Herge and TIN TIN

I was not aware  that we had  a wonderful creator of comic books in Belgium ..Untill Vijay asked to write  abt  TinTin. We  call him Kuifje in dutch .I wonder why he could  not  keep his own name in different languages. I mean a name is a name and even his lil doggy  we call  Bobbi  and in  Tintin book his called Snowy.

Tintin and Snowy the main caracters

Tintin is a young Belgian reporter who becomes involved in dangerous cases in which he takes heroic action to save the day. Almost every adventure features Tintin hard at work at his investigative reporting, but he is rarely seen actually turning in a story without first getting caught up in some misadventure. He is a young man of more or less neutral attitudes and is less colourful than the supporting cast. In this respect, he represents the everyman.

Snowy, a white Fox terrier, is Tintin's four-legged companion. They regularly save each other from perilous situations. Snowy frequently "speaks" to the reader through his thoughts (often displaying a dry sense of humour), which are supposedly not heard by the characters in the story except in Tintin in America where he explains Tintin about his absence for a period of time in the book.

Like Captain Haddock, Snowy is fond of the Loch Lomond brand of whisky, and his occasional bouts of drinking tend to get him into trouble, as does his raging arachnophobia. The French name of Snowy, "Milou", has nothing to do with snow or the color white. It has been widely credited as an oblique reference to a girlfriend from Hergé's youth, Marie-Louise Van Cutsem, whose nickname was "Milou"

Even  the book Tintin in Tibet is translated in Esperanto.

Other caracters are

Bianca Castafiore is an opera singer whom Haddock absolutely despises. However, she seems to constantly be popping up wherever they go, along with her maid, Irma, and pianist, Igor Wagner. Her name means "white and chaste flower"

Thomson and Thompson  (Jansen  and Janssen  In dutch) are a pair of detectives. It is unclear whether the two are related; they have different names but are referred to as twins or brothers at least twice in the series. In any case, the two clumsy detectives look like twins and can only be told apart by the shape of their moustaches. They provide much of the comic relief throughout the series, as they are afflicted with spoonerism. They are thoroughly incompetent, and always bent on arresting the wrong character, but in spite of this they somehow get entrusted with delicate missions

Well  the strips are still collecters items.

 Last saterday there was an  auction  in Paris a guy payed 674.200 euro for a gouache  made for the cover of Tintin  in America in 1932