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It's not for anyone apart from Hergé to decide a successor to Alph-Art. I mean, no one can ever guess what Hergé might think of... His imagination was too vivid for anyone of us to match it.

In fact, I don't think anyone would've guessed Alph-Art for instance, as the next one to 'Tintin and the Picaros'.

There was still the mysterious business with Mik Kanrokitoff - that could have opened some avenues. The rescue of Wolff could have been relived, as well as Rastapopoulos, Allan, Spalding and co. brainwashing his alien captors into planning the takeover of the Earth! Tintin in the New World is a good suggestion.

Tintin and Aliens? Now that sounds like a Steven Spielberg movie! lol! I still can't believe he went with aliens in his last IndieJones flick... :/
But Tintin has dealt with the supernatural before [how about Tintin and the X-Files?], so, maybe, it could make for an interesting story--if Herge was still alive to write it...(personally, i think the world has grown tired of 'alien' stories)...
As far as romance goes, i agree with other posters that it does feel rather out-of-place in a series such as Tintin. Although, i still wouldn't mind it if a female-adventurer as a counterpart for our hero was created for the series---i'd wager Herge would probably make the relationship end up being platonic at most anyway.

I apologize if this is rather out of topic, but is this the drawing you meant? I came across this last week at a clothing shop nearby and thought it was some sort of parody. I was very much curious on how that could get printed on a shirt.

Moderator Note: The answer to your second question about the shirt is “illegally”; as it constitutes bootleg or unofficial merchandise, the link has been removed, and replaced with a less controversial one.

The Happy Tintinologist Team

From memory, I think I might have been recalling a similar but different drawing, more of a close up of just Hergé at his drawing board, with Tintin at his shoulder, and in black-and-white. I think it might be in that big tribute book that came out a few years after Hergé's death, Tintin and Hergé: reporters, but I'll need to check. It may be that I'm just recalling a black-and-white version of this drawing.

Anyway, I've also seen this one you've linked to before, and I think it's also fairly well-known, at least in the French-speaking world. I don't know if the T-shirt is an official product or not, but the picture is certainly drawn by Hergé himself. I believe it's the front cover of some sort of retrospective book, the title of which translates as "Fifty Years of Very Happy Work", a title which the drawing makes clear is dripping with irony!

I'm sure someone on this forum will know more about this book than me, but from the title and from a vague recollection, I'd guess that the book came out in the late 70s to commemorate Tintin's fiftieth anniversary.

It is, sort of; Cinquante ans de travaux fort gais was written by Hergé, and prepared by Casterman for presentation to guests at a cocktail party held to celebrate his golden jubilee as author of Tintin. Rather than being a retrospective, per se, he talks about his process for drawing an album.

To do this, he uses an otherwise un-published page of Picaros (which interestingly doesn't feature Tintin), and shows the steps from initial rough sketches, through line art, to a finished complete page, by way of a demonstration of a page of colouring, where an acetate sheet allows the reader to lay the black line art over a page of flat colours.

It's a reasonably slim volume, made to the same dimensions as a standard album; the contents were also included within the Rombaldi collection a few years later (possibly without the overlay acetate?).

The title is indeed highly ironic, and given Hergé has drawn himself in prison garb with a ball-and-chain, I like to think of it being closer to Fifty Years of Jolly Hard Labour!

He did do more than one version of the theme: the cover of this book for example, by Phillippe Goddin, Comment nait une bande dessinée, may be the one you are thinking of.

Thanks for the further info, Jock. I thought you'd probably know!


Yep, that's the one I think is in Tintin and Hergé: Reporters, though in its black-and-white form. It's clearly a considerably earlier drawing than the Fifty Years cover, from the way Tintin and Hergé are drawn.

I notice that Tintin doesn't actually have a whip in this drawing though, so clearly I was conflating aspects of the two drawings together in my memory.

Ohh that's what it said. Well Google Translate decided to have fun with me back then and said something about "Fifty Years of Hard Work Gays" that definitely made me go like, "...Whut?"

Anyway thanks for the confirmation. I was awfully curious about it. :)

Tintin the New World is just....it's not Tintin!
It's a fake!

I'm sure there's at least one old thread on the forum which tackles that interpretation of Tintin and Haddock's adventures together! ;-)

My translation is probably inaccurate too; it's a translation I'd seen elsewhere, rather than one I made with any real expertise in French, to say the least! I can see now that "Fort" does translate better as "hard", rather than "very" (which would be "trés, obviously). So, as Jock suggests, Fifty Years of Jolly Hard Labour is no doubt better (though "jolly" obviously has a double meaning in English, which I don't know if "Gais" has in French). Some people on the forum are actually proper French speakers (rather than semi-informed guessers like me!) so we might get a definitive translation from one of them. But anyway, at least you've got the gist now!