Corentin is a series of comics

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 created by Belgian artist Paul Cuvelier

Paul Cuvelier

Paul Cuvelier was a Belgian comics artist best known for the comic series Corentin, published by Le Lombard, which first appeared in the first issue of Tintin.-Biography:...

 (1923-1978). Influenced by Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...

, Cuvelier created the character of Corentin Feldoë in 1943. The character first appeared in a series of watercolors that Cuvelier made for his own family. Hergé

Hergé

Georges Prosper Remi , better known by the pen name Hergé, was a Belgian comics writer and artist. His best known and most substantial work is the 23 completed comic books in The Adventures of Tintin series, which he wrote and illustrated from 1929 until his death in 1983, although he was also...

, convinced of the merit of these watercolors, commissioned Cuvelier to do a series of comic strips. Thus, Corentin first made its appearance in the periodical Tintin

Tintin (magazine)

Le journal de Tintin or Kuifje , was a weekly Belgian comics magazine of the second half of the 20th century...

, on September 26, 1946.

Story

At the end of the 18th century, Corentin Feldoë, an orphan

Orphan

An orphan is a child permanently bereaved of or abandoned by his or her parents. In common usage, only a child who has lost both parents is called an orphan...

 of Breton

Breton people

The Bretons are an ethnic group located in the region of Brittany in France. They trace much of their heritage to groups of Brythonic speakers who emigrated from southwestern Great Britain in waves from the 3rd to 6th century into the Armorican peninsula, subsequently named Brittany after them.The...

 origin, decides to flee the house of his uncle, an inveterate drunkard who has been abusing him. Corentin runs off to sea, only to be shipwreck

Shipwreck

A shipwreck is what remains of a ship that has wrecked, either sunk or beached. Whatever the cause, a sunken ship or a wrecked ship is a physical example of the event: this explains why the two concepts are often overlapping in English....

ed onto a desert island

Desert island

A desert island or uninhabited island is an island that has yet to be populated by humans. Uninhabited islands are often used in movies or stories about shipwrecked people, and are also used as stereotypes for the idea of "paradise". Some uninhabited islands are protected as nature reserves and...

. Corentin befriends a gorilla

Gorilla

Gorillas are the largest extant species of primates. They are ground-dwelling, predominantly herbivorous apes that inhabit the forests of central Africa. Gorillas are divided into two species and either four or five subspecies...

 named Belzébuth and a tiger

Tiger

The tiger is the largest cat species, reaching a total body length of up to and weighing up to . Their most recognizable feature is a pattern of dark vertical stripes on reddish-orange fur with lighter underparts...

 named Moloch, and subsequently befriends Kim, an India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n boy, and Sa-Skya, a beautiful princess.

Western-themed story

Seeing the need for a Western-themed comic in Tintin, editor Raymond Leblanc asked Cuvelier to shift the focus of Corentin in 1949. Cuvelier situated his new adventures in the Wild West but made their hero a grandson of the original Corentin.