The Broken Ear is the sixth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children's supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from December 1935 to February 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, as he searches for a stolen South American fetish, identifiable by its broken right ear, and deals with other thieves who are after it. In doing so, he ends up in the fictional nation of San Theodoros, where he becomes embroiled in a war and discovers the Arumbaya tribe deep in the forest.
Cover of the English edition
Paraguayan troops in Alihuatá, 1932, during the Chaco War
A scene from The Broken Ear on the cover of Le Petit Vingtième
The Chimú statuette from the Cinquantenaire Museum which was copied into the adventure by Hergé.
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of 24 comic albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth in 1907, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies, and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film.
The early Adventures of Tintin naïvely depicted controversial images, which Hergé later described as "a transgression of my youth". In 1975, he substituted this sequence with one in which the rhino accidentally discharges Tintin's rifle.
Tintin and the Black Island at the Arts Theatre in the West End of London, by the Unicorn Theatre Company, in 1980–81
The Tintin Shop in Covent Garden, London
Belgian Post's series of postage stamps "Tintin on screen" issued 30 August 2011 featuring a chronological review of Tintin film adaptations made through years.
