Tintin.

Although I only came across Tintin late in life through my kids, I quickly became a fan. (Also of Asterisk, but that’s another author and another story.) May 22 would have been the 100th Birthday of one Georges Remi of Brussels. Georges is better known as Herge (pronounced air- zhay), the creator of the cartoon character Tintin, which has been translated into over 50 languages.

He first started producing Tintin in 1929 in a weekly paper, and eventually these Comic stories were collected and turned into hard bound Books, which continue to sell all around the world in over 50 languages.

Initially Tintin was Georges Remi and the character reflected Georges life, loves and experiences as he had lived it or wished he could live it, but eventually the character Tintin took on a life and a persona of its own in the public domain. One that Herge struggled with. He is recorded as writing to his first wife of his feelings of being hemmed in by his creation.

He wrote,” I have just discovered that I know that Tintin is no longer me, that if he is to go on living, it will be by an artificial respiration that I will have to practice constantly and which exhausts me more and more.”

What about you? Have you created something or started on something, that has now completely taken over your life and created one of its own? One that you now have to live up to, but like Herge, resent!

Will you like Herge, go with the money and fame and put up with it or will you say enough is enough and it is now time to move on, (or even to go back) to something that again fulfils you? I have come to the conclusion that my current job is no longer fulfilling and it is time to go back to something that is. What about You? Walter