Hergé considered it his favourite Tintin adventure and an emotional effort, as he created it while suffering from traumatic nightmares and a personal conflict while deciding to leave his wife of three decades for a younger woman.

The story tells of the young reporter Tintin in search of his friend Chang Chong-Chen, who the authorities claim has died in a plane crash in the Himalayas.

Convinced that Chang has survived and accompanied only by Snowy, Captain Haddock and the Sherpa guide Tharkey, Tintin crosses the Himalayas to the plateau of Tibet, along the way encountering the mysterious Yeti.

The story was a commercial success and was published in book form by Casterman shortly after its conclusion; the series itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition.

While on holiday at a resort in the French Alps with Snowy and Captain Haddock, Tintin reads about a plane crash in the Gosain Than Massif in the Himalayas of Tibet.

[1] The porters abandon the group in fear when mysterious tracks are found, while Tintin, Haddock and Tharkey go on and eventually reach the crash site.

They try to camp for the night but lose their tent and must trek onwards, unable to sleep lest they freeze, arriving within sight of the Buddhist monastery of Khor-Biyong before being caught in an avalanche.

[4] In October 1957, Hergé sent his publisher, Casterman, the cover of his completed nineteenth Tintin adventure, The Red Sea Sharks, and for several weeks considered plot ideas for his next story.

[6] Another idea had Tintin striving to prove that Haddock's butler Nestor was framed for a crime committed by his old employers, the Bird brothers.

In 1956, he realised that he had fallen out of love with his wife Germaine, whom he had married in 1932, and by 1958, he and Fanny Vlaminck, a colourist at Studios Hergé twenty-eight years his junior, had developed a deep mutual attraction.

[22]At the advice of his former editor Raymond de Becker, Hergé travelled to Zürich to consult the Swiss psychoanalyst Franz Riklin, a student of Carl Jung, to decipher his disturbing dreams.

"[26] Although Hergé was tempted to abandon Tintin at Riklin's suggestion, devoting himself instead to his hobby of abstract art, he felt that doing so would be an acceptance of failure.

[27] In the end, he left his wife so that he could marry Fanny Vlaminck, and continued work on Tintin in Tibet,[28] trusting that completing the book would exorcise the demons he felt possessed him.

[9] Thompson noted: "It was ironic, but not perhaps unpredictable, that faced with the moral dilemma posed by Riklin, Hergé chose to keep his Scout's word of honour to Tintin, but not to Germaine".

[33] The idea of a solo voyage led to Tintin being accompanied only by Snowy, their guide, and a reluctant Haddock—who supplies the needed counterpoint and humour.

[34] While considering the character of Chang, absent since The Blue Lotus,[9] Hergé thought of his artistic Chinese friend Zhang Chongren,[35] whom he had not seen since the days of their friendship over twenty years earlier.

[42] Models for drawings such as of monks with musical instruments, Sherpas with backpacks, and the aircraft wreckage came from clippings Hergé had collected from sources such as National Geographic.

[43] Members of the Studios helped him gather other source material; for instance, collaborator Jacques Martin researched and drew the story's costumes.

[44] To learn about the Yeti, which he depicted as a benevolent creature, Hergé contacted his friend Bernard Heuvelmans, the author of On the Trail of Unknown Animals.

[45] Hergé interviewed mountaineers, including Herzog, who had spotted the tracks of what he believed was an enormous biped that stopped at the foot of a rock face on Annapurna.

[47] Another influence came from Fanny Vlaminck, who was interested in extrasensory perception and the mysticism of Tibetan Buddhism, prominent themes in the story[48] that also fascinated Hergé.

A representative of Air India complained to Hergé about the adverse publicity the airline might suffer, arguing: "It's scandalous, none of our aircraft has ever crashed; you have done us a considerable wrong".

[54] Jacques van Melkebeke suggested that the Yeti not be depicted to create a sense of enigma; Hergé disagreed, believing that it would disappoint his child readers.

[55] Casterman deemed it too abstract, so Hergé added a mountain range at the top; biographer Benoît Peeters expressed that in doing so, the image was deprived of some of its "strength and originality".

[56] In March 1959, Tibet's foremost political and spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled the region into self-imposed exile in India during the 1959 Tibetan uprising.

Farr calls it "exceptional in many respects, standing out among the twenty-three completed Tintin adventures ... an assertion of the incorruptible value of bonds of friendship".

Apostolidès notes that the character displays worry and emotion not present previously, something he suggested showed Tintin sorting out the problems that he faced in life.

[j] McCarthy suggested the "icy, white expanses of Hergé's nightmares [may] really have their analogue in his own hero", especially as "Tintin represents an unattainable goal of goodness, cleanness, authenticity".

[72] Referring to its "stripped-bare story and archetypal clarity",[73] Benoît Peeters believes Tintin in Tibet to be one of the two "pivotal" books in the series, alongside The Blue Lotus, and deems it poignant that Chang features in both.