Via the Comic Bits web site, Welsh language publisher Dalen Books reports:

“We’ve just also published Tintin the Black Island in Welsh, with Land of Black Gold to follow in Welsh in September We’ll be doing the 2 Tintin moonshot stories next year (plus also a possible Irish edition TBC).



I’ll send you our current Tintin titles for evaluation; I imagine they could be of interest to aficianados of the genre. It’s surprising how many orders we’ve received for these from collectors on the continent. ALSO, fans can also get free A2 Tintin posters from our website (they just pay for p&p), the kind they’d get charged £15 for an unframed French version – and we’re currently hosting an online Tintin competition with a rare and collectable running sheet of 8/8 pages as a prize. The only thing is, the question is based on the Welsh Black Island which entrants will have to get before they’re able to answer!”

More on Welsh Comics and Books: Dalen Books

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.