Smash hit

But if Tintin’s anti-fascist credentials remained impeccable, his creator acquired a more dubious reputation as a Nazi collaborator. Michael Farr, in Tintin: The Complete Companion, argues that this is unfair. As a patriot, Hergé was simply answering his king’s wartime call for Belgians to work for the national good. Hergé’s obsession was to continue Tintin, so when his old paper shut down during the occupation he worked for the Nazi-controlled Le Soir.

Hergé’s response to the war was to move his hero into more escapist, nautical yarns such as The Crab with the Golden Claws and The Secret of the Unicorn. However, he was imprisoned as a collaborator after liberation and refused a work permit for two years.

His career was rescued by the Resistance hero-turned-publisher Raymond Leblanc, but there was a price: a punishing contract which led Hergé to declare: “I’ve fallen out of love with Tintin — I just can’t bear to see him.”

By the time of his nervous collapse in the 1950s, Hergé had tried to make amends for sins past with more pro-European and American strips. He also found solace in oriental philosophy in Tintin in Tibet.

Tintin went on to hold great sway in the world. Hergé’s crisp lines influenced pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein. Andy Warhol said Hergé had influenced him as much as Walt Disney; his portrait of Tintin’s creator can be seen in Greenwich. Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films echo such tales as Prisoners of the Sun and Cigars of the Pharaoh.

As time went on, Hergé struggled to come up with new ideas, and by the late Seventies had become increasingly ill. Yet he still achieved a personal quest — to track down Chang, an art teacher in Shanghai who disappeared during the Cultural Revolution.

Hergé and Chang were finally reunited in Brussels in 1981. The event caused uproar in Belgium and France (which has adopted Tintin, much to the Belgians’ annoyance) for here was a character, saved as a boy by Tintin in The Blue Lotus, who had grown old.

People don’t age in Tintin’s world. He’s for ever the prepubescent youth performing a man’s deeds, a personality so devoid of attributes other than courage, resourcefulness and optimism that any wishful-thinking reader can project his own faultier self on to him.

Hergé saw no reason to grow up: recalling the Red Indian games he played when he joined one of Baden-Powell’s troops in 1919, he said: “I never ceased to be a Boy Scout.”

Before his death in 1983, he admitted: “In Tintin, I had put my whole life.”

• The Adventures of Tintin at Sea opens on Wednesday at the National Maritime Museum (020-8858 4422)

CHARACTER BUILDING

TINTIN
Known as Kuifje in Dutch, Tim in German, Ten Ten in Greek, Ding-Ding in Chinese. In his whole reporting career, he filed only one story.

SNOWY
Called Milou in French, after a girl Hergé had fancied at school.

CAPTAIN HADDOCK
Has more than 220 unusual epithets, including “Sea-gherkins!” and “Bashi-bazouks!”. Hergé discovered an Admiral Sir Richard Haddock who was a contemporary of Sir Francis Drake.

BIANCA CASTAFIORE
The opera diva was a cross between Maria Callas and Hergé’s Aunt Ninie.