Happy Birthday: Hergé
Georges Prosper Remi was born in Etterbeek, Brussels, Belgium in 1907. He was still in school during World War I, when Brussels was occupied by the Germans, and doodled images of the invaders in his notebooks.
In 1920 he attended the collège Saint-Boniface and joined the Boy Scouts troop there. His first published drawings were in the school’s Scout paper and in the monthly Boy Scouts magazine Le Boy-Scout Belge. In 1924 he began signing his illustrations “Hergé,” the French pronunciation of his first and last initials reversed. He would keep the pseudonym for the rest of his life.
After finishing school, Hergé worked at the Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siècle. In 1926 he published his first cartoon series, Totor, in Le Boy-Scout Belge. In 1928 Hergé was given responsibility for Le XXe Siècle’s weekly children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtième.
In 1929 he debuted a new strip of his own creation there, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Tintin became an immediate success, and Hergé produced new Tintin adventures right up to his death in 1983—the 24th and last one, Tintin and Alph-Art, was published unfinished.
Hergé received many awards during his lifetime, including the Harvey, the Eisner, the Adamson, and the Grand Prix Saint Michel. He was posthumously inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003.
When is Tintin's birthday? Is the censure of "Tintin in the Congo" justified? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_CongoHow much are we willing to revise art to stay within contemporary tastes? Hergé edited and redrew parts of "Tintin in the Congo," in 1946 to appease critics who found the book too colonialist and cruel to animals. (Tintin blows up a Rhino with dynomite in the original story. The Rhino steps on Tintin's gun; it fires and scares away the Rhino in the revision.) How much should art be altered to make it palatable for the public? Or should we leave artworks alone and say that they are a product of their times, document those times and to alter them is creating revisionist history. Is it a crime to attach fig leaves on naked, public sculptures?I remember Bugs Bunny Cartoons being altered for broadcast in the seventies so that all violent acts (and there are plenty of them in a Bugs Bunny Cartoon) took place off-camera, out of the frame. The cartoons are much less violent and less funny too.Is it worth risking little children smacking each other in the head with frying pans just because it's really funny seeing Jerry make Tom's head frying pan shaped?