Mikael Uhlin:
To be honest, the easiest way would have been to restart Seven Crystal Balls in the magazine,
Perhaps from a narrative point of view, but I don't know if it would have been from a production stance: the strips were fairly easy to re-format to fit the album page, but the magazine moved the adventures to the landscape format.
Hergé would have had to take the strip art, edit it to fit the double page spread, perhaps having to create more new frames, and adjust the pacing and dialogue in doing so - and
then take that and re-do it a second time for the book.
Starting a way though the narrative would also mean that he was getting nearer to getting not one but two new books out: had he gone back to the beginning, he'd have been six months to a year behind schedule on that.
The time factor and the pressures it was putting him under (never mind the strain of having been facing prison or even execution for a couple of years) were also significant. He was already involved in the re-edition in colour of the old books, the design of the new magazine in his role as art director, and having to produce new pages of the
Prisoners saga.
No, I think that that would have been too much additional effort under the circumstances, and not really easier.
mct16:
New readers would have had to pick up the whole thread and figure out the past plot as they bought the magazine and read it over the next few weeks.
That's not complicated - and readers are generally quite flexible: I had read
Prisoners many times over a period of at least five years before I ever even
saw a copy of
Seven Crystal Balls, and it didn't impeded my enjoyment, or make me think I didn't know what was going on...!
mct16:
I think that most new readers would have preferred a series of panels
That may be true for you, but I don't think it's reasonable to extrapolate that to "most" - how could it ever be demonstrated? What possible evidence is there to justify it?
mct16:
Such a setup could have included Tintin meeting Alcazar at the music hall and later in the street, thus maintaining the chronology.
It
could have, but as he didn't do it that way, Hergé obviously had a different intention in mind...! There are always what-ifs, and if-only scenarios, but what I'm trying to do is unpick the threads of
what-was-done to see what it was we ended up with...