L'Oreille cassée
Georges Remi—best known under the pen name Hergé—was employed as editor and illustrator of (""The Little Twentieth"), a children's supplement to ("The Twentieth Century""), a staunchly Roman Catholic, conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native Brussels which was run by the "Abbé" Norbert Wallez. In 1929, Hergé began "The Adventures of Tintin" comic strip for , revolving around the exploits of fictional Belgian reporter Tintin. Wallez ordered Hergé to set his first adventure in the Soviet Union as anti-socialist propaganda for children ("Tintin in the Land of the Soviets"), to set his second adventure in the Belgian Congo to encourage colonial sentiment ("Tintin in the Congo"), and to set his third adventure in the United States to use the story as a denunciation of American capitalism ("Tintin in America"). Wallez was subsequently removed from the paper's editorship following a scandal, although Hergé was convinced to stay on the condition of a salary increase. In preparing "The Broken Ear", Hergé developed the new habit of keeping plot notes and ideas in a notebook. He also began making cuttings of photographs and other images from magazines and newspapers, filing them away for future use; he used them as a basis for many of the drawings in "The Broken Ear".