Blistering barnacles, Tintin! Your picture’s sold for £ 450,000
HIS legendary adventures include the perilous search for Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Castafiore Emerald.
And now Tintin has unearthed another fortune, after a sketch of the young cartoon hero by his creator Georges Remi fetched an astonishing £450,000 at a Paris auction yesterday.
The India ink drawing measuring about 8in x 8in features the boy detective – whose best friend Captain Haddock has the catchphrase ‘Blistering’ Barnacles!’ – and his dog Snowy as they are escorted through a palace in King Ottokar’s Sceptre.
The illustration was created in 1939 by Belgian cartoonist Remi – who used the pen name Hergé – for the newspaper Le Petit Vingtième, which serialised Tintin’s adventures before t hey were collected in book form.
Among the other items sold in Paris was a strip that went for more than £340,000 from Tintin’s adventure of The Shooting Star, which was writ- ten under Nazi occupation in 1941. Altogether the auction of Tintin items fetched about £2 million. But one item that was surprisingly left unsold after failing to meet an estimate of £7,000 to £15,000 was a copy of the comic book Destination Moon, signed by Hergé and American astronauts from the Apollo programme. The signatures include that of Buzz Aldrin, who jokingly wrote ‘first moonwalker after Tintin’ although Aldrin was in fact the second man on the Moon in 1969 after fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong. The Adventures Of Tintin have been translated into 90 languages and sold more than 300 million copies. An ink drawing of Tintin by Hergé sold in 2014 to an American fan for £2.36 million, the world record for a comic book illustration at auction.