For those of you who may not know who inspired Hergé to create the character of Tintin, I thought I would share this tidy summary from The Copenhagen Post:
Tintin displays his Danish roots
MONDAY, 12 JANUARY 2009 15:04 KR
Famed cartoon character Tintin was based on Danish teenager who traveled the world.
After decades of traveling the world in search of adventure with his faithful dog Snowy by his side, the Belgian cartoon character Tintin celebrated his 80th birthday on Saturday. Somewhere in a Copenhagen nursing home, the Danish inspiration for the character smiled with glee.
‘It sounds fun to be the cause of it, doesn’t it? It’s an enormous pleasure,’ Palle Huld told Ekstra Bladet newspaper. The 96-year-old former actor confirmed that Tintin’s creator, Georges Remi, better known by pen-name Hergé, was inspired by a trip undertaken by the Dane when he was just a teenager.
Hald was just 15 years old when he won a newspaper competition to take a trip around the world, marking the centenary of Jules Verne. The adventure, dubbed ‘Around the world in 44 days’, attracted much attention from international media and caught the eye of the Belgian cartoonist.
On Hald’s return, he was welcomed by a huge crowd at Copenhagen railway station, just like Tintin in his first adventure, but the Dane admits he has trouble remembering much of his earlier travels.
The first comic strip adventures of Tintin were published in Belgian newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle in 1929 and went on to sell more than 200 million books featuring the mystery-solving teenager reporter .
