Brussels Scout who drew Tintin's clear-line planet
Georges Prosper Remi, 22 May 1907 to 3 March 1983, signed himself Herge from reversed initials RG and invented The Adventures of Tintin. Scout magazines trained the line; later liberation politics shadowed the author even as the albums remade comics worldwide.
Georges Remi was born in May 1907 in Etterbeek, a central Brussels suburb, to a Walloon father who worked at a confectionery factory and a Flemish mother who kept house. He loved the cinema, from Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur to Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and their comic timing shows in his strips. Not much of a reader, he still enjoyed Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn and Alexandre Dumas, and doodled everyday scenes in the margins of his schoolbooks.
Scouting shaped him more than school. He joined the Saint-Boniface troop at twelve, led the Squirrel Patrol under the nickname Curious Fox, camped across Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Spain, and in 1923 hiked some 200 miles over the Pyrenees. His scoutmaster Rene Weverbergh printed his first drawing and then placed more in the federation newsletter that became Le Boy-Scout Belge. There, from July 1926, he ran Totor, a strip about a patrol leader in which he began trying out speech balloons.
Art school at Saint-Luc lasted a single lesson. He took a dull job in the subscriptions office of Le Vingtieme Siecle, a conservative Catholic daily, and after military service met its editor, Abbe Norbert Wallez, an outspoken fascist who kept a signed photo of Mussolini and became a father figure to him. Wallez launched a Thursday children's supplement, Le Petit Vingtieme, whose pages carried Catholic, fascist and antisemitic content, and in 1929 Tintin was born there: a boy reporter with a fox terrier, modelled partly on Totor and on Herge's brother Paul.
When Belgium was liberated in 1944, Le Soir, where he had worked during the occupation, was closed and its staff accused of collaboration. No charges were brought against him, but the accusation followed him for years. In 1946 he and Raymond Leblanc launched Tintin magazine. His clear drawing and carefully researched plots spawned stage, screen and game adaptations, and a Herge Museum opened at Louvain-la-Neuve in 2009.
Source: Hergé
