The English dept of The Heritage College celebrates Tintin’s 92nd birthday

The iconic comic-book character Tintin turned 92 on January 10. Though ‘92’ sounds like Tintin has reached his ripe old age, for us fans of The Adventures of Tintin he will always be the sprightly teenager embarking on one adventure after another with friends Captain Haddock and Snowy.

The English department of The Heritage College organised a three-hour webinar on ‘Herge and his famous creation Tintin’ recently to celebrate the occasion. Professor Pinaki De of Raja Peary Mohan College, Uttarpara --- who is also a graphic illustrator-designer --- took the audience into the world of Tintin, a young journalist travelling the globe to crack all kinds of mysteries.

Here are some of the fascinating things about Tintin we learnt from Prof Pinaki De:

-- Belgian cartoonist Herge first created a comic strip magazine called The Adventures of Totor alongside illustrating the character of Totor, who later looked exactly like Tintin.

-- The Adventures of Totor was serially published in the Belgian scouting magazine ‘Le Boy scout Belge’ from 1926 to 1929.

-- Herge started a job in the newspaper La Vingtieme Siecle, which had a Thursday supplement called ‘La Petit Vingtieme’ where Tintin made his first appearance in the story Tintin in the land of Soviets.

-- Though Herge had initially planned to send Tintin to America, he later sent him to Russia as Tintin became a kind of vehicle to promote anti-Communist propaganda.

-- In 1946, there was a paradigm shift and Tintin became a comic magazine itself named Le Journal de Tintin. It became very popular worldwide.

-- Herge used a new style of illustration called Ligne Claire to draw the Tintin strip. “So that, before reading the text, a child could get a vivid description of the story outline and the characters, looking at the sketches,” said Prof De.

-- Herge paid importance to the setting of the text and the atmosphere. Edward Jacobs gave colour to the illustrations of Tintin in a complicated way, and George McManus influenced Herge to introduce the speech balloon technique.

(Author bio: Olypriya Roy is a second-year student of English (UG) at The Heritage College)