From the Fact Files
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| Format | Comic one-shots | |
| Reprint of | Le Journal de Tintin | |
| First TFUK appearance | Issue 15 | |
| Final TFUK appearance | Issue 21 | |
IT REALLY HAPPENED! A TALE FROM THE TRANSFORMERS FACT FILES...
History
OK, so: Georges Remi, better known by his pen name Hergé, was a cartoonist and illustrator from Belgium. In 1925, he found employment at Le Vingtième Siècle, a Catholic, conservative, and, frankly, fashie newspaper. By 1928, he had risen up from a file clerk to become editor-in-chief of an eight-page, weekly youth supplement called Le Petit Vingtième, and in 1929, he was writing and illustrating a comic strip serial for the publication: the first instalment of what would become known as The Adventures of Tintin. Hergé's strip continued until 1940, when the Nazi occupation of Belgium forced Le Vingtième Siècle to close. That same year, Hergé was hired as an illustrator for Belgium's leading newspaper Le Soir, where he eventually found an outlet for more Tintin strips. World War II also brought that era of Tintin to a close, as the paper's German overseers fled when the Allies entered Brussels in September 1944.
For his work on Le Soir during the occupation, Hergé was seen as a Nazi collaborator, and was left without a publisher until 1946, when he was approached by fledgling publishing company Le Lombard, the founders of which sought Tintin to be a headliner character. This gave birth to Le Journal de Tintin, an anthology comic uniting various Frano-Belgian comic creators. The book was published simultaneously in both Belgium and France featuring the same contents, though each publication utilised a different issue numbering scheme. A Dutch version, which appeared to feature different interior material, was published under the title Kuifje, the localisation of Tintin's name.
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...and then four stories that originated in Le Journal de Tintin (and Kuifje) appeared in The Transformers, translated and re-lettered into English by uncredited parties. Each story seemed to be cherry-picked for retelling an historical event, with a particular focus on derring-do. The slapdash nature of these reprints was evident in the feature's inconsistent titling, with various issues referring to "From the Transformers Fact Files", "From Our Transformers Fact Files", "A Tale from the Transformers Fact Files", and simply "From the Fact Files" – and often with two of those names in the same issue!
The Transformers UK Appendix has chosen to represent these stories using From the Fact Files as an umbrella title, both due to its succinctness and the fact that it uses the only words that are consistent across all four title options.
