page_title: Explorers on the Moon
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Explorers on the Moon / History / Background
context_page_description: Explorers on the Moon is the seventeenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised weekly in Belgium's Tintin magazine from October 1952 to December 1953 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1954. Completing a story arc begun in the preceding volume, Destination Moon, the narrative tells of the young reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy, and friends Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and Thomson and Thompson who are aboard humanity's first manned rocket mission to the Moon.
  Developed in part through the suggestions of Hergé's friends Bernard Heuvelmans and Jacques Van Melkebeke, Explorers on the Moon was produced following Hergé's extensive research into the possibility of human space travel – a feat that had yet to be achieved – with the cartoonist seeking for the work to be as realistic as possible. Hergé continued The Adventures of Tintin with The Calculus Affair, while the series itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition.
context_section_description: Hergé first devised the idea of sending Tintin on a mission to the Moon while he was working on Prisoners of the Sun (1949). His decision to move into the field of science fiction might have been influenced by his friendly rivalry with his colleague Edgar P. Jacobs, who had recently had success with his own science fiction comic, The Secret of the Swordfish (1950–53). He decided that it would be a two-volume story arc, as had proved successful with his earlier arcs, The Secret of the Unicorn (1943) and Red Rackham's Treasure (1944), and The Seven Crystal Balls (1948) and Prisoners of the Sun. He had initially intended on beginning this story after the culmination of Prisoners of the Sun, but both his wife Germaine Remi and his close friend Marcel Dehaye convinced him to proceed with Land of Black Gold (1950), a story that he had previously left unfinished, instead.
  Seeking advice on the story, Hergé consulted his friend Bernard Heuvelmans, who had authored the non-fiction book L'Homme parmi les étoiles ("Man Among the Stars") (1944). In autumn 1947, Heuvelmans and Jacques Van Melkebeke developed a script for the story, which they gave to Hergé. This version based Calculus' lunar expedition in a fictional location, Radio City, in the United States. It featured a return of Professor Decimus Phostle, a character who had previously appeared in The Shooting Star (1942), but this time as an antagonist; Phostle had sold the secrets of the mission in order to attain funds to buy a diamond for the actress Rita Hayworth. In early 1948, Hergé produced two black-and-white pages of this version of the story before abandoning it. Hergé retained some elements of this original script in his finished version, namely the scenes in which Haddock drinks whiskey in a gravity-free environment and that in which Haddock goes for a space walk and nearly becomes a satellite of Adonis, which appear on pages 5 and 8 of Explorers on the Moon. Nevertheless, Heuvelmans thought his influence on the story to be more significant, stating that "In going through the two books we [he and Van Melkebeke] really had the impression that it was what we had originally done at the beginning. In broad outline, that was it."
  Hergé hoped for the story to be as realistic as possible, and sought to eschew fantastical elements. In his own words, it contained "no moonmen, no monsters, no incredible surprises". To ensure this realism, he collected a wide range of documents about rockets and space travel with which to conduct research. In this he was aided by Heuvelmans, who collected pictures of rockets and atomic research facilities for him. Hergé's research archive included an article from the American magazine Collier's which discussed how humanity could reach the Moon, as well as books by Pierre Rousseau and Auguste Piccard. A further work that he used was L'Astronautique (1950), a book on putative space travel by the physicist Alexander Ananoff, with whom Hergé began a correspondence in April 1950. He also visited the Ateliers de Constructions Electriques de Charleroi's Center for Atomic Research, striking up a subsequent correspondence with its director, Max Hoyaux. Hergé incorporated much of this technical information into the story, but juxtaposed it with moments of humour to make it more accessible to his young readership.
  According to literary critics Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier, possible fictional influences on Hergé's story include Jules Verne's 1870 novel Around the Moon and the 1950 American film Destination Moon. Hergé was certainly inspired by a number of photographic stills from the Destination Moon film which had been published. The computer system at the Sprodj space centre was visually based upon the UNIVAC I, the first computer to be created for non-military purposes. Hergé based his Moon rocket on the designs of the V-2 rocket which had been developed by German scientists during World War II. The red-and-white checker pattern on Hergé's rocket was based upon an illustration of a V-2 which Hergé had come upon in Leslie Simon's 1947 book Ge
caption: A German V-2 rocket being tested in 1942. The V-2 would serve as a major inspiration for Hergé in his work on both Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.
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