The TinTin Collection

by Editions Atlas

If you’re familiar with expressions such as ‘Blistering Barnacles!’ and ‘Great Snakes!’ you must be a fan of Tintin, the perennially youthful cartoon reporter invented by the Belgian artist Georges Rémy (1907-83), better known as Hergé.

To the car enthusiast, however, the most interesting thing about Tintin is that his creator took great pains to ensure the vehicles depicted in his stories were authentic. One fan has even created a website identifying 215 of them! When French publisher Atlas decided to launch a series of models of vehicles featured in the Tintin books, it could be sure it was onto a winner.

Following the well-tried ‘partwork’ marketing formula, the first vehicle – a blue Jeep from

Destination Moon – was sold at an artificially low price in 2008 to entice subscribers to sign up for the rest of the series, which eventually stretched to 70 regular items, plus a few additional special issues.

While many of the subjects are familiar enough in model form, their style, finish and presentation are unique. Rather than producing exact replicas of the real vehicles, the idea was to create 3D replicas of scenes from the Tintin books. The vehicles have semi-matt paint finishes and they come with highly detailed figures of Tintin and his associates Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus and, of course, the bumbling policemen Thomson and Thompson. The pace never flags in a Tintin story and this is reflected in the action poses of many of the models: Captain Haddock clinging to the bonnet of a Lancia Aurelia, or Tintin hiding in the rear of a truck or diving into the back of a Panhard Dyna taxi.

Though the series is now complete, you can still easily pick up the ones that appeal to you from online auction sites.