Balthazar:
Or the misdirected speech balloon stalk in the Calculus Affair's tank scene.
This put me in mind of something, but I couldn't put my finger on it until just now!
There was a discussion of another possible speech-bubble error in
Calculus Affair, you might recall, in which the Captian deduces how to trace a car by the C.D. plates he'd spotted. Some said that, given the lucidity of the train of thought, the speaker should have really been shown to be Tintin...
...I then found that in
the original Tintin magazine version of the story, there was an actual error two frames later, which
had been corrected: originally Haddock is shown to be the speaker, but, as can be told from the fact that the Captain is referenced by name in the text, the speaker
should be Tintin, and the artwork was changed accordingly when the book came out.
I argued that, it would be unusual and indeed careless to undertake such a change without reading backwards and forwards a little to check that the new version made sense, and thus there would have been an opportunity for Hergé to change the C.D. plate speech had it been intended for Tintin to be the speaker there too.
So in my opinion, it was more than likely that the Captain was the correct source of the speech in frame 2.
This is a bit of a round-about way of saying that there could be a case that Hergé was open to making changes as necessary, and that, in the event of some tragedy having robbed us of him between the magazine version and teh book of
Calculus Affair, he'd most likely still have been happy for someone else to sort out the fourth frame on p.19, but not so happy if they chose to change the second one.