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King Ottokar's Sceptre: Is the Eagle publication the earliest?

sponsz
Member
#1 · Posted: 15 Jul 2008 18:53
King Ottokar's Sceptre was published in 1951-52 by Eagle, Britain's national strip cartoon weekly.

Can someone help me with following questions :
- What was the name of Tintin's dog in this publication ? (Snowy, Bobby, Milou?)
- Do they used the name of Tintin or does he have another name in this publication?
- Which were the names of the other characters (Haddock, Dupondt, Castafiore ?)
- Do they mention some were the name of the English translator of this story?
- What was the exact publication period (Dates)
- Does anyone knows other English translations, besides those from Methuen or Casterman (1952)?
Harrock n roll
Moderator
#2 · Posted: 15 Jul 2008 19:43
Hi Sponsz,

1) The dog is called Milou in this publication.
2) He is called Tintin (and occasionally Tin Tin).
3) Haddock doesn't appear in King Ottokar's Sceptre, but he is called Haddock in the Casterman translation of Unicorn and Rackham. The Dupondts are called Thompson and Thomson, Castafiore is Castafiore. I believe all of the other names are the same as they are in the original French.
4) The translator is (as yet) unknown.
5) I don't have the exact publication dates to hand I'm afraid.
6) Apart from the Golden Press translation (American), I'm not aware of any others.

Hope that helps!
Prince
Member
#3 · Posted: 30 Sep 2010 21:55
Harrock n roll
Hey do you have all the Golden Press edition books,the Casterman editions and the Eagle one also, cause you seem to have quite a lot of knowledge regarding these early edition books.
Richard1631978
Member
#4 · Posted: 1 Oct 2010 20:55
According to one of Michael Farr's books the early translations were done by a Belgian interpreter.
superjm9
Member
#5 · Posted: 22 Jun 2020 12:31
I know it's been ten years since this post was commented on, but for anyone who comes across it, I can answer question 5. The Eagle serialisation of King Ottokar's Sceptre ran over 40 issues from 3rd August 1951 to 2nd May 1952 (Eagle volume 2 issue 17 to volume 3 issue 4).
The story is unnamed in Eagle.
It didn't receive its title until the 1958 Methuen publication.
The story is also abridged in Eagle. The scene where Snowy steals a dinosaur bone was removed, for example.

An update to question 6: A few years ago (2016 I think?) new digital versions of Tintin became available on iOS and Android. These have completely new translations by Michael Farr.
StephenGrant
Member
#6 · Posted: 7 Jul 2026 13:18
Hi It's now been another 6 years but can you tell me what other stories were published in the Eagle comic, and the dates if known, thanks. I believe the Moon stories were but that would have been some time between 1953/54 and 1959
jock123
Moderator
#7 · Posted: 13 Jul 2026 17:00
StephenGrant:
can you tell me what other stories were published in the Eagle comic

Sorry, unless you have something to the contrary, no other stories appeared in the Eagle after Ottakar's Sceptre.

Remember, the fact that Ottokar got translated at all was that it was handled by Casterman, who were staging their multi-lingual, multi-country launch of Tintin; this took the form of the target countries getting The Secret of "The Unicorn" and Red Rackham's Treasure in hardback in their local languages.

Presumably had the books taken off, then we might also have had a bound volume of Ottokar as the next title. However the books didn't sell sucessfully in any of the languages, so no further foreign-language albums appeared from Casterman for these markets in this series.
Therefore there wouldn't have been English versions of other stories for the Eagle to publish, and they never re-published the two Casterman hardbacks.

It wasn't until Methuen took up the torch in 1958 that the English series was to take off.

My only hesitation in my opening remark is that I think that there may have been international versions of the Eagle, and I suppose that there is an outside chance that one of them might have gone out on a limb and done something, but the subject has been pretty well looked at by collectors all across the globe, and had there been a further English-language publication by the Eagle, it would have been widely reported by now.

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