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Flight 714: Are there two missing pages?

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west_coast_ninja
Member
#11 · Posted: 1 May 2007 18:14
I have no idea what state the pages are in either, I've read that they simply depict Tintin being rescued but that doesn't seem like it would take up two whole pages. It's pretty strange that that particular story happens to be the one where Tintin travels to the part of the world that has been utterly destroyed by Nuclear weapons. I always thought that was a bit strange. I also thought it was a bit odd that Calculus' pendulum stood straight up on the string inside the flying saucer.

Flight 714 was definitely a vast departure from Tintin's other adventures.
Balthazar
Moderator
#12 · Posted: 1 May 2007 20:32
west_coast_ninja
It's pretty strange that that particular story happens to be the one where Tintin travels to the part of the world that has been utterly destroyed by Nuclear weapons.

Not really sure what you mean, west_coast_ninja. Some South Pacific islands have certainly been wrecked by nuclear testing - famously Bikini Atol - so maybe that's what you're thinking of.

But from the flora, fauna and flight path given in Flight 714, I'd say that the island of Pulau Pulau Bompa is meant to be located in the Indonesian archipelago, somewhere near Timor maybe. (The Sondonesians could well be fighting for independence from Indonesia, as East Timor has.)

This part of the world is certainly under threat from many things - slash-and-burn deforestation; the choking smog that results from this; poverty; religious conflict; earthquakes; and other things I'm sure.

But I don't think any of the islands of this region have been utterly (or even partly) destroyed by nuclear weapons - not yet anyway!

To get back on topic, I agree that it'd be great to see the earlier rough versions of the ending of this book. In fact, it'd be great to see all Hergé's rough pages for all his books.

If they can package up all the rough work for Alph-Art into a book, why not do the same for all the books he actually finished?

The few pencil roughs I've seen from other books (mostly from Tintin in Tibet) are absolutely beautiful - really loose and expressive - and very informative in trying to learn how the lucid drawings and tight framing and plotting of the finished books was achieved.

The Complete Plot Drafts, Pencil Roughs and Related Scribbles of Hergé... That really would be a great Hergé centenary book to see published. I'd buy it!
west_coast_ninja
Member
#13 · Posted: 2 May 2007 08:37
You could be right. There's really no telling which way the plane went after it got hijacked.
KaiserChicken
Member
#14 · Posted: 13 Aug 2007 00:29
I have read in many sources that, while finishing Flight 714, Hergé had too many pages and was forced to eliminate one or two. The same happened with the Picaros, but the missing page is easily found in the Internet (check the Wikipedia article). I have found no information on the Flight 714 page, though. Has anyone ever seen it?

Thank you for your replies!
Balthazar
Moderator
#15 · Posted: 13 Aug 2007 21:21
Unlike Picaros, where there's a whole page (or half page - I forget which) of completed fully drawn and coloured frames that appeared in the magazine version, but which was cut from the final book version, I don't think the extra stuff that Hergé had in mind for Flight 714 ever got to this stage.

I think that in his rough scribble and script stage he envsaged actually showing the yellow flying boat rescuing Tintin and co from the dingy just before it drifts back into the danger zone around the erupting island. But before these pages were ever drawn, he realized that he'd miscalculated the number of pages and decided he'd need to cut from the place where the flying boat crew spots them to the TV interview some time later, in order to fit the story into the 62 pages.

So I don't think this rescue scene ever even got as far as fully drawn pencil roughs. (I could be wrong, but I've never seen any in any of the books where you might expect to see such rough pages to be reproduced.)

Some people have commented that the ending of Flight 714 feels rushed (I think I read that Hergé felt this himself), but personally, I think the jump cut to the TV programme works fine (much as I'd like to see an extra page, of course, if it existed!)

If you're looking for extra Tintin pages, there are certainly more examples, other than the Picaros example you mentioned, of magazine pages that had to be cut from the book versions. There are extra pages or half-pages from Tibet, Prisoners of the Sun and Explorers on the Moon, and maybe others.

There's also a whole page of a non-existent Tintin adventure cooked up in the 1950s, I think, by some of Hergé's studio team while Hergé was away on holiday, partly to fool some reporters (they said it was a forthcoming adventure) and possibly partly to demonstrate how much of the Tintin artwork was down to them by this stage.
I think Hergé had to take it as a joke, but I think I read that there may have been some tension around the whole incident.
However, if their intention was to prove that Hergé wasn't completely indispensible, the page kind of proves the opposite. It looks superficially like a page of a Tintin book, but it lacks Hergé's touch.

Moderator Note: It should be pointed out that the "extra" page for Picaros was not published during its run in the magazine, and was never considered to be a genuine part of the story. It is entirely possible that it was never more than a means to an end, in as much as it was an exercise designed to showcase the process used by Hergé from start-to-finish.
As well as the publications listed earlier in the thread, the extra page was added to a special "cocktail" edition of Picaros, which was given out to those who attended the launch parties in Paris and Brussels for the book; these have the additional page, endpapers showing sketches from Hergé's work for the story, and a yellow cloth binding, similar to the bindings of the albums before cardboard spines were used. The back-cover has the scene of Tintin in front of the billboard, listing the titles of the books in Hergé's œuvre, as opposed to the gallery of covers which started on publication of the regular Picaros edition.
KaiserChicken
Member
#16 · Posted: 16 Aug 2007 13:59
Thank you for your reply, Balthazar! The constant and repeated mentions of such page led me to believe that it indeed exist, and was circulating throughout the inner Tintin circles.

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