Tintin, Astro Boy, and Batman at Art & Anime Auction
Heritage Auctions' upcoming International Original Art & Anime Auction Signature Auction March 10-12 features two original works featuring one of comicdom's oldest and most celebrated world traveler, Tintin as rendered by his creator, the Belgian artist Hergé.
Four years after Heritage sold the first published Tintin cover for $1,125,000, the auction house will offer two more originals. Both images were used for the popular Tintin coloring books first published by Casterman in the 1960s.
One hails from 1961's Album à colorier No. 5 and is instantly recognizable to Tintin fans as a modified rendering of the cover to 1941's collection The Crab with the Golden Claws, among the volumes Steven Spielberg used as inspiration for his 2011 film The Adventures of Tintin.
Hergé took the original image featuring Tintin and Captain Haddock and erased a few things — shards of glass from an exploding bottle, bandits just over the dune, the camels' shadows — to make it easier for children to color the work. "It's a real re-composition in the purest style of the ligne claire with, let's say, a more peaceful atmosphere than the World War II-era original," says Olivier Delflas, Director of International Comic Art & Anime.
In the second work Tintin is surrounded by the series' six most important characters, among then Snowy and Haddock. But it didn't only serve as the cover for 1963's Album à colorier No. 6: This illustration was also used as the front of the commercial brochure used when Little, Brown and Company brought Tintin to U.S. shores in 1974. For many Americans, this image was their introduction to him. Read More..
