The Adventures of Tintin ( ) is a series of 24 bande dessinée albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth in 1907, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies, and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film. The series first appeared in French on 10 January 1929, in (The Little Twentieth), a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper (The Twentieth Century). The success of the series led to serialized strips published in Belgium's leading newspaper (The Evening) and spun into a successful Tintin magazine. In 1950, Hergé created Studios Hergé, which produced the canonical versions of 11 Tintin albums. The series is set during a largely realistic 20th century. Its protagonist is Tintin, a courageous young Belgian reporter and adventurer aided by his faithful dog Snowy ( in the original French edition). Other allies include the brash and cynical Captain Haddock, the intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (), incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (), and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore. The series has been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ("clear line") style. Its well-researched plots straddle the action-adventure and mystery genres and draw upon themes of politics, history, culture and technology, offset by moments of slapstick comedy. History Le Vingtième Siècle: 1929–1939 Georges Prosper Remi, best known under the pen name Hergé, was employed as an illustrator at Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century), a staunchly Roman Catholic, conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native Brussels. Run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez, the paper described itself as a "Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information" and disseminated a far-right, fascist viewpoint. Wallez appointed Hergé editor of a new Thursday youth supplement, titled ("The Little Twentieth"). Propagating Wallez's sociopolitical views to its young readership, it contained explicitly pro-fascist and antisemitic sentiment. In addition to editing the supplement, Hergé illustrated (The Extraordinary Adventure of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette and Cochonnet), a comic strip authored by a member of the newspaper's sport staff. Dissatisfied with this, Hergé wanted to write and draw his own cartoon strip. He already had experience creating comic strips. From July 1926, he had written a strip about a Boy Scout patrol leader titled Les Aventures de