Tintin Forums

I’ve got to say that I can’t agree entirely with your analysis here - the technology is really neither here nor there at the end of the day, it’s how you deal with the material itself.

It’s not just a question of popping pages into a scanner, and printing off the end results, it’s the sifting through the accompanying paper-work (someone is having to read and annotate and catalogue in excess of fifty thousand letters, amongst other things), coordinating that to the archive of Hergé’s research materials, which we know is vast, andhopefully conduct primary research with the survivng members of Hergé’s family and colleagues, and all with a staff of two or three people. That’s not “easy” in my book…

I’d rather they took their time, and did it justice, than that they ran off stuff pell-mell, and then had to update them again as they came across new stuff.
Think of what happened with Alph-Art: first we get the separated pages-and-script version, then we get the revised gold “standardized” version with extra pages, oly to be told that in the space of time it took to get that one designed and printed, they actually uncovered further archival material which couldhave been included.
I’ve already got grey hair - a bit more won’t make much difference…! ;-)

With all due respect Jock123, I have to disagree in turn with some of the points you make. I don’t have time to respond at length now, so will just make two quick remarks. (Needless to say, I don’t dispute the difficulties you allude to, but my intention is to stimulate debate !).

First, I stand firmly by the example I have given (and which you do not address). If Marsu Productions can do it, then Moulinsart - with a larger team and budget - can do it too. No excuses ! And there is certainly nothing “pell-mell” about Marsu productions’ publications. Quite simply, they are very finely produced systematic publications of original artwork at near one to one format (accompanied by light but accurate notes and a good selection of supplementary documents). The demand among Tintin collectors is certainly there, so a series along similar lines would also represent a viable business proposition.

Second, I believe that the case of Alph-Art is more ambiguous than you suggest. The "rediscovered" pages were a something of a myth concocted by the Studios Herge and/or Casterman (to offer a little proof : the very first of these supposedly “new” sheets had already been published in the introduction to the Rombaldi edition of Alph-Art almost twenty years earlier !). It seems that the entirety of Herge’s Alph-Art dossier was available from the very start - and the original intention was to publish all of the approximately 150 storyboard and sketch leaves in facsimile - an option eventually abandoned for a number of reasons, one being that many of the variant storyboard pages were near-duplicates and would have confused readers. Ultimately, the first edition was regarded as something of a failure by the principal members of the team who devised it (although it nonetheless proved to be an unexpected commercial success). In the second edition of 2004 - which undoubtedly has its advantages - the storyboard leaves are now tiny and almost illegible. I feel that the most attractive edition overall remains the first English edition (without the awkward binding of the first French edition) put out by Jane Taylor and Nick Rodwell in London. It is really quite a handsome book.

Largely that’s because I have aboslutely zero knowledge of Franquin and his books.

I have no idea how to compare the relative ease and speed with which these books have been made (I don’t see how one can guess unless one was involved in it), for example, the circumstances in which Franquin’s art is kept, and how many people are involved - if there are fewer people working on these than there are for Moulinsart, then that is a small number, because Moulinsart has about twelve to fifteen people in total, and the Studio is just three people.

I also don’t know if Franquin’s people have been undertaking anything like the Chronologies and building a museum in the same period.

I want the art, in as many stages as possible, in as many varieties as comes to hand, but I want the thinking behind it too - the references where available, the correspondence which, as mentioned contains information about the choices made, the changes needed, and notations of what state the art is in, and how else it may have appeared (if you’ve seen any of the page art, you’ll know that art has been chopped up, re-positioned, changed around and otherwise repurposed over the years to revise the format, change page sizes and for re-use in the magazine).

Looking at the artwork with light notes would be nice - knowing about the art with in depth material will be fascinating.


Well, again, I think we are slightly at cross purposes here: what I am talking about is that Bernard Tordeur said (at the same time as he talked about the fact that the J,Z&J version of ThermoZéro was de facto complete) that further material to the extra material they had just released had been uncovered as they were going through Hergé’s papers, and which, had he been able to he would have included, and that they amounted to enough significant material to be able to produce a third version.

I noticed the Moderator's message to me(after a very long time), so I thought I would give my opinion. I think that Le ThermoZero should be published in a collection work. This work could contain deleted sketches and various plot lines.

For example, if Herge wrote down sketches of perhaps Sakharine having something more to do with the theft of the parchments in The Secret of the Unicorn that were later edited out, they could be put in this book. That is just my thought, because it would be nice to see these, and it would be more for your money's worth!