Background Beginning a series of newspaper supplements in late 1928, Abbé
Norbert Wallez founded a supplement for children,
Le Petit Vingtième (
The Little Twentieth), which subsequently appeared in
Le XXe Siècle every Thursday. Carrying strong Catholic and fascist messages, many of its passages were explicitly
antisemitic. For this new venture, Hergé illustrated ''
L'Extraordinaire Aventure de Flup, Nénesse, Poussette et Cochonnet (The Extraordinary Adventure of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette and Cochonnet''), a comic strip authored by one of the paper's sport columnists, which told the story of two boys, one of their little sisters, and her inflatable rubber pig. Hergé was unsatisfied, and eager to write and draw a comic strip of his own. He was fascinated by new techniques in the medium – such as the systematic use of speech bubbles – found in such American comics as
George McManus'
Bringing up Father,
George Herriman's
Krazy Kat and
Rudolph Dirks's
Katzenjammer Kids, copies of which had been sent to him from Mexico by the paper's reporter
Léon Degrelle, stationed there to report on the
Cristero War.
Publication In late 1935 Hergé was visited by Abbot Courtois and Abbot Pihan, the editors of
Cœurs Vaillants ("Valiant Hearts"), a French Catholic newspaper that was publishing
The Adventures of Tintin. Courtois was often unhappy with elements of Hergé's work, and had recently complained about a scene in his latest story,
The Broken Ear, in which the two antagonists drown and are dragged to
Hell by demons. On this occasion, he asked Hergé to create new characters who would be more relateable for their young readership. Whereas Tintin had no parents and did not go to school, they wanted a series in which the protagonists had a family and acted more "normal"; they also requested that these characters have their adventures in France. Hergé did not want to displease the editors, recognising that
Cœurs Vaillants was his only foothold in the French market at the time. He later related that "I happened to have some toys at home just then, for an advertising project I was working on, and among them was a monkey named Jocko. And so I based a new little family around Jocko, really just to please the gentlemen from
Cœurs Vaillants, telling myself they might have the right idea." Taking on
Jo, Zette, & Jocko alongside
The Adventures of Tintin and
Quick & Flupke, Hergé soon found himself overworked, and put the latter series on the back burner. The first
Jo, Zette & Jocko adventure was titled
The Secret Ray, and began serialisation in
Cœurs Vaillants on 19 January 1936. It would continue to appear in the newspaper in installments until June 1937, throughout being printed in red and black. Several months later it also began to appear in the pages of
Le Petit Vingtième. For New Year 1938, Hergé designed a special cover for
Le Petit Vingtième in which the characters of
Jo, Zette and Jocko were featured alongside those from
The Adventures of Tintin and
Quick & Flupke. Hergé was unhappy with the series, commenting that its characters "bored me terribly, these parents who wept all the time as they searched for their children who had gone off in all directions. The characters didn't have the total freedom enjoyed by Tintin... Think of
Jules Renard's phrase 'Not everyone can be an orphan!' How lucky for Tintin; he is an orphan, and so he is free." ==
Le Thermozéro==