Q127: It must have slipped my mind ...

Where in the canon can we see - to my knowledge - the only drawing Hergé forgot to finish?

Tintin and Alph-Art is, of course, excluded!

Time for a clue, then? This mistake came about when Hergé reformatted the book for its colour publication. It's a very small thing, but obvious once you see it!

I seem to remember reading something about socks in Black Island, is that the one? Sorry I can't be more specific, don't have the on hand right now.

labrador road 26
I seem to remember reading something about socks in Black Island, is that the one?

Afraid not! This mistake isn't an inconsistency, it's something actually missing.

Another clue, then, to hurry things along - you can see this error somewhere in The Crab With The Golden Claws.

On Page 32 of The Crab With The Golden Claws, 2nd line and 2nd panel, the seaplane is missing half of its right wing (from the support struts to the wing-tip). The wing looks like its been sliced off in a very straight, vertical way, so from your comment about this occuring during a re-formatting of the adventure, I'd guess that the truncated wing tip ends where the edge of the panel used to be, and that when the panel was widened, Hergé drew some extra sea but forgot to draw the wing-tip in. Is that it?

I'm sorry it's not on page 32, but on page 23-B2 in my Crab with the Golden Claws book!

Yamilah's quite right - it is indeed page 23 and not 32. Sorry! Not sure why my brain reversed the numerals like that. Maybe Hergé's bout of absent-mindedness is infectious, spreading to anyone who looks too long at that panel!

Well, it's been a couple of days since I posted my answer and yamilah helpfully corrected my page number error, but Richard seems to have temporarily disappeared.

I mention this not out of impatience, but because I'm away for a couple of days from tomorrow (Thursday) morning, so if Richard does reveal that my answer was right, and if he decides to give me the point in spite of my page-number slip-up (not that I'm presuming either will be the case), I won't be around to set the next question until Friday evening.

I'll make an executive decision and say that your answer is incontestibly true, Balthazar, and therefore you get a point and the chance to set the next question.

Richard can let us know whether it was the answer he was expecting when he can get to a computer.

Ed

I'm very sorry about not replying earlier, the Internet here has been dead for the past few days (and it's only barely working now). Balthazar gets the point for the correct answer; the page number doesn't matter so much as you obviously looked it up and found it. Thank you Ed for keeping things moving along too.

Apologies again, I'll try not to perform any disappearing acts in future!