And I'm back!
The helpful people at HarperCollins have got back to me (very speedily, which is nice!), with some useful information.
The reason I couldn't find the books on the HarperCollins website was because I was looking in the wrong place! D'oh!
As is the case with many publishing companies, they have a number of subsidiary branches, and in this instance, Egmont has been subsumed into the group, and still appears to exist and are still producing the Hergé output, but
Tintin is being published under the Farshore imprint. This may be a bit like when Methuen stopped putting their name on the covers of the albums, and they appeared under the Magnet brand.
So, anyway, the future of those is safe, thank goodness!
As for
JZ&J and
Q&F, I've been told that they have been officially out of print for several years - this is much as I had suspected, but hasn't been possible to verify, as Egmont never really wanted to comment on what was happening with the titles (which was their absolute right), and as I live in London, it was fairly easy to find shops which still had stock on the shelves.
However, they won't rule out getting them back into print in due course, and were glad to hear that there is interest in them.
So, let's hope that the winds are favourable, and we'll see them back on the shelves in the future!
mct16:
Although Tintin's adventures are available on both Apple Store and Google Play, this is not apparently the case of Herge's other work.
Ah, a very good point - I wonder why that is?
Secret Ray aside, the other three
J,Z&J titles strike me as worth the time to make digital, and the same for
Q&F.