It was Tin Tin’s birthday yesterday, 84 years since his first adventure appeared in Le Petit Vingtième (“The Little Twentieth”), the weekly youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (“The Twentieth Century”), on 10 January 1929. 84 years of rising popularity that would have made his father, the born and bred Bruxellois Georges Prosper Remi (22 May 1907 – 3 March 1983), better known by his pen name Hergé, proud-er.

Now I can’t claim I’m a huge fan but such an event cannot go unnoticed in Brussels! Reading about it flashed me back to our last visit to Tin Tin’s pied-à-terre, the Comic Strip Center where two of Belgium’s finest contributions to the world, comic strips and Art Nouveau come together in a beautiful setting; a semi-industrial building dating back to 1906, designed by Victor Horta for Charles Waucquez, a renowned textile wholesaler, who used it as a…