the satirical weekly newspaper (a parallel publication to Le Vingtième Siècle), Hergé included two cartoon gags with word balloons, in which he depicted a boy and a little white dog. Abbe Wallez thought that these characters could be developed further, and asked Hergé to use characters like these for an adventure that could be serialised in . Hergé agreed, and an image of Tintin and Snowy first appeared in the youth supplement on 4 January 1929, in an advert for the upcoming series. Hergé would later insist that Tintin would only be "born" on 10 January 1929, in the first episode of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Hergé admitted that he did not take Tintin seriously in the early Adventures, explaining simply that he "put the character to the test"; that he created Tintin "as a joke between friends, forgotten the next day." Hergé biographer Benoît Peeters noted that Tintin was "supremely Belgian" in his characteristics, a view echoed by Assouline, who deemed all of the protagonists of the early Adventures "very Belgian". Hergé himself commented: "my early works are books by a young Belgian filled with the prejudices and ideas of a Catholic, they are books that could have been written by any Belgian in my situation. They are not very intelligent, I know, and do me no honour: they are 'Belgian' books." Peeters ultimately considers the early Tintin to be "incoherent ... a Sartre-esque character", an "existentialist before the term had been coined", going on to observe that Tintin exists only through his actions, is just a narrative vehicle, having "no surname, no family, hardly anything of a face, and the mere semblance of a career." Characterisation Description The image of Tintin—a round-faced young man running with a white fox terrier by his side—is easily one of the most recognisable visual icons of the twentieth century. Hergé created Tintin as a young, White, blonde Belgian who is a native of Brussels. Assouline deemed Tintin to be middle-class, which he considers one of the few traits that the character had in common with Hergé. In his first appearance, Tintin is dressed in a long travelling coat and hat, a few pages later adopting his plus fours, check suit, black socks, and Eton collar. At first, the famous quiff is plastered to Tintin's forehead, but during a particularly vigorous car chase in what became page 8 of the