What do a Belgian boy reporter, a forgotten 2008 webpage, and the Wayback Machine have in common? They all played a role in uncovering Tintin the Belgian detective’s earliest adventures as part of Public Domain Day 2025.
Intellectual Property rights lawyer Aaron Moss summarizes that the earliest 1929 Tintin stories became part of the U.S. public domain in 2025, while copyright continues elsewhere. Since Tintin was not published in the English language in 1929, those wanting to utilize the original stories must return to the original French-language publication. But when those sources are nearly 100 years old **and **from a different country, that makes tracking them down difficult. Even the best methods face unforeseen limita…
What do a Belgian boy reporter, a forgotten 2008 webpage, and the Wayback Machine have in common? They all played a role in uncovering Tintin the Belgian detective’s earliest adventures as part of Public Domain Day 2025.
Intellectual Property rights lawyer Aaron Moss summarizes that the earliest 1929 Tintin stories became part of the U.S. public domain in 2025, while copyright continues elsewhere. Since Tintin was not published in the English language in 1929, those wanting to utilize the original stories must return to the original French-language publication. But when those sources are nearly 100 years old **and **from a different country, that makes tracking them down difficult. Even the best methods face unforeseen limitations when materials go out of print, become costly, or when websites go offline and inaccessible.
Luckily, we live in the 21st-Century with the connective power of the internet. Instead of traveling to Europe and searching in an archive to find original copies of Le Petit Vingtième, the initial children’s periodical that Tintin was published in, we can go online.
Even with the internet’s advantages, trying to find materials from that original 1929 publication proved to be challenging. Most searches for the initial Tintin story, In the Land of the Soviets, led me to republications with story alterations, later translated versions, or subsequent stories from beyond 1929. Yet, as each door kept closing, a window opened when reviewing the Le Petit Vingtième Wikipedia page. Buried in the description of the 1934 cover featured on the page was a link to a webpage from 2008. While the link was still on the page, it had rotted, now leading only to a dead page. Fortunately, we have the Wayback Machine.
The first Tintin comic
When plugging the rotted link into the Wayback Machine, I found an archived fan Tintin site. From that single archived link, my world of Tintin was blown wide open. Utilizing the Calendar feature of the Wayback Machine, I was able to navigate to a 2012 archive of the original 1929 comic strip. There were Tintin and Snowy in their original French appearance, along with the ensuing run of this initial tale. What had been obscure and abstract in its public domain status was now tangible and accessible thanks to the Wayback Machine.
The ability to locate the original Tintin stories in such an accessible way would not be possible without the Wayback Machine. The idea of 1 trillion web pages archived can be overwhelming in the abstract, but stories like this one remind us that the Wayback Machine is a portal to a living archive—enriching knowledge, culture, and access beyond the average lifespan of a link on the live web. The Wayback Machine supports and encourages creativity and reuse, and it feeds our common knowledge and cultural heritage.
This post is published with a CC0 license, dedicating it to the public domain.