Tintin made his first appearance in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929–1930) as a journalist reporting on the Bolsheviks of Soviet Russia with his loyal dog Snowy and soon evolved into an investigative reporter and crime-buster whose curiosity draws him into the dangerous circles of drug-traffickers and mercenaries. Tintin seems to be physically quite strong as he sometimes defeats criminals without much difficulty with punches and once easily broke a door in The Secret of the Unicorn
In the comic series, Tintin is explicitly Belgian and living in Brussels. His Belgian nationality plays a strong role in the earlier albums of the series, and in later albums, various streets and locales of Brussels are visible throughout the comic backgrounds (such as in The Secret of the Unicorn and The Red Sea Sharks). Furthermore, in Tintin in Tibet, the address written on Chang‘s letter was "比國布魯塞爾", which means "Brussels, Belgium". However, his nationality is left more vague in the 1991 animated series, as the first two albums were cut from the animated series's story line-up
In The Secret of the Unicorn, Tintin's passport states his birth year as 1929, which was the year of his first appearance in The Land of the Soviets, estimating his age to be 15, while the official Tintin website states his age as between 16–18. The tie-in game for the 2011 Secret of the Unicorn film mentions that Tintin is 17 years old. In earlier adventures, Tintin and Snowy live alone in an apartment. As the series progresses, they eventually move in to one of Captain Haddock's spare rooms at Marlinspike Hall. Throughout the series, Tintin is depicted as a self-motivated independent young man in his late teens
Hergé uses a floating timeline in The Adventures of Tintin so that while the world ages around him, Tintin does not age. In 1970, Herge was quoted as saying, "Tintin to me has not aged. What age would I give him? I don't know...perhaps seventeen? To me, he was about fourteen or fifteen when I created him, a Boy Scout, and he has hardly moved on. Allowing that he has put on three or four years in the past forty...good, let's agree on fifteen plus four, which would make him nineteen pas
