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 Tintin in Le Soir, a German-controlled paper; after liberation in 1944 he faced collaboration accusations, never charged but never cleared of the stain. He co-founded Tintin magazine in 1946, oversaw other artists, and in 1950 set up Studios Hergé to help produce the albums - his personal favorite, Tintin in Tibet, emerged during the wreck of his first marriage. He grew less prolific in later years and tried, without success, to paint abstracts.