Tintin Forums

Hi everyone,

I always loved Tintin when I was younger and recently decided I wanted to read all the books in chronological order (which I never did, even as a child). The books I used to read were published in colour by Methuen.

I recently bought Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (B&W, published by Little, Brown) and found it interesting, although it was very different to the Tintin books I was used to.

I also own Tintin In The Congo (Colour, published by Egmont, with the Collector's Edition band round the book).

I was about to order Tintin in America online when I saw that there are different versions of several of the books. I joined this group and I've been scanning through all the forums and guides etc but I'm still unsure of the exact differences between them.

Please can someone help clear up a few things for me...

1. Are the stories different in the black and white versions? How much do they change?

2. On one of the forums it was suggested that there is more than one chronology to the books - is this true? And if so, what is the correct order to the books?

3. Which versions of the books do people prefer? And which would you recommend if I had to choose between the two versions? As I said, I read the Methuen colour versions as a child and really enjoyed immersing myself in Herge's artwork, and so I feel like the books would be less enjoyable in black and white. But if there is a lot of extra stuff in the black and white versions that isn't included in the colour books, I'd also like to discover that.


I'm sorry if these questions have all been covered in previous posts, but I did trawl through them for about an hour and couldn't find anything that made things crystal clear for me!


Looking forward to being part of Tintinology,

Adam

Hi Adam, welcome to the forum!

An attempt to answer your questions:

1. Are the stories different in the black and white versions? How much do they change?
The stories are virtually the same, almost frame for frame, but there are a few sequences and frames cut out from several of the b/w versions to make the colour editions fit 62 pages.
The b/w versions of Congo, America and Cigars are in Hergé's earlier style, a bit similar to Soviets (the colour versions were completely redrawn).
From The Blue Lotus up to Crab Hergé used the b/w edition for the basis of the colour books, but added some more embellishment, like more detail in the backgrounds.
At the moment there are no English b/w books post Lotus (chronologically speaking), but you can get them all in French and some other languages.

2. On one of the forums it was suggested that there is more than one chronology to the books - is this true? And if so, what is the correct order to the books?
Here's a link to our page on Tintinologist which has the order they were written in, which is generally speaking the correct order. The page also has the dates in which they were first released in English, which is different.
I think it is this to which you're referring when you say 'more than one chronology'. Because the order in which they were released in English began as fairly haphazard (for a number of reasons), the translators altered the text of the original French in some sections where characters that were previously introduced in another book were referred to, and vice-versa. It's a can of worms.

3. Which versions of the books do people prefer? And which would you recommend if I had to choose between the two versions?
I'd say it's worth having a few b/w white books alongside the colour editions as they are significantly different in 'feel' to the colour editions and in a larger frame format. The pacing is also better in some of the b/w books because it's spread over about 130 pages, whereas the colour versions are all 62 pages. I would especially recommend The Blue Lotus and some of the other later ones (when they get to do them in English), like The Broken Ear, but that's just my personal preference.

I hope that helps a little.

Thank you!
If there's 130 pages in the b&w books, and only 62 in the colour ones, surely that means that there's quite a lot cut out of the originals? Or is that just because the size of the panels is different?

Do you think Tintin in America is one that's particularly worth getting in b&w?

To expand on Harrock's points about chronology, I'd just add that there are also oddities in the time-line arising from changes made by Hergé, irrespective of the translation.
For example, Black Island was given a complete graphic make-over in the Sixties, which modernized it, and re-set the adventure in that period, rather than keeping it in the Thirties as it first appeared to be; but the stories on "either side" did not change time-period...!

Tintin-time is elastic...!

It's mainly due to the size of panels because are about half as many panels per page in the b/w edition, but there are also some extra panels and whole sequences in the b/w books. Cigars is one that has quite a few scenes cut out, and the style of the 1934 version compared to the colour 1955 edition is very different.


America is not one of my faves and I think I even prefer the colour version (mainly for personal nostalgia reasons; I remember when it came out in English as a kid), but the b/w has some merits, like the four colour plates. I actually prefer Soviets and the b/w version of Congo to America and Cigars. Again, there's no accounting for taste.


Land of Black Gold is another case in point since there are three versions; the b/w Petit Vingtième, the first 1949 colour edition and the partly revised 1971 edition.

Yep, there certainly are anomalies in the Tintin space-time continuum!

Another couple of questions: Were any of the characters removed or added in to the colour versions? I'm sure I read on the thread somewhere that Thompson and Thomson were added in and Marlinspike was also a new addition from the b&w originals?

On your recommendations, I'm going to purchase the colour version of Tintin in America and the b&w version of The Blue Lotus (I already own Cigars of the Pharaoh in colour).

In the first frame of Tintin au Congo (color version), you'll recognize Dupond et Dupont (Thompson and Thomson), but they don't play any role in this album. This was because they weren't in the B&W version of the story, because they hadn't been thought of yet.
Originally, it wan't until the next album, Les cigares du Pharaon (B/W version), that secret agents X33 and X33bis appear for the first time, and they'll only get the names Dupond et Dupont in le Sceptre d'Ottokar, three albums later.
But when it became time to revise the B& W Congo for colour, several years later, Hergé could draw the detectives into the first panel, as they were by then well-established figures to the readers.

Thanks for your reply, Chevet. Are there any other characters, locations, etc., that are added or removed from different editions of the books?

To a certain extent, that's what these forums are about! :-)
You'll find all sorts of information about changes, modifications and differences between editions if you look through them; there isn't a simple way to encapsulate that sort of information here.

As to your specific question, chevet has given you all the information there is: the Thom(p)sons were not in the B&W Congo, and were added to the colour album when the book was re-drawn.

Marlinspike was not added to any book originally published prior to it's introduction in Unicorn/ Rackham. It did appear in B&W, but only in as much as the initial run of these tales was in a newspaper strip, now re-published in two volumes in French as Les Vrais Secrets de la Licorne and À la recherche du trésor de Rackham le Rouge.

Then might I suggest that you also get the one in B/W if you have not already? Of all of the early adventures that were redrawn and colourised in the 1940s and 50s it is the one which varied the most from the original. The basic plot was the same but there were many changes in the details and characters that Tintin met. In the original B/W for instance Dr. Sarcophagus is unnamed and does not feature in the Red Sea incident when Tintin and Snowy are cast adrift in boxes.

The B/W version of Cigars also features at least three major scenes surrounding the discovery of the tunnels where the drugs cartel has its HQ to the kidnapping of the Maharajah's son.