The Adventures of Tintin following the adventures of a strong protagonist. Tintin's iconic representation enhances this aspect, with Scott McCloud noting that it "allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world." Snowy ("Milou" in Hergé's original version), a white Wire Fox Terrier dog, is Tintin's loyal, four-legged companion. The bond between Snowy and Tintin is very deep, as they have saved each other from perilous situations many times. Snowy frequently "speaks" to the reader through his thoughts (often displaying a dry sense of humour), which are not heard by the human characters in the story. Snowy has
The Adventures of Tintin of heart: it is packed with close textual analysis and laden with psychological jargon." Following Apostolidès's work, French psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron examined the series in his books "Tintin et les Secrets de Famille" ("Tintin and the Family Secrets"), which was published in 1990, and "Tintin et le Secret d'Hergé" ("Tintin and Hergé's Secret"), published in 1993. The first English-language work of literary criticism devoted to the series was "Tintin and the Secret of Literature", written by the novelist Tom McCarthy and published in 2006. McCarthy compares Hergé's work with that of Aeschylus, Honoré de Balzac, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James