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Hergé: Do we know what his last drawing was...?

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GSC
Member
#11 · Posted: 11 Dec 2011 23:56
The very last drawing by Hergé is on Wikpedia, in the artical about Alph-art.
jock123
Moderator
#12 · Posted: 12 Dec 2011 11:46
GSC:
The very last drawing by Herge is on wikpedia in the artical about Alph-art.
As has already been said in this thread, there's nothing but circumstantial evidence for Alph-Art being the last thing he drew - never mind that Wikipedia just isn't authoritative enough a source to determine what came when.

It's just one of the things he did towards the end of his life, but he wasn't sitting at his desk with his pen in his hand, drawing Alph-Art when he died.

From reading The Art of Hergé, Vol. 3, it seems that Alph-Art wasn't even his last major project.

The latest dates for work on that book appear to be in 1979 (although again he may have doodled, made notes or worked on pages after that).

However he personally designed and drew layouts for the Stockel underground station friezes - and those were worked on between 1980 and 1983 (thus after the Alph-Art material, which he had set aside by then).

If you add to this that he was still involved in work on his annual greetings card, as well as autographing and sketching Tintin and Snowy on items for friends and admirers, and whatever other sketching he did, and it just isn't possible on this evidence to say what the last thing he drew was.

Looking back through this thread, it's worth putting to bed a few of the issues it raises.
Firstly, yes, Hergé did draw his own strips, including backgrounds, scenery, vehicles and what not. There are enough samples out there of his working to dispel any sense that he wasn't "hands on".
He did thumbnails, roughs, then worked up pencil pages, from which the final art might be made. It was here that he might call on studio hands to lend their skills to items such as backgrounds and machinery, in order that they be rendered accurately (he's on record saying that should the detail not be correct, an army of critical readers would let him know!).
His team was never vast; before the war he did almost all the work himself, then the number ramped up a little to accomodate the reworking of older stories for colour album release along side whatever the new adventure was. However, the number of assistants declined in late years, with Hergé handling the bulk of the work on Tibet, Castafiore Emerald, 714 and Picaros, the latter with really only Bob de Moor.
This may be why people see a "De Moor influence" in these - I propose that it wasn't he was actually doing all the work, as critics seem to want to imply, but instead that what work he did do didn't get so subsumed into a homogenous finish, as hand after hand reworked a page might.

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