Tag: Robert Lloyd

Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd is a longtime “Tintin” fan. He has been writing a series of posts on the heritage of the character. This installment explores the bookshelf epic’s many costars and companions. Tintin, the Belgian boy reporter, did not travel alone. From the very beginning to the very end he was accompanied by his dog, Snowy, and as the years went on, he collected other friends and kept them: a bibulous sea captain, a pair of lookalike detectives, a hard-of-hearing inventor, an Italian soprano. Snowy: For his first eight adventures, Tintin’s sole sidekick was the little wire fox terrier (or, as creator Hergé once described him, “approximately” a wire fox terrier) English readers know as Snowy. His French name, Milou, came from the nickname of Hergé’s first girlfriend — or from Belgian motorcycle champion Rene Milhoux, according ...

Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd is a longtime “Tintin” fan and he will be writing a series of posts on the heritage of the character. This installment explores: Who is Hergé? A December 1972 photo in Paris shows Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, aka Hergé. (Getty Images) Hergé is the pen name of Georges Remi, who created, and for 54 years wrote and drew “The Adventures of Tintin.” I will just call him Hergé here. Hergé — Remi’s initials backwards, pronounced in French — was born in Etterbeek, Brussels, Belgium on May 22, 1907; like his hero, he was a city boy with a taste for the outdoors. His first published drawings, after his school paper, were for the monthly Le Boy Scout Belge; he had been a Scout himself, and made his first comic-strip hero — Totor, a ...

Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd is a longtime “Tintin” fan and he will be writing a series of posts on the heritage of the character. This installment explores: Who is Tintin? Tintin is a young Belgian reporter of somewhat indeterminate age, the central figure in Hergé’s world-beloved comic-strip/comic-book series “The Adventures of Tintin.” I say “reporter,” because he is at times described as one, but apart from asking a lot of questions he is almost never shown at work. (Indeed, in the stories he is more reported upon than reporting.) Nevertheless, the notion of the job gives the character a reason to travel and frames a life of investigation and adventure; it also made him, for a while, a figure both in and of the newspaper that first published “Tintin,” Belgium’s Le Vingtième Siècle, in its children’s supplement, ...

Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd is a longtime “Tintin” fan and he will be writing a series of posts on the heritage of the character. This post has been corrected, as detailed below. Tintin is a comic-strip/comic-book character — a young Belgian reporter, nominally, but a reporter who has rarely done any reporting — and by extension the name for all the characters and things that fall within his world, as laid out in the 23 books (and an incomplete 24th, eventually published in sketchbook form) that comprise “The Adventures of Tintin.” Unlike Superman or Mickey Mouse, who have outlived their creators to be re-imagined to whatever purpose the current age or copyright-holder demands, Tintin’s adventures, which began in 1929 with “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,” came to a close with the 1983 death of the man who invented ...

Times television critic Robert Lloyd checks in on tonight’s return of the Doctor. The Doctor is (back) in. The second season of the adventures of the 11th  Doctor — which is also, officially, the sixth series of the post-16-year-TV-hiatus 21st-century “Doctor Who,” if you don’t count a year of “specials” — begins Saturday on BBC America, with an emphasis on the “America.” It has been a while — whatever “a while” means in the curlicue chronologies of this time-twisting show — since the Doctor (Matt Smith) has run with recent and future traveling companions Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill), now newlyweds. But they have been getting messages from him out of the deep past: the Doctor naked in a Baroque painting, cavorting in a fez in a Laurel and Hardy film. And then comes an actual invitation (in a “Tardis ...