The Adventures of Tintin Trivia
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70 free The Adventures of Tintin trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tintin has been travelling since 10 January 1929, when a Brussels Catholic newspaper's youth supplement packed him off to the Soviet Union, and this quiz follows him all the way to the Moon and back. It covers Hergé (why he is called that, the Scout strip that came before Tintin, the Chinese friend who taught him to research, the wartime job at Le Soir, the studio on Avenue Louise) and the whole cast: Snowy and his French name, Captain Haddock's first name and finest curse, the sunflower professor, the two detectives you tell apart by their moustaches, and the diva who cannot get Haddock's name right. There are questions on the albums themselves, from the crude black-and-white debut and the notorious Congo book to King Ottokar's Sceptre, The Blue Lotus, the Moon diptych, the magpie in The Castafiore Emerald and the unfinished Alph-Art, plus the fictional countries, the real satire behind them, and the adaptations: the Nelvana cartoon, the Spielberg film and a British bookshop chain named after a king. Easy questions suit anyone who read the albums as a child; the expert tier asks which page the quiff went up. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the series, its creator, characters and individual albums, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which style of trousers was Tintin's trademark through almost all of his adventures?
Plus fours
Plus fours, the baggy golfing trousers, lasted until the 1970s, when Hergé put him in brown flared jeans and many readers complained.
Q 02What is the real name of Hergé, the creator of Tintin?
Georges Remi
Georges Remi signed his early drawings with his initials reversed, R.G., which spoken aloud in French sounds like 'Hergé'.
Q 03Why was Tintin's unfinished final adventure never completed after Hergé died?
His own wish
His own wish: Hergé had said Tintin should end with him, so when his assistant Bob de Moor offered to finish the story his widow finally said no, and it came out as rough sketches.
Q 04What is Tintin's job?
Reporter
Reporter is his job title, yet across the whole series he is shown writing up a story for his paper just once.
Q 05What is Snowy's name in the original French editions?
Milou
Milou was the pet name of Hergé's first girlfriend, Marie-Louise Van Cutsem, and he borrowed it for the dog.
Q 06What breed of dog is Snowy?
Wire Fox Terrier
Wire Fox Terrier. The breed normally has coloured patches on its white coat, but Hergé drew Snowy without a single marking.
Q 07Tintin first appeared in which weekly children's supplement to a Brussels newspaper?
Le Petit Vingtième
Le Petit Vingtième, which Hergé himself edited, marked the end of that first story by staging Tintin's homecoming at a Brussels station with an actor and a dog, and crowds of fans turned up.
Q 08Hergé's editor, a priest, ordered him to set Tintin's very first adventure in which country?
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was the choice of Abbé Norbert Wallez, who ran the paper and wanted a strip that would warn its young readers about communism.
Q 09Which is the only completed Tintin adventure that Hergé never redrew in colour?
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets struck Hergé as too crude to rework, and he kept it out of print for some 40 years, relenting only to undercut pirate editions.
Q 10Which Boy Scout patrol leader, the hero of Hergé's first comic strip, became the prototype for Tintin?
Totor
Totor sailed to America and outwitted gangsters in a Scout magazine strip from 1926, and Hergé later described Tintin as Totor's little brother.
Q 11The French name for Hergé's influential drawing style translates as what?
Clear line
Clear line, or ligne claire, only got its name in the 1970s, when Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte coined it for the style Hergé had used for decades.
Q 12Captain Haddock's country house, Marlinspike Hall, is modelled on which real French stately home?
Château de Cheverny
Château de Cheverny lost its two outer wings in Hergé's drawing because he found the full building too grand for Haddock; since 2001 the real château has housed a permanent Tintin exhibition.
Q 13In which album is Captain Haddock introduced?
The Crab with the Golden Claws
Q 21Bianca Castafiore's party piece is the Jewel Song from which opera?
Gounod's Faust
Gounod's Faust supplies her Jewel Song, in which the heroine tries on a casket of jewels and is dazzled by her own reflection: a pointed choice for the vainest character in the series.
Q 22From the 1950s, Hergé remodelled Bianca Castafiore on which real opera diva?
Maria Callas
Maria Callas filled the magazines Hergé read in the 1950s; an earlier model was his aunt Ninie, whose shrill singing to the piano in his childhood home did nothing to win him over to opera.
Q 23In which album does Bianca Castafiore make her first appearance?
King Ottokar's Sceptre
The Crab with the Golden Claws introduces him as a drunken wreck held captive by his own first mate, whose gang hides opium in crab tins; Tintin sobers him up and gains a friend for life.
Q 14What is Captain Haddock's first name?
Archibald
Archibald stayed a secret for some 35 years: readers met the Captain in 1941 and only learned his first name in the 1970s.
Q 15Which word completes Captain Haddock's famous curse, 'Billions of blue blistering...'?
barnacles
Barnacles! Real swearing could never run in a children's paper, so Hergé armed Haddock with harmless words to bellow like the foulest insults, hunting more out of the dictionary.
Q 16Professor Calculus's French name, Tournesol, is the French word for which flower?
Sunflower
Sunflower. In the story that introduces him, the deaf professor sells the patent on his one-man submarine and uses the money to buy Marlinspike Hall for Haddock.
Q 17Professor Calculus was partly based on which real Swiss physicist?
Auguste Piccard
Auguste Piccard, a lanky balloonist, taught in Brussels, where Hergé used to see him in the street; he said he drew Calculus as a 'mini-Piccard' because the real man was too tall for the panels.
Q 18How can you tell Thomson and Thompson apart?
By the shape of their moustaches
By the shape of their moustaches: Thomson's twirls out at the ends, Thompson's is trimmed straight. Abroad the pair dress in what they take for local costume to blend in, and stand out more than ever.
Q 19Which identical twins in Hergé's family partly inspired Thomson and Thompson?
His father and uncle
His father and uncle, Alexis and Léon, went out walking in matching bowler hats with matching canes, and plain-clothes policemen of the day really did dress in black suits and bowlers.
Q 20What are Thomson and Thompson called in the original French?
Dupont et Dupond
Dupont et Dupond got those names late: in their first album appearance the pair were known only as agents X33 and X33A.
King Ottokar's Sceptre has her give Tintin a lift and burst into song in the car; he is grateful that the windows are unbreakable and slips away at the first chance.
Q 24Which real event did Hergé satirise in a Tintin story about a plot to seize a Balkan kingdom?
Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria
Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria came in March 1938, and that August Hergé began what he later called 'the tale of a failed Anschluss', in which Tintin foils the takeover.
Q 25The name of Müsstler, a fascist plotter Tintin foils in the Balkans, blends the names of which two dictators?
Mussolini and Hitler
Mussolini and Hitler: Hergé later said the name plainly alluded to both, and he dressed the story's Bordurian officers in uniforms modelled on the Nazis'.
Q 26The Syldavian language in the Tintin albums is really a Slavic-looking transcription of what?
Marols, a Brussels dialect
Marols, a Brussels dialect mixing Dutch and French, was dressed up with Slavic-looking endings, so that 'police' in Syldavian becomes 'politzski'.
Q 27Which young friend of Tintin was modelled on a real art student who became Hergé's close friend?
Chang
Chang was modelled on Zhang Chongren, a Chinese sculpture student who taught Hergé about his country in 1934; the two then lost touch for nearly half a century before a reunion in Brussels in 1981.
Q 28Which Tintin album, set against Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria, was the first Hergé researched in depth?
The Blue Lotus
The Blue Lotus was pointed enough that Japanese diplomats in Brussels lodged an official protest and threatened to take Hergé's children's comic to the international court at The Hague.
Q 29Who is the long-suffering butler at Captain Haddock's home, Marlinspike Hall?
Nestor
Nestor first appears loyally serving the villains who own the house; Haddock speaks up for him when he is arrested with them, and the butler stays on when the Captain moves in.
Q 30Which Brussels newspaper serialised Tintin during the German occupation of Belgium?
Le Soir
Le Soir had been seized from its owners and ran under Nazi control, earning the name 'the stolen Soir'; after the liberation Hergé was arrested as a collaborator but never convicted.