Hergé and Le Petit Vingtième Hergé is considered the star of European comics. His success is global. His pseudonym 'Hergé' is derived from reversing the initials 'R' and 'G' of his real name, Georges Remi, born May 22, 1907 in Brussels. Tintin and Snowy, the comics characters who brought him worldwide fame, first appeared in Le Petit Vingtième, the weekly supplement for children published every Thursday (a half-holiday from school at the time) in the major Belgian daily newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. It consisted of a simple illustration showing the reporter and his dog strolling through the streets of Moscow, designed to announce the publication from the following week of an extraordinary news report by this Tintin, the paper's special envoy to the Land of the Soviets. Hergé at this stage is very influenced by his milieu and Catholic education. The newspaper employing him, and notably the Abbot Norbert Wallez, have very strong opinions about communism in Russia established in October 1917. As a result, Hergé's caricature of the USSR lacks subtlety, and above all plays it for laughs. The Adventures of Tintin and Snowy The story which Hergé embarks on from Thursday January 10th, 1929, will run to 139 pages in total, drawn entirely in a rounded, caricatural style. Hergé has already had illustrations and picture stories published in different magazines and in Le Petit Vingtième, but here for the first time in his career he incorporates the dialogues into his drawings instead of using a descriptive text beneath the panels. It's an approach which he appreciated in the works of the American George McManus and the Frenchman Alain Saint-Ogan. What is striking about Hergé's first story in comics form is how any awkwardness quickly disappears and how the adventure develops real dynamism. All of this is improvised, every twist and turn: Hergé could not have imagined the success awaiting Tintin and Snowy, nor that they would make his career in albums sold all over the world. The idea of compiling the episodes into an album is not even considered at this point: this is an unpretentious serial, which contains the germs of what will bring glory to its author and his character. Hergé has already shown his drawing ability through a wide range of creations and here considerably simplifies his line to ensure legibility. But he rapidly proves that he has a sense of movement, and leaves no doubt that his little hero is thoroughly modern. Tintin borrows fashionable modes of transport like the train, motorbike, automobile and plane, and other less conventional ones, such as the motorboat, racing car, horse and even machines he has built himself. The story does not appear in color, which explains why the author plays with the black and white surfaces to make up for this lack, using a system of feathering, cross-hatching, stippling, to which he quickly adds mechanical screen tones which allow him to introduce greys. An historical step On January 23rd 1930, buoyed by the success of Tintin, Le Petit Vingtième is doubled from eight to sixteen pages and adds from then on a front-page illustration. This is how there appears on February 13th, a supplementary illustration to Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. It's the very first time that a magazine puts Tintin on its cover like this, and it could be said that with this illustration Tintin's media career truly 'takes off'. A drawing of exceptional quality The scene which Hergé chooses refers to the 57th double-page of the story, and shows the hero carving a tree trunk into a make-shift propeller for his plane, watched by Snowy. This composition is remarkable in more ways than one. First because Hergé chose not to make do with enlarging one of the panels from his story and removing the speech balloons: instead he works here as an illustrator, composing the image with care and paying attention to detail in every part. Then, because, as a painter would do, he wants to bring the whole image surface to life, he leaves practically none of it blank: the sky is 'furnished' by the wing of the plane, the earth by wood-chips. Elegance suffuses this piece: in the forms of the wood-chips, the supple folds of the leather of the flight jacket, and of the boots, the appearance of sheepskin on the hero's collar and gloves... The streaks of the tree stump which Tintin in sitting on respond to the lines of Snowy's bandages. The grass we can make out near the plane's wheel echoes the thin pines on the horizon. Hergé's humor also comes into bloom in this large-format composition (measuring 10.5" x 11.5"): to the veins and knots of the wood are added young leaves struggling to grow despite Tintin's concerted carving. A supreme decorative effect is the artist's choice to allow the ingenious pilot's propeller to break out of the frame, on one side and the other. He gives his image relief and depth, which he had not yet dared to show in the panels of his story. By chance, this remarkable composition g