The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin [lez‿avɑ̃tyʁ də tɛ̃tɛ̃]) 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,[1] Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies,[2] and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre and film. The series first appeared in French on 10 January 1929, in Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth), a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century). The success of the series led to serialised strips published in Belgium's leading newspaper Le Soir (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[3] 20th century. Its hero is Tintin, a courageous young Belgian reporter and adventurer aided by his faithful dog Snowy (Milou in the original French edition). Other allies include the brash and cynical Captain Haddock, the intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (French: Professeur Tournesol), incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (French: Dupont et Dupond), and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore. The series has been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ligne claire ("clear line") style.[4] Its well-researched[5] plots straddle the action-adventure and mystery genres and draw upon themes of politics, history and technology, offset by moments of slapstick comedy.