On this day in 1958 the first weekly instalment of Tintin in Tibet appeared in Tintin magazine, and went on appearing until November 1959 before it was gathered into a book in 1960. Hergé called it his favourite of the twenty-odd albums, and he drew it through a hard stretch of his own life — nightmares, a marriage ending. I only paraphrase; I don't have his words exactly to hand.

What I love is that it is the one adventure with nobody to defeat. No forger, no smuggler, no colonel. Tintin is told his friend Chang died in a plane crash in the Himalayas, refuses to believe it, and walks. That's the whole engine. Snowy, Captain Haddock, Tharkey the Sherpa guide, and a mountain.

The weekly format suits it perfectly. A serial has to end each page with a reason to come back, and here the reason is never a gunshot; it's a footprint, a scarf, a sound above the tent. Pip would approve of the Yeti, who turns out to be the most generous monster in comics. Read as a book it flows; read a page a week, it must have felt like the slowest, kindest suspense in Belgium.