When the Belgian cartoonist Hergé begin creating the world of Tintin and his dog Snowy nearly eighty years ago, it was merely a simple supplement to the Brussels based magazine Le Petit Vingtième. Today Tintin and his adventures are nothing short of a cultural phenomena, having survived the test of time to resurface in popularity again and again over the years. Hergé's “ligne claire”, or clear line, style has proven to be one of the most influential styles of drawing used by comics artist today, while his merit as a storyteller has proven just as influential in the works of some of the top writers and filmmakers dominating the industry right now.

Tintin created the market for serialized comic strip collections. His first adventure Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, is one of the most sought after Graphic Novel's of all time, rating high on he lists of rare book collectors across the world. This first volume collected the weekly comic strips of Hergé's work with the newspaper together for the first time. In it the young reporter Tintin fights communism and tyranny as he reports from behind the Iron Curtain. For a children's book the theme's explored in this early collection wouldn't have made it past the editor's desk today, yet Hergé's talent as an artist and storyteller proved perfect for the post-war era of the time.
 

The second volume saw Tintin face-off against gangsters in the African Congo for control of diamond mines. While the subsequent volumes that followed saw the young reporter take on real life American gangster Al Capone, an Egyptian drug trafficking ring, a pair of dangerous antique smugglers, and even the great mysteries of outer space. Critics of Tintin have found the works full of violence and negative racial stereotypes that at the time of the original printings where merely the products of the bourgeois society in which Hergé lived and worked.