Tintin Forums

I saw, somewhere in the internet, a Tintin image in which he fought against the Rumbabas from The Broken Ear.

Tintin is drawn knocking down one Rumbaba and surrounded by others, still wearing the white shirt and colonel's suit trousers and boots.

This image doesn't seem to come from the album, since the background is drawn, and as far as I remember the background when Tintin has reached the land of Arumbayas is sadly, mostly green.

This image looked like a poster, judging from its size.

Question is, does anybody know the story behind this image? (eg. where it was shown for the first time? For what was it drawn? etc.)

This is only a guess, but since it's an image from a 1930s adventure with, as you say, a more fully drawn background than in the actual strip, maybe it's a cover image from the Petit Vingtieme magazine, where the story first was published.

But that's purely a guess. Someone else here might well have more informed information. The image you describe does ring a very vague bell in my memory though.

The image you describe sounds like one of the colour plates from the original black and white edition. The black and white editions (Congo through to Crab) usually contained at least four full page drawings in colour. Most of them were dropped from the later colour editions of the books, apart from a few pages that still remain in Crab. A lot of these colour pages were recycled and used to create the Tintin Poster Book, which could be the source of the large image you have seen. The original black and white albums are slightly larger than A4, but the poster book is a lot larger, I think somewhere between A3 and A2 (this is from memory, since the copy of the poster book I had got split up and given away as individual pages years ago!).

Also, I seem to recall that the pages in the poster book are flat colour, whereas a lot of the images from the original b&w books are more painterly.