HERGÉ - Lot 75

HERGÉ TINTIN Original illustration, cover of Petit Vingtième No. 3 January 20, 1938. Signed. India ink, colored inks and white gouache on paper 21 × 21.4 cm (8.27 × 8.43 in.) In 1938, Hergé was already a veteran of the comic strip world. He was now a master of his art, thanks to his meeting with Tchang at the time of Le Lotus Bleu, and also to his meeting with Casterman, who had taken over the Vingtième Siècle albums and were working to give them a real commercial dimension, something to which Hergé was attached. The fact that a collection of albums was established and improved with each reprint was also a positive factor for the creator of Tintin. Charles Lesne, publishing director at Casterman, plays a decisive role in the evolution of the albums and, indirectly, in the conception of the new Tintin stories. This cover of Le Petit Vingtième, one of 447 that Hergé drew for the magazine (including 32 for L'Île noire), is a good example of this evolution. Just as he was drawing L'Île noire, Hergé received the Blue Lotus album published by Casterman. Hergé was delighted: the printing was impeccable and the colors beautifully reproduced. The question of color had been bothering him for a long time. Le Petit Vingtième, like the Tintin albums, was then printed in letterpress, a rather crude printing process. Since Tintin's print runs were still quite small (around 6,000 copies per printing run, and Casterman didn't buy its first offset press until 1942), the high pagination made them quite costly, especially for color, which at the time was handled by chromists (not colorists!): printing technicians who used screens and chemical processes to make the zinc plates used to print the drawings. This drawing was first produced in black and white, using a Gillot's-Inquduct G-2 stainless steel nib from a stock purchased in England in March 1937, during a trip Hergé made to Sussex, the first scouting trip for The Black Island. Hergé was very proud of his acquisition of this important stock, as he would use it well into the 1970s! So it was a cover for Le Petit Vingtième, executed rather quickly, because as we know, the press doesn't wait... Curse! Once the drawing was done, he realized he'd forgotten to draw Snowy! A touch-up with white gouache (which doesn't show up in the line drawing) and the matter's settled! The question of color remains. Was this coloring done after the fact to enhance the drawing as a gift for friends, or was it to indicate the colors to the colorists at Le Petit Vingtième (who first interpreted them in two-color process) and then to those at Casterman, who took over in 1937? The first hypothesis is that only four Petit Vingtième covers were produced in direct color. It wasn't until 1941, in agreement with Charles Lesne, and after much trial and error and frustration, that Hergé began using coloring blues, which were photographed by the Brussels photograver Bindels. This is an exceptional document that bears witness to the evolution of Tintin, with Hergé's own brushstrokes and colors. A museum piece! Didier Pasamonik Rare colorization of an Indian ink drawing originally intended for a Petit Vingtième cover. Apart from the 3 covers for the first albums - Tintin en Amérique, Les Cigares du Pharaon and Le Lotus bleu - and a calendar project for 1938, direct-color drawings from the 1930s are very rare on the market. This attitude of Tintin walking three-quarter profile backwards was a great inspiration to Hergé: indeed, it was later used not only on the "small picture" cover of the first album edition of this adventure, but also on the "large picture" of the 1942 reissue, an image that remained the cover until the end of the 1950s. When the new version was redesigned in 1965, one of the many cover designs again used the same theme, although a different design was chosen: Tintin in the boat, but still in the same three-quarter profile position. Gaëtan Laloy