Across Europe, the aftermath of the Second World War saw elation replaced by frustration as austerity measures continued to bite. For youngsters, in particular, there was little entertainment to be had, something that the Belgian businessman Raymond Leblanc saw as a social challenge and a commercial opportunity. The outcome was the birth of one of the powerhouses of comic-strip publishing, and the establishment internationally of Tintin as a household name.

The character had first appeared in 1929 in a children's supplement (edited by Georges Remi, or “Hergé”) to a Belgian church-run newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle. The weekly cartoon had become an immediate hit locally, with the 16-year-old Leblanc among thousands who turned out in Brussels in 1931 to welcome “home” an actor dressed as Tintin, who had been adventuring in the Congo.

When war came, the newspaper was closed by the occupying Germans, but Hergé accepted an invitation from another, Le Soir, approved of by the Nazis, to publish his work instead. The strips were studiedly apolitical, and Hergé believed that he was doing no more than keeping up his compatriots' morale, but after the Liberation his actions were seen in another light.

Accused of collaboration, Hergé was arrested and forbidden even to ride a bicycle lest he try to flee Belgium, as had acquaintances of his such as Léon Degrelle, the Belgian fascist leader and SS officer, who had also worked for Le Vingtième Siècle.

Leblanc, by contrast, had had a good war in the Resistance, and thus was well placed to lay his hands on that otherwise scarce resource, paper. In 1945 he set up a publishing company, Éditions du Lombard, with two friends and then approached Hergé with the proposal that they produce a weekly magazine featuring Tintin.

Using his influence, he was able to clear Hergé's name, although disaster nearly struck when, without telling Leblanc, the author hired as his assistant another suspected collaborator, Jacques Van Melkebeke. Leblanc was able to get the latter out of the offices only minutes before the police came looking for him, with a warrant to close down the nascent magazine if he was found to be working there.

Nonetheless, the first issue of Tintin was published in September 1946, running to a dozen high-quality pages of which the centre spread was devoted to the young reporter's exploits. Forty thousand copies were printed in French, 20,000 in Dutch (for Flemings); all were sold within days.

In 1948 Leblanc signed a distribution agreement with the Paris publisher Georges Dargaud for a French edition, which was also soon selling strongly. Sales, however, rocketed from 1950, when he added a loyalty scheme to the magazine, allowing readers to exchange “Tintin stamps”, or coupons, for prizes, travel and food.

By the mid-1950s 200 million stamps were in circulation in Belgium annually, and the magazine was selling more than 500,000 copies a week across the Francophone and Dutch-speaking world. This in turn led to far greater sales of the Tintin books, compilations of the weekly strips, which continued to be published, as they had been since the early 1930s, by another firm, Casterman.

Leblanc later established his publishing house in a landmark building in Brussels, complete with a revolving Tintin on the roof, and diversified into other businesses, including advertising and a television and film studio, Belvision. For a time in the 1960s and 1970s, this was one of the few large animation companies in Europe, and though he failed in his ambition to become the new Disney, it did make several films featuring cartoon characters such as Tintin, the Smurfs and Asterix.

The creators of the last, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, had worked for Lombard in the mid-1950s, and Tintin magazine also spawned other successful strips, such as Alix, the young Roman created by Jacques Martin, and the adventurers Blake and Mortimer, who in France still outsell each year the winner of the Prix Goncourt. This was just as well, since Leblanc's relations with Hergé, though always cordial, were rarely straightforward. Hergé's mother had ended her days in an asylum, and for several decades after the war he battled depression. In the 1940s he contemplated emigrating, and later as his first marriage began to fail he frequently failed to produce his weekly copy, leading to awkward absences from Tintin magazine. He wrote very little in the 20 years before his death in 1983, although the publication continued to appear until 1993.

Raymond Leblanc was born at Longlier, in southern Belgium, in 1915. His father was a factory inspector, though the family was of Ardennes farming stock. He joined the civil service as a Customs inspector, used his fluent German to good effect in the Resistance, and ended the war as a liaison officer at Field Marshal Montgomery's HQ.

He sold Lombard in 1986, although he continued to advise the firm and was an inspiring figure to younger comic-strip artists. Recently he had set up a foundation to promote their talents, and he was pleased by the announcement that Steven Spielberg is to make a series of Tintin films.

In his youth, Leblanc had been a sportsman and he was always fond of female company, but he was also a rather modest man with old-fashioned values once thought of as English. In the 1970s, when they were having problems with Dargaud, their publisher, Goscinny and Uderzo asked him to publish the Asterix books instead. Although it would have made him a second fortune he declined, preferring to maintain his long friendship with Dargaud.

He is survived by a son and two daughters of his first marriage, and by a daughter of the second.

Raymond Leblanc, publisher, was born on May 22, 1915. He died on March 21, 2008, aged 92