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 (character) and has prompted a few to devote their careers to his study. General Charles de Gaulle "considered Tintin his only international rival". Hergé biographer Pierre Assouline noted that "Tintin had a prehistory", being influenced by a variety of sources that Hergé had encountered throughout his life. Hergé noted that during his early schooling in the midst of World War I, when German armies occupied Belgium, he had drawn pictures in the margins of his school workbooks of an unnamed young man battling (a slang term for the Germans). He later commented that these drawings depicted a brave and adventurous character