The Secret of the Unicorn (The Adventures of Tintin)

The Secret of the Unicorn is the eleventh volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised daily in Le Soir, Belgium’s leading francophone newspaper, from June 1942 to January 1943 amidst the Nazi German occupation of Belgium during World War II.

The Secret of the Unicorn was serialized amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. Hergé had accepted a position working for Le Soir, Belgium’s largest Francophone daily newspaper. Confiscated from its original owners, the German authorities permitted Le Soir to reopen under the directorship of Belgian editor Raymond de Becker, although it remained firmly under Nazi control, supporting the German war effort and espousing anti-Semitism. After joining Le Soir on 15 October 1940, Hergé became editor of its new children’s supplement Le Soir Jeunesse, with assistance by old friend Paul Jamin and cartoonist Jacques Van Melkebeke, before paper shortages forced Tintin to be serialised daily in the main pages of Le Soir. Some Belgians were upset that Hergé was willing to work for a newspaper controlled by the occupying Nazi administration, although he was heavily enticed by the size of Le Soir’s readership, which reached 600,000. Faced with the reality of Nazi oversight, Hergé abandoned the overt political themes that had pervaded much of his earlier work, instead adopting a policy of neutrality. Without the need to satirise political types, entertainment producer and author Harry Thompson observed that “Hergé was now concentrating more on plot and on developing a new style of character comedy. The public reacted positively”.