89 years ago, on the very same day, a senior editor of “Le Vingterme siècle” said farewell to a junior reporter on platform and dispatched him to report on the situation in the Soviet Union and that has proved to be one of the greatest things to have happened, atleast for the kids and the comic lovers. That is how ‘Tintin’ was born.
Today is its 90th anniversary.
The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin; [lez‿avɑ̃tyʁ də tɛ̃tɛ̃]) is a series of 24 comic albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé’s birth in 1907, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies, and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film.
Tintin’s journey began with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which was published in the Belgian magazine Le Petit Vingtieme. Since the entire Tintin series gained immense popularity, there have been many blames on his initial volumes arguing that they were anti-Soviet, racist, stereotypical, and promoted animal cruelty, colonialism, violence, and even fascist leanings, including ethnocentric caricatured portrayals of non-Europeans. The most notable one is the first volume itself.
The series was also surrounded by controversies but its popularity kept increasing and gradually it transformed into one of the greatest series.
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is accused of presenting the Bolsheviks as villains. Herge drew on Moscow Unveiled, a work given to him by Norbert Wallez (Belgian priest and journalist) and authored by Joseph Douillet (former Belgian consul of Russia): who were both highly critical of the Soviet regime.