Tintin has sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, in 50 languages, and eventually brought Hergé to all the places he dreamed of. The exhibition will include the oldest known drawing of Tintin, without his distinctive tuft of hair but with a most unflattering plus-fours check suit, with some of the earliest strip cartoons which doubled circulation.Īndy Warhol, who adored comics, was among the fans, and the exhibition will include his unlikely portrait of George Remi.
He dusted down the boyish star of a cartoon about the only exciting thing he had done - camping with the boy scouts - re-named him Tintin, made him the foreign correspondent he longed to be himself, and sent him off, wildly improbably, to Soviet Russia. George Remi, Hergé - who was to draw and write Tintin for more than half a century - had never been anywhere in 1929. The exhibition will be sponsored by Ottakar Books - James Heneage, the founder of the company, is a lifelong passionate devotee and named his shops after the Tintin adventure King Ottokar's Sceptre.Ĭaptain Haddock is the tenuous connection between the National Maritime Museum and the immortal creation of a panic-stricken young Belgian graphic artist with less than a week to create a strip cartoon for a new section of his Brussels newspaper. "I keep talking to big business figures who get all misty eyed about Tintin." "The most surprising people love Tintin," Roy Clare, director of the National Maritime Museum, said yesterday.