Contents page Hergé Biography 2

Childhood

On finishing school in 1925, Georges worked at the Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siècle. The following year, he published his first cartoon series, The Adventures of Totor, in the scouting magazine Le Boy-Scout Belge. In 1928, he was put in charge of producing material for the Le XXe Siècle's new weekly supplement for children, Le Petit Vingtième. He began illustrating The Adventures of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette, and Cochonnet, a strip written by a member of the newspaper's sports staff, but soon became dissatisfied with this series. He decided to create a comic strip of his own, which would adopt the recent American innovation of using speech balloons to depict words coming out of the characters' mouths. Previously lines of dialogue had appeared like subtitles, outside of the panel of artwork.

and would later divorce in 1975 when Hergé began a relationship with a young illustrator, Fanny Vlamynck.

The Second World War broke out on September 1st, 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. Hergé was mobilized as a reserve lieutenant, and had to interrupt Tintin's adventures in the middle of Land of Black Gold. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1940, Belgium had fallen to Germany with the rest of Continental Europe and Le Petit Vingtième, in which Tintin's adventures had hitherto been published, was shut down by the German occupation. However, Hergé accepted an offer to produce a new Tintin strip in Le Soir, Brussels' leading French daily, which had been appropriated as the mouthpiece of the occupation forces. He had to leave The Land of the Black Gold unfinished, due to its anti-fascist overtones, launching instead into The Crab with the Golden Claws, the first of six Tintin stories which he would produce during the war.

The occupation of Brussels ended on September 3rd, 1944 and Tintin's adventures were interrupted toward the end of The Seven Crystal Balls when the Allied authorities shut down Le Soir. During the chaotic post-occupation period, Hergé was arrested four times by different groups. He was publicly accused of being a German sympathizer, a claim which was largely unfounded, as the Tintin adventures published during the war were scrupulously free of politics (the only dubious point occurring in The Shooting Star, which showed a rival scientific expedition flying the Flag of the United States). In fact, the stories published before the war had been unequivocally critical of fascism; most prominently, King Ottokar's Sceptre showed Tintin working to defeat a thinly-veiled allegory of Nazi Germany's takeover of Austria. Nevertheless, like other former employees of the Nazi-controlled press, Hergé found himself barred from newspaper work. He spent the next two years working with Jacobs, as well as a new assistant, Alice Devos, adapting many of the early Tintin adventures into colour.

The increased demands which Tintin Magazine placed on Hergé began to take their toll. In 1949, while working on the new version of Land of Black Gold (the first version had been left unfinished by the outbreak of World War Two), Hergé suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to take an abrupt four month-long break. He suffered another breakdown in early 1950, while working on Destination Moon.