Herge

"Herge" is the French pronunciation of "R.G.", the reverse of his initials. His best-known and most substantial work is The Adventures Of Tintin, which he wrote and illustrated from 1929 until his death in 1983, which left the twenty-fourth Tintin adventure, Tintin and Alph-Art, unfinished. His work remains a strong influence on comics, particularly in Europe. He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003.

The notable qualities of the Tintin stories include their vivid humanism, a realistic feel produced by meticulous and wide-ranging research, and Herge's ligne claire drawing style.

Other series that Herge wrote and drew include Jo, Zette and Jocko and Quick & Flupke (Quick et Flupke).

Georges Remi was born in 1907 in Etterbeek, in Brussels, Belgium to middle class parents, Alexis and Elisabeth Remi. His four years of primary schooling coincided with World War I (1914-1918), during which Brussels was occupied by the German Empire. Georges, who displayed an early affinity for drawing, filled the margins of his earliest schoolbooks with doodles of the German invaders. Except for a few drawing lessons which he would later take at Ecole Saint-Luc, he never had any formal training in the visual arts.

In 1920, he began studying in the "college Saint-Boniface", a secondary school where the teachers were catholic priests. Georges joined the Boy Scouts troop of the school, where he was given the totemic name "Renard curieux" (Curious fox). His first drawings were published in Jamais assez, the school's Scout paper, and, from 1923, in Le Boy-Scout Belge, the Scout monthly magazine. From 1924, he signs his illustrations using the pseudonym "Herge".

His subsequent comics work would be heavily influenced by the ethics of the scouting movement, as well as the early travel experiences he made with the scout association.

On finishing school in 1925, Georges worked at the Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siecle. The following year, he published his first cartoon series, The Adventures of Flup, Nenesse, Poussette, and Cochonnet, a strip written by a member of the newspaper's sports staff, but soon became dissatisfied with this series. He decided to create a comic strip of his own, which would adopt the recent American innovation of using speech balloons to depict words coming out of the characters' mouths.