An original board from a Tintin adventure, “The Mysterious Star”, offered at auction on Wednesday for an estimate of 400,000 to 500,000 euros, did not find a buyer, announced the Tajan house in Paris. The price below which the owner of this piece did not wish to go down, as well as his name, have not been disclosed.
Tintin is usually the comic book hero who most freaks out the auction house counters, thanks to his worldwide notoriety. The record is the drawing of a cover project for the “Blue Lotus” in 1936, ultimately not used, and sold in 2021 for 3.175 million euros.
On the 1941 board put on sale on Wednesday, Hergé draws the beginning of this adventure which appears in the Brussels daily “Le Soir” from October 20 and for seven months. “These strips are among the rare intact original drawings of this Tintin adventure, because they were not reworked, cut out, re-glued or cropped for the needs of the 1942 color album,” commented Hergé expert, Marcel Wilmet, on the Tajan website.
Hergé draws two horizontal bands of four and five boxes respectively, in black and white, which is adapted to the format of the newspaper, but not the album. To move on to the book, he must reorganize the boxes each time.
This will not be the only difficulty. At the beginning of 1942, the publisher Louis Casterman decided to revolutionize the Tintin albums. Faced with the shortage of paper during the German Occupation, he chose to go down to 62 pages compared to a hundred until then. And move on to color. Hergé had to completely redraw the beginning of “The Mysterious Star,” where Tintin sees an unusually large star and experiences the rising heat.
The album appeared in September 1942, and was revised in a new edition in 1954, to remove anti-American and anti-Semitic elements. It is one of Hergé’s most polemical, having been read as a criticism of the global ambition of the United States, which entered the war in December 1941.
