L'Affaire Tournesol: magazine version to be published

According to a couple of online retailers (links here and here), Casterman are due to publish a standalone edition of the Journal Tintin edition of L'Affaire Tournesol on 29th October. This follows on from 2023's volume dedicated to Les Bijoux de la Castafiore.

The Journal Tintin version of L'Affaire Tournesol previously appeared in volume 11 of the now dormant Hergé: le feuilleton intégral series. Its serialised form is notable for the page format changing from portrait to landscape for the last third of the story. Like the Castafiore volume, this one will include an illustrated preface.

Very interesting! I wonder if we may now finally get to see Hergé's proposed plexi-glass cover overlay come to fruition? I know we've had one false dawn in the past, but maybe now they can pull it off?

...Although I'm not holding my breath!! ;-)

I wonder how they're going to work that, turn the page sideways for the last third or go full spread across two pages?

The landscape format of Affaire also includes opening panels with a drawing on a colour background with summary text. These are unique to the magazine version with a few redrawn earlier panels.

The release of these editions seems haphazard chronologically but I think they must be timed with anniversaries. So, Castafiore 1963 was released 2023 and Affaire was late '54-'56, which is close enough! Thinking ahead, will we get Coke En Stock next or Au Pays De L'or Noir? Both would be great, the Khemed anthology.

My instinct would be to turn the page sideways. The artwork will be smaller, but that's preferable to losing a decent chunk of the centre in the gutter (obviously not an issue in the magazine itself when it was the centrefold!). Does anyone know how it was handled in the corresponding Feuilleton volume?


Or a volume with both the Journal Tintin and Petit Vingtième versions of L'or Noir? I'd be very happy with that...

I'm surprised they picked this one next, given how recently it was published in the Feuilleton. I would have expected the magazine version of Tibet, 714, or the colour Black Gold, which to my knowledge have never been republished. (Neither has the magazine version of Picaros, but I think that one is identical to the album version.)


The landscape pages are oriented normally and spread across the gutter. The book is bound in such a way that very little material is lost; where a speech balloon crosses the gutter, all the individual letters remain visible. Still, I agree it would be better to turn these pages sideways. They each correspond with one page of the album, so the artwork would actually not be much smaller.


It looks like something similar has been done before (see here). I think the colour Black Island that was published in Tintin magazine is identical to the album version, so this might not provide anything new except for the opportunity to compare the versions side by side.

Yes, I have that; it's a nice looking book on the whole, but the format does make reading difficult. I get why they did it like that – I think it's perhaps the only way to have all three versions visible at once – but it is a cumbersome thing. The end of the story in Le Petit Vingtième was printed in two colours, black and either red or green (perhaps sometimes both? I'd have to check the book again), which has been replicated here but not altogether successfully, in my opinion – the paper sheen is a bit unforgiving and the colours come across much harsher/darker than they would have in the original magazine. (On a separate note, how much?!)

If they took a similar approach to Au Pays De L'or Noir, I'd be happier with one version following the other: it could be printed in a standard album format, you get around the issue of the Petit Vingtième version being unfinished, and there'd be a proper sense of progression seeing the story through to its completion. With lots of lovely background and archive material, obviously. :-)

Well, the challenge with Black Gold would be that there are four different versions, all of which have substantial differences!

There is some background and archive material on the first version in volume 8 of the Feuilleton, including the unpublished pages.

Well not really because, as I mentioned above, they appear to be timed with anniversaries. So, it's possible we'll get Flight 714 next year, since that began its serialisation in 1966. Indeed, they can choose to release any book that has an anniversary approaching, not necessarily one that has a different magazine version, which they did with Crabe for its 80th anniversary in 2021.

Anyway, to drag this back on topic...
I am very much looking forward to this volume. I would really like them to keep the running headers used in the magazine version, although they didn't for Les Bijoux De La Castafiore (apart from the first page). They would look particularly nice in the landscape pages. I'm also in favour of having the landscape pages sideways, as mentioned above. Quite a few of the panels were cropped when it was reformatted in portrait, such as the plane taking off from Cointrin airport on page 46, which looks marvellous in the magazine edition. There are quite a few changes compared to the final edition, although no whole sequences like there are in some of the other magazine versions.

We have a cover, or a provisional one at least.

The cover uses the magazine version of this particular frame (from page 58 of the book), since Tintin is wearing braces which was part of his initial disguise for rescuing Calculus.

And still no hint as to whether the plexi-glass overlay will be included...

Interesting. It looks like there's still some artworking to be done to extend the image fully into the broken window. I think I'd have liked something a bit further from the original design myself – I've been enjoying the 'new' covers for the colourised editions. Perhaps they're counting on familiarity with the classic cover.


Another approach would be to die-cut the broken window shape out of the front cover board, with the illustration of the characters appearing on the first page of the book block. It'd be a nice way to add depth and be more affordable than plexi-glass (but potentially increases the risk of damage to the book in transit).