The prescient politics of Tintin

Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was a failed journalist. His first job after leaving school was on a Brussels newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle, but boringly in the subscriptions department. His mind was set on becoming a top foreign correspondent like some of the leading names of the 1920s.

He really had started on the bottom rung, for subscriptions were located in the basement of the newspaper building. At every opportunity he would migrate upstairs, to the busy newsroom and especially to the cuttings library, where he discovered the world at his fingertips. There he found and could browse through the international press, otherwise not so readily available in Brussels. He was able to develop a lifelong passion for current affairs.

There was a bonus too. On the back page of American newspapers, he discovered strip cartoons, then almost unknown in Europe. These gave him ideas of his own which he could soon develop.

Back in the basement, going through the subscriptions, he would pass the time doodling and drawing, and this was noticed by the editor’s secretary when she came down to check an address. She was impressed and mentioned the young man’s evident ability to the editor. At a time when newspapers only used photography sparingly, illustrations could be a useful substitute and Hergé was elevated from the basement and given a brief to provide illustrations for various parts of the paper: the literary and arts pages, fashion and even sport.

The editor’s next bright idea was to launch a children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtième, on Thursdays (a half-day in Belgian schools) and appoint Hergé – then only 21 years old – as its first editor. It was a bit thin at first as Hergé tried to draw together material from a variety of contributors, so he decided to bolster it with a regular contribution of his own, a strip cartoon featuring the adventures of a young reporter called Tintin.