Tintin Forums

I have the Lake of Sharks book.

From the drawings I can tell Hergé didn't draw it; however, it was published by the people who did the series.
Is it rare?

The book Tintin and the Lake of the Sharks is made up of stills from a cartoon feature made in the early 1970’s, tailored to match the design of the rest of the literary canon: the basic design of the frames and the addition of those iconic, stylized speech bubbles.

I haven’t seen the movie in a long time, but it looks like characters and objects within the frames of the book have also been touched up or outlined in someway to appear more hand-drawn than the animated originals they were taken from. Nonetheless, while it was made during Hergé’s lifetime and one would expect him to have had some input on the production process, it clearly isn’t, as you say, drawn by Hergé and as such, is not considered to be a real part of the corpus.

It gets a lot of flack nowadays for that fact, but since its inception (which we must note was given the go-ahead by Hergé himself) this has been understood, so I don’t think it particularly fair to denounce it on those terms. I don’t give much thought to it beyond it being a curiosity mind you, but I certainly don’t think of it with disdain - or let’s just say: place it in the same category as Tintin in Thailand, for example ; )

Anyway, this book isn’t rare or even hard to come by. I often see copies on the rocket in Waterstones and Blackwells and you can find it quite easily on the internet too.

Surely Tintin in Thailand wasn't authorized by Hergé – or even Da Big M – right? Wouldn't that make it even less "canonical"?

An observation: Something that's always bothered me about Lake of Sharks is the lack of realism vis-a-vis the canonical Tintin.

For example, the appearance of the submarine isn't very believable, and the aircraft Tintin, Snowy, and the Captain take to yet another incarnation of Syldavia doesn't really exist (although it looks like a Boeing 727, it's called something else). Just my humble opinion.

Man the book is terribly rare! There are a still a few of us who are struggling to get soviets, congo and alph-art

It really bugs me when people say these books are rare - they are all in print and available from retailers, including TIntin.com and Amazon, all over the internet.

Not rare at all, it’s as common as any other of the other official Tintin books, and available in most book shops that stock Tintin.

I always thought it was pretty good: I read it in my youth, when I was too young to know it wasn't a proper Hergé adventure.

I don't know why people say it's not believable - it’s more believable than some other Tintin adventures!

R

Hi there, I have a first edition hardback of this book, is this rare??

Thanks

Nick

nim23
I have a first edition hardback of this book, is this rare??
It’s hard to say, as there isn’t much data on print-runs for the U.K. market out there to say how many were printed and how long the first edition took to sell out. However, if you really want to know is it valuable, probably not very would be my guess. It isn’t a particularly sought after title, as it doesn’t seem to be popular with fans due to its lack of original Hergé art; the book has been available since it came out, so there isn’t an un-tapped market; and it hasn’t really changed, so there aren’t collectable variations out there - a cloth-bound spine, or changed art, as there are for several of the other titles - that mean people might more than one copy. It did recently lose the image from the back cover, when it started to carry the thumbnails of the whole series, but that doesn’t seem to have set the world on fire as far as making it a collector must-have.
I’d say it was a nice thing to have if in good condition, but unlikely to be worth a great deal.

I saw a copy of the book in my local book store a few weeks back. Didn't realise it was rare until now.

Grey
Didn't realise it was rare until now.
You were right all along - it isn’t!