Page from Tintin moon adventure may raise $1 mn at auction

PARIS - Agence France-Presse

A page of original comic strip drawings from one of the best Tintin adventures, “Explorers on the Moon,” is expected to sell for up to $1 million when it goes under the hammer later this month.

The page, entitled “We walk on the moon,” has the boy reporter, his dog Snowy and blundering sidekick Captain Haddock making their first moon walk from their red and white rocket.

With the 1954 book regarded as one of the artist Herge’s very best, the Paris auction house Artcurial said it could make up to 900,000 euros. The late Belgium artist already holds the world record price for a comic strip.

A double-page ink drawing that served as the inside cover of all the Tintin adventures published between 1937 and 1958, sold for $3.7 million to an American fan two years ago.

Rival auction house Christie’s said Nov. 7 that it was putting another rare Herge strip up for sale on the same day, Nov. 19.

It said the page from the unfinished story “Tintin and the Thermozero,” estimated at 250,000 euros, is the first ever to come to market.  

Why the artist never finished the tale of espionage and a terrifying secret weapon set against the backdrop of the Cold War, is one of the great mysteries for Tintin-ologists.

Herge wrestled with it for years, “starting it at the end of the 1950s,” said Christie’s, but never got further than eight pages.

Artcurial’s comics expert Eric Leroy described the “Explorers on the Moon” as “a key moment in the history of comic book art... it has become mythic for many lovers and collectors of comic strips.

“It is one of the most important from Herge’s postwar period, on the same level as ‘Tintin in Tibet’ and ‘The Castafiore Emerald’,” he added.