The two men were extremely close, born in the same year, and their birth centennials will be celebrated next year by Tintin fans. Remi was born on May 22, 1907 and Tchang on September 15, 1907.

The stories were first in black and white but in 1942, Remi reorganized them and added color. He worked until his death in 1983, leaving an unfinished work, "Tintin and Alph-Art."

As part of the global centennial celebrations, Benoit Peeters, a Belgian specialist on Remi, visited Beijing and Shanghai to share the stores behind Tintin's China adventures.

Comic lover Zhou Tao, 25, still clearly remembers most of the plots and the characters.

"It is the book I most wanted in my childhood," he says. "Every a couple of months, a new story came out and my father would go to the bookstore and buy it for me. I still keep the whole collection to this day."

Peeters says each time he reads Tintin he learns something different. "I appreciate more and more the intelligence of his (Remi's) accounts, the audacity of his ellipses and the skill of his cuttings."

Remi never wanted his work to be continued by others after his death, says Peeters, adding Tintin was the work of a painter and a novelist.

Steven Spielberg has been adapting Tintin's adventures to the screen; the film is expected to be completed in 2009, according to Peters.

Remi's friendship with Tchang was critical in the development of the adventure series, says Peeters.

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