Ranko:
Interestingly, in my Egmont 3-in-1 edition it looks as though an attempt has been made to ink over the pipe to make it look like Haddock's beard.
I realize that some time has passed since this thread was current, but I was browsing through my copy of
Calculus Affair (an Egmont hardback), and happened to notice that the Captain's pipe in this frame is actually missing its colour - it's a sort of a white blob. As I had a Casterman copy in French to hand, I looked at that as well, and lo and behold, it too has the pipe without colour!
I wonder therefore if there was an attempt to repair the art when it was reduced for the 3-in-1, if it was noticed that the colour had been lost at some unspecified time in the past, leading to the noticeable "inking in"?
There's a third possibility, and, to borrow a phrase from Hergé's Belgian compatriot René Magritte, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"...
It's not said that the Captain is going to smoke a pipe, and he doesn't have a pipe before he goes for the papers, and has been remarked, it certainly isn't there when he gets startled. Could it be that the colourist mistook a mark or marks on the page to be a pipe, and filled it in brown? The side of the Captain's beard
could be misread as a spiral of smoke.
Could what I have now described as the white blob, and Ranko saw as an attempt to ink it in, be the remains of remedial work to try and clarify that the Captain *isn't* smoking a pipe? It wasn't unknown at all, in the days when printing was more mechanical, and artwork was physical rather than digital, for repairs and revisions to be done by affixing patches of paper to the page with glue, which then in turn perished over time, and the patch would drop off again and get lost.