The Adven­tures of Tintin may be a chil­dren’s com­ic series from mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Europe, but its appeal has long since tran­scend­ed the bound­aries of form, cul­ture, and gen­er­a­tion. In fact, many if not most seri­ous­ly ded­i­cat­ed fans of Tintin are in mid­dle age and beyond, and few of them can have avoid­ed ever con­sid­er­ing the ques­tion of his cre­ator’s activ­i­ties dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. Georges Remi, known by the nom de plume Hergé, was born to a low­er-mid­dle-class fam­i­ly in a Brus­sels sub­urb in 1907: utter­ly mun­dane begin­nings, per­haps, but ones that would lead to what the apoc­ryphal ancient Chi­nese curse calls inter­est­ing times, even for a young man whose inter­ests did­n’t run far past scout­ing and draw­ing.

After serv­ing in the Bel­gian army, explains his­to­ry YouTu­ber Mark Fel­ton in his new video above, Remi was hired by the con­ser­v­a­tive Catholic paper Le Vingtième Siè­cle to draw comics for its chil­dren’s sup­ple­ment Le Petit Vingtième. It was there that he became Hergé and cre­at­ed the boy reporter Tintin, whom the paper’s edi­tor asked to be sent to a fic­tion­al­ized Sovi­et Union in order to expose the evils of the Bol­she­viks. Pop­u­lar­i­ty came imme­di­ate­ly, and built up to the degree that an actor was hired to put his hair into a quiff and “return” by train to an appre­cia­tive crowd in Brus­sels upon the sto­ry’s con­clu­sion. There fol­lowed the fur­ther adven­tures of Tintin in the Con­go (at the time, a Bel­gian colony) and Tintin in Amer­i­ca, both of which have since come in for a great deal of crit­i­cism for their reliance on stereo­types.

Though very much his own artist, Hergé at this stage let the pol­i­tics of Tintin sto­ries be dic­tat­ed by high­er-ups. Con­ceived in response to Japan’s inva­sion of Manchuria, The Blue Lotus, from 1934, did offer him an oppor­tu­ni­ty to increase the real­ism of his art, ren­der­ing the look and feel of Chi­na as accu­rate­ly as his research could make pos­si­ble; he con­tin­ued to incor­po­rate large amounts of detail from all over the world into The Bro­ken Ear, The Black Island, and King Ottokar’s Scep­tre. Though that last deals with fic­tion­al Euro­pean coun­tries, it also clear­ly sat­i­rizes the inva­sive ten­den­cies of Hitler’s Ger­many — which would come for Hergé’s home­land in 1940, shut­ting down Le Petit Vingtième, putting him out of a job, and even req­ui­si­tion­ing his home.

Even­tu­al­ly, Hergé land­ed on his feet and joined Le Soir, Bel­gium’s largest French-lan­guage news­pa­per. Though he could pub­lish Tintin there, the Nazis had turned it into their ide­o­log­i­cal mouth­piece, a fact that did­n’t reflect well on Hergé after the Allied vic­to­ry. He found him­self black­list­ed and cat­e­go­rized with the thou­sands of Bel­gian col­lab­o­ra­tors who could receive the death penal­ty or life in prison, but an inves­ti­ga­tion into his case found him to be “a blun­der­er rather than a trai­tor” — shades of P. G. Wode­house mak­ing broad­casts about the lighter side of intern­ment for the Gestapo. His good stand­ing as a cit­i­zen and artist was even­tu­al­ly restored, though even today, his wartime activ­i­ties are occa­sion­al­ly called into ques­tion. Still, he was able to con­tin­ue Tintin’s adven­tures until he died in 1983, engag­ing in only the kind of col­lab­o­ra­tion he could do with his staff at Stu­dios Hergé.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hergé Draws Tintin in Vin­tage Footage (and What Explains the Character’s Endur­ing Appeal)

How Andy Warhol and Tintin Cre­ator Hergé Mutu­al­ly Admired and Influ­enced One Anoth­er

Comics Inspired by Wait­ing for Godot, Fea­tur­ing Tintin, Roz Chast, and Beav­is & Butthead

How Dis­ney Fought Fas­cism with Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons Dur­ing World War II & Avert­ed Finan­cial Col­lapse

How the Nazis Waged War on Mod­ern Art: Inside the “Degen­er­ate Art” Exhi­bi­tion of 1937

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.