Draft:The Adventures of Tintin publication history
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The Adventures of Tintin, a comic book series created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé, has a publication history of 24 albums, including one unfinished adventure. Each story, with the exception of the last, was pre-published in a newspaper before being published as an album. The first adventure in the series, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was launched on January 10, 1929 in Le Petit Vingtième, the weekly youth supplement of the Catholic, nationalist and conservative Belgian daily Le Vingtième Siècle. It was in this same periodical that all stories written before the Second World War were published, until Tintin in the Land of Black Gold was discontinued after the invasion of Belgium in May 1940.
The series resumed the following September in Le Soir, a daily whose circulation was almost twenty times that of Le Petit Vingtième, for the duration of the German occupation of Belgium. After the country's liberation, Hergé was banned from publishing for a time, before finally resuming his activities in a new periodical, Tintin magazine, created by Raymond Leblanc, whose first issue appeared in September 1946. Until his death in 1983, all the cartoonist's stories appeared in this periodical. Le Vingtième Siècle also published the first three adventures in album form, before Hergé signed an exclusive contract with Casterman. Initially in black and white, the albums were printed directly in color from 1942 onwards, entailing a lengthy reworking of the first stories to adapt them to the new standard format of 62 colorized plates.
The various adventures were also published in newspapers and magazines around the world. The series was first published in France in the weekly Cœurs vaillants, then in Switzerland in L'Echo illustré, while the Portuguese newspaper O Papagaio offered Tintin its first translation in 1936. In 1940, Hergé's hero made his debut in Belgium's Dutch-language press, before enjoying wide distribution and international success from the 1950s onwards. This was also the period when the first foreign-language albums were produced, reaching over 100 translations by the 2010s, including many dialects and regional languages.
As the Adventures of Tintin are published in periodicals around the world, they undergo a number of changes, whether for commercial or editorial reasons. The author's original texts and drawings are sometimes adapted without his consent. Likewise, the series' foreign publishers force the author to make numerous alterations, both to correct his work and to comply with censorship.