The man who drew the most morally upright boy reporter in comics was arrested four times, jailed, and blacklisted as a collaborator at the height of his career. This episode charts Georges Remi, known as Hergé, from a childhood he described as gray in 1907 Brussels, through his escape routes in silent cinema and the Boy Scouts, to his job under Abbé Norbert Wallez, a fascist priest with Mussolini’s photo on his desk who commissioned the first adventures as explicit anti-Soviet, pro-colonial propaganda.

We follow the 1934 turning point when Chinese art student Zhang Chongren taught Hergé calligraphy, Taoist philosophy, and the reality of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, transforming him from propagandist into researcher. Then comes the German occupation, his decision to work for the Nazi-controlled Le Soir and its 600,000 readers, the anti-Semitic villain in the meteorite story, the baker defense, and the post-liberation reckoning. The conversation closes with Raymond Leblanc’s rescue, the founding of Studios Hergé, the 18-month breakdown during the moon story, the recurring white dreams, Jungian analysis, and the 1981 reunion with Zhang before Hergé’s death in 1983.

• How scouting and silent film gave a melancholic child both a moral code and a visual language
• The propaganda origins of the first three adventures under Wallez
• Zhang Chongren’s influence and the shift to meticulous factual research
• Why working for Le Soir during the occupation counts as soft propaganda
• The clear line style as a coping mechanism for a chaotic personal life