Early in 1928, a Danish newspaper ran a competition to mark the centennial of the celebrated author Jules Verne. The winner would re-enact the globe-circling voyage undertaken by Phileas Fogg in Verne's bestselling novel, Around the World in 80 Days. For reasons a 21st-century parent can only wonder at, however, Politiken decided the contest should be open only to teenaged boys, who – if they won – would have to complete the circumnavigation unaccompanied, within 46 days, and without using planes.

Fresh-faced, freckled, with a snub nose, a shock of bright red hair and a penchant for plus-fours, 15-year-old boy scout and car showroom clerk Palle Huld left Copenhagen on March 1 and duly circled the globe – including then-wartorn Manchuria and foreigner-unfriendly Moscow – by train and passenger liner. He returned 44 days later to be greeted by a crowd of 20,000 cheering admirers and his mightily relieved mother, who, according to the Copenhagen Post, "had been prescribed sleeping tablets for the duration".

The following year, an intrepid, globetrotting boy reporter – fresh-faced, freckled, with a snub nose, a shock of bright red hair and a penchant for plus-fours – made his first appearance in a Brussels newspaper called Le Petit Vingtième.

Over the following 50-odd years, Tintin, the creation of a Belgian comic artist called Georges Rémi, better known as Hergé, went on to star in some two-dozen comic books with more than 200 million volumes being sold worldwide.

Meanwhile, Huld, who died last week, went on to a glittering career as a stage and screen actor in Denmark, performing for years with the Danish Royal Theatre and appearing in 40 movies.

But was he the inspiration for Tintin? Huld certainly suggested so. However, some Tintinologists believe their hero was more likely to have been inspired by a French war and travel photojournalist called Robert Sexe – who not only, like Tintin, rode a motorbike, but also had a best friend called René Milhoux (Tintin's dog, Snowy, is called Milou in French) and toured the Soviet Union, the Congo and the US in the same order as Tintin's first three books.

It is not, sadly, a dispute that is ever likely to be solved: Hergé died in 1986, and in any case always claimed that "Tintin, c'est moi".