintin to make tributes to his late creator. One French daily, Libération, even gave over its whole front cover to a black framed image of Tintin with Snowy howling by his side “WAAOOOUUU!! Tintin is dead…” with the label “The Final Adventure of Tintin.” Additionally, inside every page surrounding the articles was a geographically or politically relevant image from a Tintin adventure. It was a reverent nod to the creator of one of the most famous reporters the world has ever known.
References:
- Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline
- Tintin: The Complete Companion by Michael Farr
- Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World by Monte Beauchamp
- The Art of Hergé: Inventor of Tintin 1937-1949 by Philippe Goddin
- Hergé, Son of Tintin by Benoît Peeters
- The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum