Hergé

Georges Remi, pen name from his reversed initials, grew up in a lower-middle-class Brussels household and started drawing for Scouting magazines as a teenager. In 1929, working for the conservative Catholic paper Le Vingtième Siècle, he launched The Adventures of Tintin—early albums like Tintin in the Soviet Union and Tintin in the Congo served as blunt propaganda for children. A friendship with Chinese artist Zhang Chongren in 1934 changed his method: he began researching exhaustively, and from The Blue Lotus forward the work turned more real. During the Nazi occupation he kept publishing Tin…