I would just like to thank everyone who has commented, emailed, tweeted or spoken to me about the Travels of a Boy Reporter. However, a few people need to be mentioned specifically.

• The Ephemerist is a great blog covering comics from a European perspective. A blog evert comics fan should reading.
• Our friends at the Tintin blog need a big mention and if you are after any sort of Tintin related merchandise, have a look at Shop Tintin as well.
• Robot 6, part of Comic Book Resources, covers a wide range of subject matter.
• The folks on Metafilter, a community driven blog that covers all things geek and much more.
• From Canada, the travel blog Off the Map covers everything related to exploring the world.
• Finally, Comicopia, a Spanish language comics blog.

Many thanks to all these and any I have missed.

Also a big thank you reader Steve and ComfySofa from MetaFilter for spotting some typos on the map. These are about to be fixed along with a few other minor flaws before the map goes to the printers. If you check-out the map’s version number (next to the copyright) you will see it currently says 0.95. I’m currently on 0.97 and version 1.00 will be the first batch from the printers. The online and downloadable versions of the map will be updated in the next few days.

The BBC have a report from the Herge Museum.

Today would have been the 102 birthday of Georges Prosper Remi, better known as Herge.

Have you ever wondered where Syldavia is? Where Tintin found the Shooting Star? Or where was Captain Haddock’s ancestor was marooned in Secrets of the Unicorn?

I had.

When I read Tintin, I wanted to know more about the places he visited. Herge brought them so vividly to life in the books that as a child I dreamt of going to Tibet and finding the Yeti myself or to exploring the streets of Brussels and meeting the weird and wonderful characters that occupied Tintin’s world. Over time, I grew up and these fantasy developed into a genuine fascination in the history and geography of the world.

My love for Tintin had waxed and waned over the years. I completed my collection of books but they were rarely looked at. More reminders of fond memories than anything I kept for their own value. Yet when the Tintin movie was announced, something drew me back to them and I started this blog. Once more I’ve found myself engrossed with Tintin except this time, I was more interested Tintin’s place in the world. How Herge shaped the real world around his hero, keeping some aspects of reality and ignoring others. Eventually this drew me to the map. I wanted to be able to see how Herge had intertwined reality with fiction and a map was the easiest way of exploring this aspect of Herge’s creativity.

Probably my favourite part of the map is the route taken in The Shooting Star. It was the first Tintin book I owned and I spent many hours as a child reading and rereading it. But what stands out from the map is the real sense of a chase taking place. With the sighting of the Perry and the distraction of the faked SOS message, more than any other of Tintin’s travels, it is possible to see how the story and his physical journey combined.

Explore the travels of a boy reporter with the interactive map, read more about the map, or download the map. The map is also available to buy as a poster in a variety of sizes.

Continuning our occasional series of Ligne Claire (Clear Line) and other comics that might interest you, may I present Dresden Codak.

A product of the clearly bizarre mind of artist, Aaron Diaz, the strip is an exploration of physics, psychology, art, philosophy and a whole lot more. It is strange, confusing and challenging. This is not a comic where you will find a clear, easy to follow narrative. I’m just get a small fraction of the references and allusions in it but I love it. The artwork regularly switches in style but whatever the style used, the artwork is fantastic.

So Dresden Codak – challenging and not to everyone’s taste but no less brilliant because of it.

Many thanks to the Tintin Blog for sending me (yes that grinning idiot is me) a set of Tintin Popups as part of a transatlantic exchange. Now I just need to work out where to put them.

Herge liked to mix real and fictional geography in his story-telling, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly.

Machu Picchu doesn’t appear directly in the books but it can be assumed as the basis for the temple in The Seven Crystal Balls / Prisoners of the Sun. Located high in mountains, in a remote part of Peru, it was the last strong hold of the Incas. A sacred site, one of the main buildings is called the Temple of the Sun. The site was ‘discovered’ and made famous in 1911 by the American explorer and historian Hiram Bingham.

This facade appears in The Red Sea Shark though you may be more familiar with it from Indian Jones and the Last Crusade. In reality it is in Petra, an ancient city in modern-day Jordan and is one of the true wonders of the world. At its peak, around 200AD, it was a city of over 20,000 people with a sophisticated water management system that allowed the city to thrive in the middle of a desert.

Loch Lomond itself never appears in the books but it is a name familiar to all Tintin fans as Captain Haddocks favourite tipple. It is particularly prominent in The Black Island as Tintin visits Scotand but it crops up regularly in a number of books. There is a real world Loch Lomond Distillery who do tours. So, if you are ever in Scotland, call in, see how they make the whisky and have a wee dram for Captain Haddock.

Last Sunday, an auction of Tintin and Herge memorabilia smashed national and international records. The highlights of the auction were a handful of original pages drawn by the man himself. All the pages are reproduced below, taken from the auction catalog. If you are interested in Tintin memrobilia then I advise you to have a look through the catalog but these drawings are the real gems.

My favourite are the pages from Flight 714, particularly the sketch pages. In the image of Tintin with his hands behind his back we can see how fine an artist Herge was. Also, the strange figure in the bottom left hand corner. It is an odd mix of styles, half realistic, half modern art. The pages from The Castafiore Emerald are great examples of how Herge refined the story as he drew. Look how the sequence and point of view of the images changes between the original and the inked work.

Many thanks to MetaBunker for finding these.

This Tintin image just leaves me wanting to know more.

It comes from a fanzine writer / blogger / illustrator by the name of Frits Jonker who once did some illustrations for another fanzine writer, by the name of Anton Hermus.

Anton Hermus died a few years ago. When I was sixteen I started a correspondence with him. He published a private magazine about Tintin, called “Het Brilliantinepotje”. It was one of the weirdest zines I ever read, so when he asked me to make some illustrations for him, I gladly did that. In 1982 he wrote a little book about his rather paranoia ideas about Tintin …

I cannot help but wonder what paranoid ideas you can have about Tintin.

Source: Anton Hermus

Tintin is eighty years old this year and he is even bigger than ever.

Size Matters

As part of a whole year of celebrating Tintin‘s birthday and Belgium comics in general, Brussels unveiled the world’s largest comic page. Weighing almost 350kg and covering an area of 672 sqm (about 3 Tennis courts), the scene from Destination Moon was created using thermo-welded panels.

Record Busting Auction

To cap the weekend off, on Sunday almost 600 lots of Tintin and Herge memorabilia was up for action and broke national and world record prices. The sale raised 1,172,000 euros (1.57 million dollars), a new world record for Herge related items and a national record for comic book related sales. The sale included five large original hand-drawn pages. Two of which from the “The Castafiore Emerald” sold for a total of 312,5000 euros to an unknown Belgium collector.

Sources: Giant Tintin page takes pride of place in Brussels, Records broken at Tintin auction