On Thursday 8 May 1930, the train from Moscow pulled into Brussels’ Gare du Nord. Station officials fought to control a huge and excited crowd that surged forward, eager to catch a glimpse of their hero. As the big black engine drew to a halt, the carriage doors opened and a familiar quiff was spotted bobbing above the heads of the travelers. The crowd went wild.
The young boy stepping confidently from the train was dressed in Russian costume, as befitting anyone who had just single-handedly conquered an entire continent, and put a nation of cowardly Bolsheviks to flight. By his side strode a small white dog on a lead. Behind him hovered a thin, nervous young man in a raincoat, recognized by only a few as the artist Georges Remi, or ‘Hergé’, who had spent the past year-and-a-half chronicling the adventures of the lad in front of him for the readers of the Vingtième Siècle newspaper. Tintin, junior reporter and adventurer extraordinaire, was coming home to meet his public at last.
The adulation was so unstinting that few onlookers noticed the unusually dark color of Tintin’s hair or the fact that his quiff kept falling down into his eyes. Doubtless, those that had spotted the sizeable jar of hair grease under Hergé’s arm didn’t mind that ever-increasing dollops were needed to maintain their hero’s celebrated hairstyle. As for the usually perky Snowy, well, the doleful black-eared beagle at Tintin’s side simply got lost in a forest of feet. If you’d told the multitude that ‘Tintin’ was in fact Henri de Donckers, a cut-price actor rented for the day, who’d got on the train with Hergé a couple of stops up the line, none of them would have believed you.
Waiting to meet the train, and Hergé in particular, was an appropriate royalist dignitary – the ex-Empress Zita of Austria-Hungary. Just as the breathless author had made contact with her, and was waiting to be presented officially, the crowd swept Donckers off in another direction. Georges looked at the Empress, at the sagging quiff now disappearing rapidly into the scrum, and at the pot of hair grease in his arms. He made up his mind and plunged into the crowd after his protégé. For the rest of his life, through thick and thin, euphoria and black depression, he was never able to leave Tintin’s side again.
In due course, the prototype comic strip hero the young author had created went on to be massively influential, both commercially and artistically. Inside Hergé’s profession, Tintin gave rise to a whole movement, the bande dessinée tradition, a style of comic illustration – as distinct from cartooning – that captured the imagination of the European mainland. Many major bande dessinée artists were inspired in the first instance by Tintin. Clare Bretécher, who produced ‘Ode to Tintin’ on Hergé’s death, recalls: ‘I was wholly nurtured on Tintin, like all my generation.’
From excerpt ‘Tintin keeps up appearances’ by Harry Thompson