King Ottokar's Sceptre

The Adventures of Tintin (Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of comic strips created by Belgian artist Hergé, the pen name of Georges Remi (1907–1983). The series first appeared in French in Le Petit Vingtième, a children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle on 10 January 1929. Set in a painstakingly researched world closely mirroring our own, Hergé's Tintin series continues to be a favorite of readers and critics alike decades later.

The hero of the series is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided in his adventures from the beginning by his faithful fox terrier Snowy (Milou in French). Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash, cynical, and grumpy Captain Haddock, the bright but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (Professeur Tournesol), and other colorful supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (Dupond et Dupont). Hergé himself appears in several of the comics as a background character, as do his assistants in some instances. The success of the series saw the serialized strips collected into a series of albums (24 in all), spun into a magazine and adapted for film and theatre. The series is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, with translations published in over 50 languages. The comic strip has long been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ligne claire style. Engaging, well-researched plots span a variety of swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories feature slapstick humor, accompanied in later albums by sophisticated satire and political and cultural commentary.