Tintin made his Belgian creator 'sick', reveal letters

London, Nov 22 : Tintin might have made his creator famous all over the world, but Herge confessed in his previously written letters that the comic character and his dog Snowy made him "sick".

The starling confession was a part around 300 hundred letters written by the Belgian author which were auctioned on November 22 in Paris.

"I'm so tired," he wrote in 1947, shortly after the war - Herge's career was tainted with links to Nazism, as he continued to publish his cartoons during the war in a Belgian newspaper used for collaborationist propaganda.

"There is a complete divorce between what I think and what I invent and draw," he wrote.

"And right now, my work makes me sick," he tells his wife.

"Tintin is no longer me. And I must make a terrible effort to invent (him)... If Tintin continues to live, it is through a sort of artificial respiration that I must constantly keep up and which is exhausting me," he added.

These letters provide an insight into Herge's private thoughts, including love for his first wife and a guilty admission of adultery, reports the Telegraph.

The letters were sold for 112,000 euros- around ten times the amount estimated- to the Jean-Claude Vrain book shop in the French capital.

They include a postcard to his parents from a boy scout's camp in 1921 - when he was just 14, while the others showed the highs and lows of Herge's creative and love life until the early 1950s.

The letters were kept by Herge's nephew, Georges Remi Jr and showed the boyish enthusiasm he shared with his famous cartoon reporter turned at times to ennui and doubt.

ANI