page_title: The Adventures of Totor
section_title: Critical analysis
hierarchical_section_title: The Adventures of Totor / Critical analysis
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: L'auteur Benoît Peeters au Salon du livre de Paris lors du débat Le droit d'auteur a-t-il encore un avenir&#160;? English: The author Benoît Peeters at the Paris Book Fair, during the debate Does copyright have a future?
context_page_description: The Adventures of Totor, Chief Scout of the Cockshafers is the first comic strip series by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, who later came to notability as the author of The Adventures of Tintin series. It was serialised monthly from July 1926 to summer 1929 in Belgian scouting magazine Le Boy Scout Belge, with a nine month break in 1927. The plot synopsis revolved around the eponymous Totor, a Belgian boy scout who travels to visit his aunt and uncle in Texas, United States. Once there, he comes across hostile Native American tribes and gangsters, each of whom he outwits, before returning to Belgium.
  Like the Bécassine comics, which were common in Western Europe at the time, the series is a text comic, consisting of pictures with separate captions, although Hergé had begun to experiment with the use of speech bubbles throughout, something influenced by American comics. In 1929, Hergé created the character of Tintin for the new story, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which would be largely based on Totor. Literary critics have expressed mixed views on the narrative and artwork.
context_section_description: Tintinologist Harry Thompson described Totor as "a brave, resourceful young character", noting that in several years he would "metamorphose" into Tintin. He nevertheless thought that the text was "slightly rambling and uninspired."
  Hergé biographer Pierre Assouline described the Totor story as being "very Boy Scout in spirit and clearly a prefiguration of Tintin." He nevertheless had mixed views of the illustrations, commenting that the lines were "awkward, hesitant, incomplete, but the movement, rhythm, and above all, the humor is apparent." Another biographer, Benoît Peeters, thought that the intrigue of the series was "extremely fragmented" because the main goal was to string gags and fight scenes together rather than to develop a plot. He commented that although by the early 21st century it appeared "puerile", being "a long way" from the formula of The Adventures of Tintin, it was nevertheless "an important step toward the modern comic strip".
  Tintinologist Phillipe Goddin considered the series to be "a milestone", describing it as "full of promise" and containing "plety  [sic] of humour, rich in developments". The Tintinologists Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier commented that "Everything that made Tintin what it later became was seminally present in Totor", including the artistic style, the pace of the story, the use of humour, and the manner in which it imitated motion pictures. They also commented that Totor read like "an adult was retelling one of those early American western serials... to a group of children. On the one hand he is exciting the children, but on the other he is winking at the adults as if to say, "you and I know this is not serious.""
caption: Hergé biographer Benoît Peeters considered The Adventures of Totor "an important step toward the modern comic strip".[11]
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