Les 4 As: Comic series by Chaulet & Craenhals

I'm looking for the name of a Tintin-influenced comic series.
Unfortunately, I have only read the Farsi translation, and can't find the original name of the series based on that.
It is of great interest because in one of the books there is a scene in which Tintin, making a cameo appearance, drives past in a car with Snowy.
Tintin asks one of the main characters if he has seen a green car go by. The boy says yes, it passed him moments before, so Tintin thanks him. As Tintin drives off, the boy remarks that it's strange, but he thinks he had seen Tintin somewhere before...

Any help to identify this series would be appreciated.

Moderator Note: As the copyright status of the translations to which you posted links is not known to us, to be safe, and keep this site out of trouble, the links have been removed.

The Tintinologist Team

I don't know if the series was influenced by Tintin per se, but there is definitely a connection...

The book you are speaking about is Les 4 as et le visiteur de minuit (The Midnight Visitor), by François Craenhals and Georges Chaulet.

The series started in the pages of Tintin magazine in the late fifties, where Craenhals also launched his Pom et Teddy strip, and was (apparently - I've never actually read the books) a slightly tongue-in-cheek affair, with the young heroes (three boys, a girl and their dog) playing on the stereotypes of juvenile fiction of the day.

Brought to album format in the early sixties, the stories continued beyond the original strips from Tintin, running to some forty titles in a similar number of years.

The Tintin gag you mention is an hommage to Hergé by a colleague and friend, and shows the way in which the series played with conventions of children's stories (a young investigator who has a hunch that he might have seen someone before is almost a cliché), and makes a joke of one cartoon character not quite recognizing another cartoon character.

Maybe there's a Tintin tribute in Les 4 as et le visiteur de minuit but blue barnacle seems to refer to a guest spot by Tintin in Les 4 as et la vache sacrée (The sacred cow), apparently drawn by Hergé himself (the guest spot, that is)!