Tintin Forums

I recieved this email from Casterman after sending them an email on how I could obtain The Secret Ray.

Dear Mr number1fan,

I'm afraid you won't find anymore the adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko in English, except perhaps on commercial sites...
The only translations actually date from the 90s and haven't been reprinted since. We are sorry.
There is still a publication on the Egmont site, but I think it is out of print. You can always ask them.

I have The Secret Ray in English from 1994. It's in mint condition.

That's fantastic.I wish I would of picked it up a few years ago when there were more copies around.This book is very hard to get in English now.

Is there any way we can get a request to publishers to publish the following books by Herge in English ?

Jo and Zette
Quick and Flupke

I got it recently at a considerable cost to complete my English-language Hergé collection. Still, it was far less than I've seen it selling for elsewhere. I agree that it should be published again. Ideally in album form, but even digitally will do. I know that The Manitoba No-reply has racist content at the end, but it's only a few pages. I suppose they don't want to attract controversy like what has happened with Tintin in the Congo (though that's much worse). It's a shame too, as The Eruption of Karamako doesn't really have anything objectionable, and has one of the best climaxes I've seen from Hergé.

These albums definitely made me appreciate that I had studied French in school. Before I got the English version I got both French albums, which I was able to understand enough of to read. That's an option I would strongly recommend to anyone who has any understanding of French. I got them for around €10 each.

The Secret Ray was also the last English-language album to be hand-lettered aside from reprints. I'd guess it wasn't done by Neil Hyslop, as it's in a different style to his usual lettering. It's also different from the lettering in the Quick and Flupke books published by Mammoth in 1992.

The album also marks the end on an era. Hergé's works had been translated and published in English at least every few years since 1958. The biggest gap before this was the five-year gap between Tintin in America and The Blue Lotus. After The Secret Ray, it would be ten years before we got new content in English (black-and-white Congo with four full-size plates and black-and-white America). The only publications of note during this time were the 1999 standard edition of Soviets and Last Gasp's American publication of the Soviets and 1931 Congo facsimiles.

Hopefully a publisher will publish these stories again in English. It's not without precedent. Hergé's 'Popol et Virginie au pays des Lapinos' was published by Methuen in 1969 as Popol Out West. After 1970 it wasn't reprinted again until the softcover version in 1992. In 2017 it was re-translated and published by a new publisher as Peppy in the Wild West. So there is hope yet.

Can we put enough pressure on the publishers to release enough copies? I believe the demand is there