The Broken Ear

The Broken Ear (L'Oreille cassée)
Cover of the English edition
Date	1937 (black and white) 1943 (colour)
Series	The Adventures of Tintin
Publisher	Casterman
Creative team
Creator	Hergé
Original publication
Published in	Le Petit Vingtième
Date of publication	5 December 1935 – 25 February 1937
Language	French
Translation
Publisher	Methuen
Date	1975
Translator	Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper Michael Turner
Chronology
Preceded by	The Blue Lotus (1936)
Followed by	The Black Island (1938)

The Broken Ear (French: L'Oreille cassée), also published as Tintin and the Broken Ear, is the sixth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children's supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from December 1935 to February 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who pursue the thieves of a South American fetish identifiable by its broken ear. In doing so, he ends up in the fictional nation of San Theodoros, where he becomes embroiled in a civil war and discovers the Arumbaya tribe deep in the forest.

The Broken Ear was a commercial success and was published in book form shortly after its conclusion. Hergé continued The Adventures of Tintin with The Black Island, while the series itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition. In 1943, The Broken Ear was coloured and reformatted for republication by Casterman. The Broken Ear introduces the recurring character General Alcazar, and was the first to include fictional countries. The story was adapted for both the 1956 Belvision animation, Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, and for the 1991 Ellipse/Nelvana animated series The Adventures of Tintin.