Tintin (character) 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, creating "The Adventures of Tintin" as a result. Images of Tintin and Snowy first appeared in the youth supplement on 4 January 1929, in an advert for the upcoming series. However, Hergé would later insist that Tintin would only be "born" on 10 January 1929, when "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets" began to be serialised
Tintin in the Congo the final scene. Literary critic Tom McCarthy concurred that Tintin represented the Belgian state, but also suggested that he acted as a Christian missionary, even being "a kind of god" akin to the character of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1899). McCarthy compared the scene where Tintin exposes Muganga as a fraud to that in which the character of Prospero exposes the magician in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest". In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, several campaigners and writers characterised "Tintin in the Congo" as racist due to its portrayal of the Congolese as infantile and stupid.