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A List of Cuts and Changes, from First Runs to Final Albums?

Jon God
Member
#1 · Posted: 21 Feb 2022 04:58
Randomly I came across a bunch of poor quality newspaper scans of a number of the Tintin stories, and going back and forth, there are often panels entirely cut, but on top of that, from time to time, there are entire scenes cut, as well.

I know a lot of the earlier books were redrawn for the albums we know and love, but outside of the 'remaking' of the albums, is there a list of all the scenes that were changed or removed from the final albums?
mct16
Member
#2 · Posted: 21 Feb 2022 22:37
I personally do not know of one. There are in fact so many differences that the only real option is to get the strips and compare them to the book versions in order to see the differences for yourself.

The adventures as they were originally published in newspapers and magazines have become available in book form, but, as far as I know, they are only in French:

You can, for example, buy books featuring the daily newspaper strips of "Secret of the Unicorn" and "Red Rackham's Treasure"

and also the daily newspaper strips of "7 Crystal Balls" and "Prisoners of the Sun" as it was published in Tintin magazine.

These are very good quality strips, the originals as drawn by Herge before being sent to the newspaper for publication.
superjm9
Member
#3 · Posted: 23 Feb 2022 00:13
A few years ago I read the black-and-white albums of the first nine adventures and the serialised versions of all of the adventures thereafter up to and including The Red Sea Sharks. Immediately afterwards I created this post, partially for my own reference.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAdventuresofTintin/comments/clz69e/deleted_scenes_from_colour_tintin_albums/

Everything after The Crab with the Golden Claws is comparing comic strip vs album, however, the black-and-white albums were mostly the same as the comic strips. To complete my above post, there are the following differences between the comic strips and the original black-and-white editions:

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets - Strip has two colour pages, these are black-and-white in album. Strip has extra page.

Tintin in the Congo - no difference

Tintin in America - no difference

Cigars of the Pharaoh - no difference

The Blue Lotus - four full-page, full-colour panels added

The Broken Ear - four full-page, full-colour panels added

The Black Island - some of the strip uses a few colours, album is black-and-white, four full-page, full-colour panels added

King Ottokar's Sceptre - Title of strip is Tintin in Syldavia, Ottokar's reason for going to Syldavia is changed. In the strip he doesn't understand the seal, in the album he wants to see if there are more like it, some of the strip uses a few colours, album is black-and-white, four full-page, full-colour panels added

The Crab with the Golden Claws - four full-page, full-colour panels added, space allotted to the story in Le Soir Jeunesse and later Le Soir was reduced three times due to wartime paper shortages (so fewer panels each week), album uses original amount of panels per page throughout the story

If you want to read the serialised versions of the stories, I would recommend the following, all in French:

The Broken Ear - Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 6
The Black Island - Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 7
King Ottokar's Sceptre - Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 8
Land of Black Gold (Le Petit Vingtieme) - Tintin au Pays de l'or Noire in the Les Archives Tintin series
The Crab with the Golden Claws - Du crabe rouge au Crabe aux pinces d'or
The Shooting Star - Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 9
The Secret of the Unicorn - Les vrais secrets de La Licorne
Red Rackham's Treasure - À la recherche du trésor de Rackham le Rouge
The Seven Crystal Balls - La Malediction de Rascar Capac volume 1
Prisoners of the Sun - La Malediction de Rascar Capac volume 2
Destination Moon - Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 11
Explorers on the Moon - Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 11
The Calculus Affair - Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 11
The Red Sea Sharks - Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 11

Unfortunately the comic strip versions of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo, Tintin in America, Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Blue Lotus, Land of Black Gold (Tintin Magazine version), Tintin in Tibet, The Castafiore Emerald, Flight 714 to Sydney and Tintin and the Picaros have yet to be collected together and published.
mct16
Member
#4 · Posted: 23 Feb 2022 20:11
Super work, superjm9 :)

There are of course lots of other scenes: for example, when "Prisoners of the Sun" was first published in Tintin magazine, it included an extended scene of Tintin and Snowy making their way to Marlinspike a few days after Calculus' kidnapping. Snowy tackles a hedgehog and gets covered in spikes, while Tintin is so engrossed in reading his newspaper that he misses a bridge and walks into a river! :)
superjm9
Member
#5 · Posted: 24 Feb 2022 21:45
mct16

Thanks! Haha, yes, I love the scene you mentioned, and it really compliments a similar scene at the start of The Seven Crystal Balls.

There are also other changes made to the albums. I noticed numerous examples (from Prisoners of the Sun onwards, as the older ones were black-and-white in serialisation) of colour changes made to the album version. Also, Prisoners of the Sun and part of The Calculus Affair are in landscape orientation rather than portrait.

One error that somehow lasted over fifteen years before being fixed is in Red Rackham's Treasure, the middle panel at the bottom of page 9. Originally, the captain's speech bubble was drawn coming from the salesman. This is in the serialised version. It managed to make it into the first Methuen edition in 1959, and the Golden Press edition the same year! It was fixed by the first Methuen reprint in 1965.
jock123
Moderator
#6 · Posted: 25 Feb 2022 15:17
superjm9:
Unfortunately the comic strip versions of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets ... have yet to be collected together and published

The only thing that hasn't been integrated into a collection of Soviets is the colour used on two pages which is mentioned earlier - the "missing" page, as I have remarked elsewhere, seems to be found in more versions of the story than it doesn't, and is widely available as such.
As the colouring is very crude, and as there is so little of it, it would be both technically difficult to achieve, and very costly to do, for very little benefit - you would either be printing a book that is 98.6% black-and-white on a colour press (expensive), or printing the pages with colour separately and inserting them at binding (probably even more expensive).
superjm9
Member
#7 · Posted: 26 Feb 2022 17:44
jock123
I agree that it would never get a standalone printing. It would make no sense for the reasons you mentioned. However, if Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral Tome 1 ever gets made, the colour pages would be included in that, as that collection aims to reproduce the stories exactly as they appeared in the comic strip, right down to the inclusion of the anti-semitic scene in The Shooting Star. Unfortunately, I believe that one of the main people behind that project has died. If this is true, then the future of the project is certainly in doubt.

Having said that, it was incorrect of me to state that we have never had the strip versions of Tintin in the Congo, Tintin in America and Cigars of the Pharaoh collected together. This is untrue, as the 1931, 1932 and 1934 albums respectively are identical to the comic strip versions.

It is true that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and The Blue Lotus are 99% the same as the original black-and-white publications, but I still counted them as separate as there are tiny differences between them (two colour pages for Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and four full-page, full-colour panels for The Blue Lotus).
LeLotusBleu
Member
#8 · Posted: 13 Apr 2022 16:10
This website may be of help/interest. It only covers the French language editions, but if you click the button under a cover image, it shows and discusses various pages within that edition, including variations between editions. I don't think it has absolutely everything (from memory, I think it misses the so-called Scandinavian rhino scene, presumably because it's in non-French editions) but it still has lots. However, you need to go through the individual editions to find them all - it doesn't just list them on a single page. I've found it very useful in identifying and discovering variations.

http://www.tintinpassion.net/LIVRES/Livres-pages/01_SOVIETS/01_SOVIETS.html

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