BOOKS

Tintin and Captain Haddock accompanied by the inseparable Snowy have traveled to Peru in search of Professor Calculus, who has been kidnapped for having dared to wear the bracelet of the Inca mummy Rascar Capac. Tintin discovers the professor on the freighter Pachamac, but is unable to free him. The clues will lead them on a long journey in the company of Zorrino, an Indian boy, through the Andes mountains and the jungle to a secret temple of the Incas.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

After two years of absence in Peru and Bolivia, the Sanders-Hardmuth ethnographic expedition returns to Europe having discovered several Inca tombs. They brought back the mummy of the Inca Rascar Capac, also called "the one who unleashes fire from the sky", who was wearing valuable solid gold jewelry. After a short time, all the participants of the expedition fall victim to a mysterious evil, and whenever this happens, fragments of small crystal balls are found.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

Tintin buys a model of an old galleon at the old market. It turns out to be a replica of the ship that Captain Haddock's ancestor, the knight Hadoque, commanded, who fought against the pirate Rackham the Red, who carried on his ship a great treasure that has been hidden for centuries. This story was first published in Le Soir on June 11, 1942, during the occupation of Belgium, and was one of Hergé's favorite albums. For the design of the Unicorn, Hergé relied on precise documentation of 17th century ships in the Paris Navy Museum.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

Following the trail of a mysterious can of crab, Tintin ends up prisoner on a ship owned by a gang of opium traffickers. There he meets the evil Allan and for the first time Captain Haddock, then a pathetic slave of his addiction to alcohol, a vice that causes innumerable problems for him and for Tintin who tries to help him. The captain's rehabilitation will come after his forced detoxification during his desert crossing. On May 10, German troops enter Belgium, interrupting the publication of Tintin in land of black gold. Disaster looms over the whole country. Hergé, with his daughter and his sister-in-law, left for Paris on May 15, and from there they went to a friend's house in the Aubergne region, to await events. On June 30 they returned to Brussels and there Hergé found that Le Vingtième Siècle had died, and with it Le Petit Vingtième had also disappeared.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

When Tintin picks up a wallet forgotten in a bank, he cannot imagine that it will lead him to the country of Syldavia, located in the center of the Balkans. There he learns that there is a conspiracy to steal the scepter of the king, Muskar XII, without which he can no longer reign. And his neighboring country, Borduria, has clear invasion intentions. The plot is clearly influenced by the period. The story was published in Le Petit Vingtième from August 4, 1938 to August 10 of the following year. The signs heralding World War II were numerous and Hitler's Germany was preparing the invasion of Austria, which was annexed and became another province of the Third Reich. We see in King Ottokar's Sceptre how Borduria tries to annex the country of Syldavia, with the help of a certain Musstler, (whose name is a composition of Hitler and Mussolini). The Bordurians can be identified with the Nazis in many aspects: the names, the uniforms, the airairplanes and by their tactics of infiltration in Syldavia. In 1947 the album was redesigned in color.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

This time, Tintin sets out on a journey to Scotland on the trail of evildoers. He discovers the secret behind the walls of the castle of Ben More, on the Black Isle, and its mysterious monster. The Black Island appeared in Le Petit Vingtième from April 15, 1937 to June 16, 1938. The album was first published at the end of 1938 in black and white. In 1943 it was changed to color, reducing the number of pages to 62. In 1965, when the English translation was made, the British publisher pointed out to Hergé numerous errors that this volume contained from the English point of view. Hergé sent his collaborator Bob de Moor to England with the list of errors and the assignment to rejuvenate and authenticate the story. Thus Black Island was completely redrawn and modernized. It should be noted that already in the 1937 edition a television set appears, and although the first essays date from 1923, it was still a relatively confidential invention at that time.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

The theft of an Arumbaya fetish from the ethnographic museum takes Tintin to the South American republic of San Teodoro. There he is immersed in the war of this country with neighboring Nuevo Rico, and becomes an assistant to General Alcazar, a controversial character that we will meet again later in other adventures. Tintin goes deep into the jungle to find the Arumbayas and discover the mystery of the stolen fetish. This Tintin adventure was first published in Le Petit Vingtième at the end of 1935 and came out in volume in 1937. It was put into color in 1943. Here again, Hergé includes allusions to current world events. The conflict between San Teodoro and Nuevo Rico over oil is based on the bloody Gran Chaco war, which confronted Paraguay and Bolivia during the 1930s and lasted three years, causing more than 100,000 deaths. Hergé is almost absolutely faithful to reality. He converts "el Gran Chaco" to "el Gran Chapo" and transforms the names of two oil companies, but everything else is scrupulously accurate.

In this album Hergé describes the first of his imaginary countries, which he will later make one of his specialties.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

Tintin travels this time to millenary China. In Shanghai he discovers the origin of a powerful poison that makes you go mad. He is confronted with a terrible gang of opium traffickers and with Japanese agents who keep the reader in suspense until the end of the book. At the end of Cigars of the Pharaoh, Hergé had announced in "Le Petit Vingtième" that Tintin was going to continue his journey to the Far East. He then received a letter from Father Gosset, chaplain to Chinese students at the University of Louvain, who advised him to learn more about China and its culture and introduced him to Tchang Tchong-Jen, a young Chinese art student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Louvain. (We can recognize him in the character Tchang, the Chinese friend of Tintin). Through long conversations with Tchang, Hergé was able to get to know the culture of China, moving away from the clichés about the Chinese that Europeans had, absolutely far from reality. The friendship with Tchang would last a lifetime, both in fiction and in reality. This is the first album that Hergé would fully assume, and from here on he always documented in depth the countries where Tintin had to travel.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

Tintin travels on a cruise ship bound for the Far East. On board he meets the strange Egyptologist Philemon Cyclone, who is traveling in search of the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Kih-Oskh. Tintin accompanies him to the tomb and there he discovers the mysterious cigars, which hide more than just tobacco. He is then kidnapped and abandoned at sea, but is saved and lands in Arabia. After numerous vicissitudes he ends up in India, where he stays with the Maharaja of Rawhajpurtalah. Here appear characters that we will meet again later: the ineffable policemen Thomson and Thompson, the evil Rastapopoulos and the peculiar Oliveira de Salazar. Cigars of the Pharaoh begin to appear in Le petit Vingtiéme on December 8, 1932. It was the time when the news of the curse of Tutankhamun's tomb occupied many pages of the tabloids. This subject interested Hergé so much that years later he raised it again in The Seven Crystal Balls.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

Tintin travels to North America, where he confronts the fearsome Chicago gangster syndicate, including the notorious Al Capone. Hergé's initial idea was to build his story around the Redskin Indian village that had always fascinated him, but then he also wanted to show as much of America as possible: the deserts and prairies, modern industries and big cities, alcohol prohibition, gangsters, cowboys and the plundering of the Redskin Indians, denouncing how they were expelled from their lands when oil was found there. Tintin in America began to be published on September 3, 1931 in Le Petit Vingtième, at the rate of two plates per week, where it would be published for a year. As in the case of Tintin in the Congo, the color version of the album was produced in 1945, benefiting from the progress that the practice and experience of these years had given to Hergé, who had already reached a great mastery and mastery in the language of visual storytelling, where the images narrate by themselves, without waiting for the text to do so.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

In this adventure, Tintin goes to the center of Africa, to make a report. There, dangerous adventures await him, as his enemies are chasing him to kill him. On Tintin's return from his trip to Russia, described in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Hergé is commissioned to take Tintin to the Congo, then a Belgian colony. This album is an excellent document to see how Europeans of the time imagined Africa and Africans. The story was first published on June 5, 1930 in Le Petit Vingtième (see Hergé's biography). In 1946, Hergé completely redrew the album to change it to color and reduce its 110 original plates to the 62 pages that the albums would have from then on. In this new color version, he introduced numerous modifications, softening the colonialist overtones a bit. In spite of this, Tintin in the Congo fell out of favor from the 1950s onwards, and became quite difficult to find. It was the troubled time of decolonization, and the album was not particularly timely. But curiously it was in a Zaire magazine that the story first reappeared, ending the quarantine of Tintin in the Congo.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

The publication of the adventures of Tintin, reporter of the Petit Vingtième in the land of the Soviets, began on January 10, 1929 in the children's supplement of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, in the form of single pages, in black and white as the present edition. In 1930 they were expanded in an album with which Hergé started the collection of the Adventures of Tintin, showing what in the future would be his way of doing both in drawings and in scripts and "gags", and that he would perfect in the following adventures.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard