Shivam302001:
Hergé did not want the book to be published in the first place
I don't think there is anything that says that that is the case - I can't think of a reference to him objecting at the time.
Shivam302001:
Hergé did not want to rework the book again
While this might have been the commonly held opinion, recent researches have presented a different and contrary story, with quite compelling evidence. There's a fuller discussion
in this thread, but here's a precis of recent developments, including a link to Benoît Peeters's article.
Hergé would have happily let the book stay in print, but for technical issues - when the book was to be reprinted, the printing plates were deemed to be be too damaged to reuse, and Hergé would have personally had to pay for a complete set of new ones, which would have been costly; added to this, the original art was mislaid, thought lost, and that further impeded progress on a new edition, and likewise made it difficult to produce a colour edition (Hergé was not against it, he just never got around to making one, given that he had new books to write, and old books for which he did have the artwork to make into colour books, which used up the time).
Hergé found at one point that he didn't even own a copy himself, and went to great pains to find and purchase a mint copy of the first edition for his collection.
Over the years it was Hergé who tried to get Casterman to re-print it, and Casterman which didn't want to.
It reached a point where Hergé threatened to take it and any new books to a different publisher, and it took the preparation of a 50th anniversary special edition in 1969 which Casterman made for Hergé to give as gifts (an edition with which he was delighted), that things settled down.
The re-discovery of the original art in a studio cupboard and the preparation of the
Archives Hergé volume which brought the first three stories back into print, showed that there was potential for the early editions, and the facsimile books, and eventually the re-adoption of
Soviets as the first book in the regular series followed.
Of course, Hergé produced two colour pages of
Soviets for the Christmas edition of
Le Petit Vingtième, and had the Studios colourists hand-colour a page which was reproduced as a lithograph sold for charity.
I really like the colour
Soviets - it's very nicely done.
They have only coloured white space, not the black inks, which some have criticized - for example, the star on the Russian 'plane is always black, because Hergé drew it as solid black - but I think that that is a minor quibble, and shows sympathy for the art.