Tintin Forums

October the 13th will be bring a more than welcome return of Harry Thompson's excellent biography Tintin: Hergé & his Creation to the shops!

Long out of print, and commanding large sums on the second-hand market, the book is to be re-issued in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., with a cover price of £8.99.

Sadly Mr. Thompson - a writer of great warmth and insight - is no longer with us, but this is a book which will stand as a work of major Tintinology for the foreseeable future; it is heartily recommended to all those looking for a life of Hergé which is written with both humour and humanity - plus it's just a great read!

Great News, long overdue!

I'm a long time fan of this book as I'm sure you're aware :)

I wonder will the reprint mean the 1st p/b editions will reduce/increase in price somewhat?

The h/b is ridiculously expensive and quite rare.

We'll have to wait and see. Logic would seem to say that it should see prices drop; however, logic doesn't seem to apply in these cases, where an item isn't being bought for it's utility or quality or whatever, but as "collectible" - just because it is what it is.

The Making of books are like this for me: the price they command far outstrips the value of the extra content. In their day they were great, but other sources of background information have come out since then; there is also nothing to say that they were ever particularly rare.

But fans buy them for high prices, and then sell them for high prices, and the market never seems to adjust. Then the market opes up to speculators as well as fans, and that just makes things worse.

Fans are their own worst enemy in this respect, as their pursuit of a collection raises prices ever higher, as they are competing in a small market: then, having made their "investment", they also like to think that their collection has a certain monetary value, and they keep prices at that level.


Sadly, in this case "ridiculously" can only mean a price that you and I would not pay, and I sympathize.

I've noticed someone selling a collection of early English Tintin albums on eBay, and although the copies look to be in nice condition, they are pricing them in the £300-£400 range, which (to me) seems very very high.
Now, as has been said before, worth and value are nebulous concepts, and what someone asks and what they can get are tow separate things. However, my worry is that should these books sell at these prices, others will automatically assume that that is a figure at which they should sell, driving prices upwards, which over all will make them even more vulnerable to speculation.

Good news! Is it an expanded edition? Because my paperback version is only around 240 pages long, while this new release is 336 pages long.

No - there aren't any changes to it at all, so I don't know where the discrepancy lies.
I asked the publisher specifically about revisions - there were one or two little bloopers in it before, and I wondered if they had been fixed - and they said no, the text is exactly as before.

I've not compared the advanced copy they sent me with my old copy, but if I can find it, I'll see if I can see what makes the difference - it may have different dimensions, or use a different font or something; I also can't remember if the hard-back and paper-back versions had the same pagination, so it could be that the matter lies there?

Tut, tut, shame on them! What kind of bloopers?

My understanding was that, given that Harry Thompson is no longer with us, and this was the edition he had given the go ahead to, that his family were happy to let it stand "as is".


The example which comes immediately to mind is the book guide, which goes a little askew on some of the dates: it misses out the 1952 translation of Ottokar, for example (although it is mentioned in the main text of the book), and suggests that Crab didn't come out until 1966. It also doesn't make it clear that the 1991 Congo translation is of the B&W book. There may be other instances in the text.

Time has also played a part in making some of the information out-of-date.
It can't include that the colour Congo has been now made available in English, and likewise it still maintains that the stop-motion Crab is a lost film, when it has been both re-discovered, and made available on DVD, in the years since the book first appeared.

I should add that hindsight is a marvelous thing - when Harry wrote the book he didn't have access to much of the reference material we have today; nor did he have the internet to fall back on.

There is still much we don't know, or about which we are uncertain, but we are able to use technology to aggregate the input and thoughts of many people all around the world in a manner which would have been unimaginable in 1991, a mere twenty years ago.
What might be regarded as an "error" now could have been sourced from the best available sources of the day.

I would not wish to denigrate this book, or to suggest that it is anything other than an essential read, and a cornerstone of Tintinology in English - I can recommend it without reservation.
The errors are trivial, and the need for clarification a personal preference.

If you haven't read it you are in for a treat!

When I first read the book, I noticed a very minor error in Harry Thompson's description of the plot of Seven Crystal Balls, where he states that Professor Calculus is kidnapped during the thunder storm, whereas he is of course kidnapped the morning after.

I seem to recall that when the book came out, the Hergé estate spotted quite a few such relatively trivial factual errors (perhaps the ones Jock mentions) and criticised the book on that basis, but I'm not sure their criticism was entirely objective or proportionate.

I think it's no secret that the estate didn't really want the book to be written at all and gave Thompson zero co-operation or access to archives, and zero permission to reproduce images.

And it's hard to believe that they were happy with his chapter towards the end of the book outlining some of the bickering over the control of the estate following Hergé's death.

Given Thompson's limited access to primary source material, I think he does an incredibly good job of covering all of Hergé's work, career and personal life in a pretty short book. It's packed with interesting facts, but woven into prose that's so well-written, it never feels like a heavy read.

Perhaps Thompson's most significant factual error actually paints Hergé in a more sympathetic light than a more accurate account would have done: namely, the circumstances of Hergé's split from his first wife and marriage to his second wife.

You sense that Thompson is happy to take the word of Hergé's loyally discreet friends, such as his right-hand assistant Bob de Moor (who seems to have been one of Thompson's main first-hand sources), and didn't feel it appropriate to unearth the rather more complicated details of Hergé's love-life that subsequent biographers have gone into!

Personally, I don't completely agree with all of Thompson's personal opinions, such as his view that The Shooting Star is entirely politically neutral, or his conclusion as to exactly where Hergé's genius lay.
And maybe he has a general tendency to make pieces of informed guesswork and speculation read like undisputed facts, for the sake of neatness and brevity.
But that's all OK, of course.
It's great to read a book with a coherent and well-argued point of view.
The whole book has a sort of thesis or shape to it, as he follows the arc of Hergé's life and work with the empathetic insight of a fellow comedy writer.
He really seems to like Hergé, even though he never met him.

So I entirely agree with Jock that no minor errors (or subjective quibbles) diminish this book's great readability, wit and intelligence.

You'd hope that the publisher will have the sense to include a foreword pointing out that the book was first published in 1991, so that readers don't judge Thompson harshly for statements which time and subsequent knowledge have now made untrue (such as the lost status of the stop-frame Crab film that Jock mentions).

But even if they don't, it'll stand up pretty well.

Was he talking about the American edition as opposed to UK edition, which I believe came out in the 50s?


Fine, I might even buy the book some day, but having a passion for history, has made me particularly keen on having identified errors corrected before they are adopted as established facts, especially when these errors can be easily identified and corrected, such as


I do believe that it is the responsibility of the editors and publishers to make corrections to verifiable facts and such corrections are not unusual when a major work is being re-issued.

There is this biography of a famous man which won major prizes and is seen as the definitive source on the subject.
Yet a number of errors were identified by other scholars and historians long after the writer's death and apparently corrected by the publishers when the book was subsequently re-printed.

Identifying such errors and doing nothing about them is silly, lazy and dangerous in my opinion.

Take for instance Don Markstein's Toonopedia article on Tintin in which you and I identified a number of errors.

He still has not corrected them (in fact he no longer appears to be working on this site) but the point is that his work is often quoted on other sites and thus may add to confusion and inconsistencies.


Personal opinions are fine. What a good editor needs to decide is what is a personal view and what are the facts.

A friend and I went to see a film. We both enjoyed it but argued about the main star: my friend thought he was brilliant, whereas I felt that his performance was rubbish.
I later told another friend about it and mentioned how the hero was in trouble because of a bomb. When I saw it on DVD I realised that there was no bomb in the film period. My mistake.

He's talking about translation dates, and Crab definitely was earlier than 1966! I think it's quite possible that the mistake is typographical, and whoever was doing the setting copied and pasted the Black Island info while creating the table, or was at least distracted by it.


You are making an unwarranted assumption there: identified, yes perhaps - but remember, as I said above, the information available at the time was nothing like the material we have now - corrected, not so much.

For a start, who would you have called on in 1991 to check?

The Estate were offering no help, and indeed that lack of help actually made other people decide not to help him.
Secondly, you are assuming that the book wasn't checked, and we have nothing to say that it wasn't.
Perhaps he showed it to every one of his contributors, and they just didn't notice.
Perhaps they led him astray, and even introduced errors.

Next, it takes a lot of work to make up a book, with a high over-head involved; to correct a mistake is basically doing the work over, which eats into costs and makes books more expensive.
Type must be reset, films run and plates made up and re-imposed.
Few publishers take on such work lightly, and most will have to weigh the commercial reality of undertaking it against the potential gains; most often, it just isn't a viable proposition.


Economic considerations apart, I think that you are making an awful lot out of a very little: this is just a book, not a legal deposition, or a text covering a medical procedure, where a misplaced comma or an over-looked step can be the difference between life or death.

It's just one man's impression of another author, and while it's nice if everything is hunky-dory, it's not going to really make the slightest bit of difference to the human condition if it isn't 100% - it leaves more scope for us to debate putting it right, for one thing...! ;-)


Again, it just doesn't happen that way.
Book publishers pay authors to write books like this based on the expertise that they themselves don't have; if editors had the ability to write it in the first place, they would.

The added problem is that, with a book like Mr. Thompson's, where he isn't available any more, how far can a correction go, without upsetting the rest of the text?

For example, it appears that in 1991, he was told, found out, or otherwise discovered that the chap playing Tintin on the return from Soviets, was a "cut-price actor" called Henri de Donckers.
We now know that Tintin wasn't an actor, and wasn't even Henri Dendoncker, but Lucien Pepermans.
But you couldn't introduce this into the book without making an adjustment to the text of such a size that it would mean that the text was no longer effectively Thompson's.
You couldn't second guess how he'd have written that paragraph, so it wouldn't be any better than a pastiche to try.

Maybe it's better just to say, when reading it: "This is the state of affairs as at 1991; let's see what we knew back then..."


Dangerous? To whom?


The point is that a discerning student can find him, and find your opinions of the information, and make up their own minds. I can't see that any obligation is upon him: we should be thankful that he ever took the time to make his resources available, not castigating him for human frailty. The other people who quote him are far more at fault than he.

If you and demand perfection, why aren't you undertaking the task yourself, and making your own web-site to bring this to the public? Could it be because it's a huge task, and you are unwilling to commit to an enormous amount of work which will always be having to be updated for absolutely zero thanks, and no reward? ;-)