Les aventures de Tintin, reporter du Petit ‘Vingtième’ #[1]

History

Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi — signing his work under the pen name Hergé, the French phonetic reversal of his initials — was 22 years old and working as illustrator and editor-in-chief of Le Petit Vingtième, the Thursday youth supplement of the conservative Catholic Brussels newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, when Abbé Norbert Wallez commissioned the strip. Wallez directed Hergé to set the story in the Soviet Union rather than Hergé's preferred America, handing him a single source book — Joseph Douillet's 1928 anti-communist memoir Moscou sans voiles: Neuf ans de travail au pays des Soviets — which Hergé drew upon heavily, transposing entire episodes (including coerced elections and fake factories) into the comic. The story ran two pages per week from 10 January 1929 to 8 May 1930, totalling 69 episodes; Wallez then published the plates as a collected album through the newly created Éditions du Petit Vingtième in September 1930, with the first 500 copies numbered and signed — Hergé signing as Tintin and his future wife Germaine Kieckens signing as Milou. Hergé later considered the work a creative embarrassment, refusing to redraw or recolor it as he did with subsequent albums, calling it a 'transgression of my youth'; unauthorized editions and piracy eventually compelled a 1973 republication in the Archives Hergé omnibus and a 1981 facsimile edition, with the story's first-ever colorized version finally appearing in 2017 via a co-edition by Casterman and Moulinsart.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of Tintin (reporter for Le Petit Vingtième) and Milou/Snowy (his white wire fox terrier companion), who debuts here as a speaking, thinking character integral to every Tintin adventure that followed.
• Serialized weekly in Le Petit Vingtième beginning 10 January 1929 — the date Hergé himself declared Tintin's 'birth' — and running until 8 May 1930 across 69 two-page installments.
• Collected and published in album form by Éditions du Petit Vingtième in September 1930; the first 500 copies were numbered and signed 'Tintin et Milou,' with Hergé signing as Tintin and Germaine Kieckens (later Hergé's first wife) signing as Milou.
• Hergé's sole research source was Moscou sans voiles (1928) by former Belgian consul Joseph Douillet — a book provided by Abbé Wallez — from which Hergé directly adapted several key scenes, including a coerced Soviet election and fake factories staged for visiting foreign communists.
• The strip helped introduce systematic use of speech bubbles to European comics at a time when most Belgian readers had never encountered the format, a formal innovation Harry Thompson described as Hergé 'virtually pioneering their use in Europe.'
• The only Tintin album never redrawn by Studios Hergé into modern style and the last to remain exclusively in black and white; Hergé categorically refused post-war reworking, viewing it as a crude youthful error incompatible with his mature ligne claire approach.
• First republished in authorized form in 1973 as part of the Archives Hergé collected volume (alongside Tintin in the Congo, Tintin in America, and Les Aventures de Totor); a facsimile edition followed in 1981. In 1999 Casterman reissued it in standard album format for Tintin's 70th anniversary — a decision that went against the late author's expressed wishes.
• A colorized edition — the first in the entire series to receive this treatment — was published jointly by Casterman and Moulinsart on 11 January 2017, without any redrawing of Hergé's original artwork.

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