(Tintin and his friends always on adventures that capture the imagination of young lads like me. Image source: Medium.com)
When I was in my secondary school, this comic book – The Adventures of Tintin series was one of the most sought out “books” in the school library (ya, we had a good collection of comic books in library and we often read them just before the examinations to release tensions).
Please read the rest of the series here
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of 24 bande dessinée albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé’s birth in 1907, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film.
The series first appeared in French on 10 January 1929, in Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth), a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century). The success of the series saw the serialised strips published in Belgium’s leading newspaper Le Soir (The Evening) and spun into a successful Tintin magazine. In 1950, Hergé created Studios Hergé, which produced the canonical versions of eleven Tintin albums.
The series is set during a largely realistic 20th century. Its hero is Tintin, a courageous young Belgian reporter and adventurer. He is aided by his faithful dog Snowy (Milou in the original French edition). Other protagonists include the brash and cynical Captain Haddock and the intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (French: Professeur Tournesol), as well as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (French: Dupont et Dupond) and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore.
The series has been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé’s signature ligne claire (“clear line”) style. Its well-researched plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, action, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories feature slapstick humour, offset by dashes of sophisticated satire and political or cultural commentary.
(Source)
In fact, if you can get a hold of the book – you have hit the jackpot!
There was a long “queue” for the Tintin comic book – and arrangements are often made “under the table” with the librarian on duty. When someone returns the comic for good (for good means they don’t “renew” their borrowing of the book), the librarian will keep it under the librarian’s table and once his buddy comes along, the book will be conveniently taken out for the buddy to borrow.
Sometimes if we know who had borrowed it, we make an arrangement with the person directly. On extreme cases, we “haunt” those who are holding the book to quickly return it.
Ah, my precious…