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Thanks for the review - a lot of good work there!
Personally I’d disagree with you, and say that the hand-drawn lettering of the original English editions fill the balloons better than the (to my eye) ugly modern computer-generated italic text. It looks especially out of place in cases such as the posters, which should be hand-drawn if the spirit of Hergé is to be retained, and not just machine-text overlaid, albeit that you think it makes it clearer so read, which may be true.
It’s also a minor point, but you have chosen to illustrate the “standard” The Broken Ear cover with what is actually the non-standard version which contains the words Tintin and, an oddity which has only been used on the back-cover album list, and for advertising, but never seems to have been on the front.
But again, thanks for the other info.

I'm not sure about that. Look at this:

(link broken - photo no longer exists)

This is a carbon copy of 1946 Congo, no change what so ever. You can see the text is much closer to the new English facsimile (which you call "computer generated") than that of the common Cigars. identical thickness, size, and font (look for example at how the "f", "n", "t", etc. are written).


Did not specifically "choose" it. This is the cover that comes up first when you search amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, and google images. I just used it to illustrate the framing, which it perfectly does, even if actual cover does not have "tintin".

Thanks for the kind words, glad you liked it.

Do you know how to resize photos, Pharaoh? they are really too big, especially for a slow connection like mine.

Yes, I can see that, but that brings up a couple of issues.
The original French text was hand-lettered, as was the text for almost all the English versions - Congo and Alph-Art are the only two which weren’t. The balloons were designed to take the French text, which uses more characters than the equivalent text in English, so that fits properly. Mr. Hyslop, the British letterer, was naturally able to adjust what he wrote to balance the text on the page. It’s a subtle art, but really good lettering is an art in itself, and Mr. Hyslop’s work is superb. It suits Hergé’s clear-line style so well in weight and execution that it was a shock to me the first time I saw a French book and saw that they weren’t done in the same manner.
Furthermore, as virtually all the books, with the above exceptions, were handled by one man, the result is that the English series had a uniformity and style which the French series didn’t have, as the writing-style changed over the years.
The new computer-font, whilst admittedly being superficially closer to the French text you show from Congo, is neither the same as it, because it isn’t hand-written, and isn’t adjusted in any way that I can see to fill the speech-bubbles properly - it looks “dead” to my eyes. It also has the oddities of the “long z”, and the fact that it is all italic, which just isn’t usually found in English.
But saddest of all, the advent of the computer letterer has also stripped away all the cleverly crafted on-page text and sound-effects which Hergé would put in as graphics, and had them re-worked in computer fonts. This hasn’t just happened in English, but in all the books too. You may be able to read that poster better, but pound to a penny, you won’t see Hergé’s original text in the French book now. Many carefully drawn sight gags will be lost - sound-effects for things breaking which were meticulously rendered as disintegrating fragments are replaced by dull plain lettering; these were beautifully translated in style for the Methuen books, and are now also gone.
I personally would have wanted the English facsimiles to be just that - facsimiles of the early English editions. While I am grateful to Egmont for giving us any new material, and these are certainly far better than nothing, they aren’t what I would have done.

This is a good catch! I have no idea how I never noticed that before?



Good point. I think I need to bring out some books and compare older to newer editions and see what exactly was changed. Again, some stuff I haven't caught before.