Seventy years is a long time in the life of any boy reporter. Into his seven decades the famously quiffed Tintin has packed battles with the Bolsheviks, adventures in America and chases through China - among other escapades. The character, whose adventures have sold more than 175 million books around the world, celebrates his anniversary tomorrow, an event which will be celebrated in his spiritual homeland, France, with a fervency akin to that which marks Bastille Day. Seventy years after he first appeared in the Brussels daily, Le Petit Vintieme, Tintin's place in the French heart looks unlikely ever to wane. Forty-four percent of French families own a Tintin book and according to Jane Taylor, who established the first Tintin shop in London and now has branches worldwide, "the French have sort of appropriated him". Over the past month French newspapers have published earnest explorations of the lad's role and analyses of his political affiliations. But in fact Tintin is perhaps the world's most famous Belgian, created by the Brussels-born cartoonist Georges Remi, alias Herge.
The debut assignment, on January 10th 1929, a two-page spread in Le Petit Vintieme, saw Tintin getting to grips with the Bolsheviks. Herge delivered two pages a week, linking one episode to another. By 1930 the strip was also appearing weekly in Coeurs Valliants, while the continuing adventures in Le Petit Vingtieme enabled the paper to double, then triple and eventually sextuple its circulation on the day the young people's supplement appeared. And as Tintin grew in popularity, his cast of fellow characters grew too. Ever present is his canine companion, Snowy. Gradually fans were introduced to the Thompson Twins, , Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Wagg and Bianca Castafiore.
Tintin, which is now published in over 40 languages, made its first English appearance in 1959. Since then 20 million books in English have been sold - a steady 500,000 a year. Tintin's publishers, Egmont Books, say they expect sales to increase "substantially in the anniversary year".
Mary Rogers, children's book buyer with Waterstone's in Dublin, tells that Tintin "is as much an adult as a children's book. It is in the children's section partly because it's hard to know where else to put the cartoon books, but we would see all ages buying Tintin." "People come to Tintin for different reasons," says Jane Taylor. "I first read the books as a child because the stories were exciting. But when I read them now, as an adult, I see how complex the stories are.""The overriding message for me is that Tintin always overcomes evil in the end. The stories are about goodness." Others have pointed to the often crude political message underlying the cartoons. Having brought Tintin safely home from the Land of the Soviets - where his activities informed young fans of the evils of communism - Herge planned to despatch him to America. Herge newspaper editor, however, wanted Tintin sent to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire). In the words of Tintin expert Benoit Peeters: "It was time to attempt a justification of this vast Belgian colony."
In one frame of the original 1930 version we see our hero giving a geography lesson to African children. "Mes chers amis," he says, "je vais vous parler aujourd'hui de votre patrie: La Belgique." In the redrawn 1946 version, this lesson on "your fatherland: Belgium", is changed to an arithmetic lesson. Herge himself later judged the Congo story harshly. "For the Congo as with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets the fact is that I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved."
Herge has been accused of collaborating with fascists during the war and acting as public relations puppet for imperialism in his earlier works, though Tintin took a more leftward leaning as his creator aged.
Dominique Busereau, a conservative member of the French Parliament, comments that one of the most fascinating things about Tintin is that "he just doesn't stand still politically". In the last adventure, Tintin and the Picaros, published in 1976, the boy is kitted out in jeans, does yoga and sports a Ban-The-Bomb sign on his motor-bike helmet. He is in Central America backing rebel guerillas against the tin-pot dictator Marshall Kurvi-Tash. Herge's death in 1983 was covered extensively in France and Belgium; the French daily Libera- tion, on the day after his death, took all the illustrations for that issue - for political stories, the weather, even small ads - from Herge's books.
HERGE was taken aback at his own and Tintin's success. Wondering at the reasons, he once mused: "That's something I am still asking myself."