HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TINTIN!

Joyeux anniversaire, Tintin: Ninety-seven years old today... and he wears it well!

On this day in 1929, young journalist Tintin and his faithful wire fox terrier Snowy set out on their first adventure, travelling to "The Land of The Soviets" at the behest of the editor of Le Petit Vingtième to unearth the truth of what was happening to the country under Bolshevik rule.

Appearing in the weekly children's supplement of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century), Tintin was initially very much a right-wing, anti-communist propaganda tool.

And yet from this unlikely start a global star of children's - and adult's - literature would eventually blossom, as he shook off those initial influences and became his own fully-developed person in later stories.

Created by 21-year-old Belgium cartoonist Georges Prosper Remi aka Hergé, the eternally young protagonist and his growing family of friends and associates would go to star in 24 canonical adventures (although the final one, Tintin and Alph-Art, was unfinished at the time of Hergé's death in 1983, and remains so).

A stipulation in Hergé's will was that no-one else could create fresh Tintin adventures and so this canon of two dozen stories will remain sacrosanct for the foreseeable future, with any upcoming projects only drawing on plots that have already been set in stone by Tintin's creator.

The animation below was created for Tintin's 90th birthday celebrations back in 2019:

Happy 90th birthday, Tintin!!! Our tribute.#tintinbirthday #Tintin90 #Tintin @SCMPgraphics pic.twitter.com/mBqLxh8hge

— Adolfo Arranz (@adolfux) January 10, 2019