Faces & TracesHerge (Son of Tintin) [Archives:2007/1064/Culture]
July 2 2007
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Faces & Traces is a cultural series of concise biographies of local or international famous and obscure personalities in fields such as literature, arts, culture and religion in which these individuals contribute affirmatively. It is a short journey in contemporary history, attempting to tackle numerous effective characters in human civilization.
Remi, Georges (1907-1983), alias Herge – his initials reversed and pronounced as in French- was a Belgian comics writer, illustrator and artist. Herge was born in Brussels, Belgium to middle class parents. Most of his early cartoons came from the time he spent traveling round Europe with the Belgian boy-scouts. His first serious drawings appear in Jamais Assez, his school scouting magazine, and starting in 1923 in the monthly magazine of the Belgian Boy Scout. In the magazine Le Boy-Scout he published his first proper series, Totor, Patrol leader of the Hannetons. Herge completed his secondary studies at Saint Boniface School, an archiepiscopal school in Brussels. After his graduation in 1925, Herge joined the subscription department of the daily newspaper Le XX-e Sci'cle (The Twentieth Century) and was asked to produce a supplement for children that would come out weekly on Thursdays in Le Petit XXe. 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 character's mouth.
Herge is often considered to be the most influential European comic artist ever with his \”clear line\”” style which was copied by many artists. He was a highly gifted illustrator with a vivid
