Hergé was the pen name of Georges Prosper Remi, a Belgian cartoonist who was born in 1907 and died in 1983. The name came from the French sound of his initials, RG, read backwards. He is best known as the creator of The Adventures of Tintin, the comic albums about the boy reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, drawn in his clean ligne claire style.
He started out drawing for Scouting magazines and launched Tintin in 1929 at the Catholic paper Le Vingtième Siècle. The first stories, from Tintin in the Land of the Soviets through Tintin in the Congo to Tintin in America, served as conservative propaganda for young readers. From The Blue Lotus onwards, influenced by his friend Zhang Chongren, he researched much harder. Under the German occupation he kept working at Le Soir, where The Crab with the Golden Claws introduced Captain Haddock; after liberation he was accused of collaboration, though no charges followed.
In 1946 he set up Tintin magazine with Raymond Leblanc, and in 1950 he founded Studios Hergé. Later albums included Destination Moon, The Calculus Affair and Tintin in Tibet, his own favourite. A Hergé Museum opened in Louvain-la-Neuve in 2009.
