The Secret of the Unicorn & The Treasure of Rackham the Red (Double Album)

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

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

This album marks a return to adventure. It begins to appear in the weekly Tintin, in September 1966, four years after the end of The Castafiore Emerald. Here we meet again Rastatopoulos, whom we thought drowned at the end of The Red Sea Sharks, and his friend Allan. A new figurine appears: the very rich Lazlo Carreras, the man who never laughs. Carreiras is a millionaire owner of airairplanes, oil companies and the Sani-Cola beverage. This character was inspired by Marcel Dassault. He is a paradoxical character: he is among the good guys, but under the effect of the truth serum he is portrayed as a being without scruples when it comes to having amassed his fortune. Towards the end of the story we discover Mik Ezdaditoff, a character inspired by Jacques Bergier, author of the book Le Matin des magiciens and animator of the magazine Planète. We see here Hergé's fascination with paranormal and extraterrestrial phenomena.

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

This Tintin adventure is about the struggle between the big oil companies. It all starts when adulterated gasoline invades the market. Tintin travels to the country of Khemed, where a power struggle pits Emir Ben Kalish Ezab against Bab El Ehr, each financed by a different oil company. Enter the terrible Abdalah, the emir's son. Hergé was inspired by a photograph of the real King Faisal II as a child. This album has gone through numerous versions before knowing its final form. It began to appear on September 25, 1939 in Le Petit Vingtième, following King Ottokar's Sceptre, but the war broke out. On May 9, 1940, the German forces entered Brussels and the publication of Le Petit Vingtième was interrupted, and with it, Tintin in land of black gold. The story stops on the current page 26 of the album, and will not be continued until 6 years later in Tintin magazine.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

La Castafiore announces her arrival in Moulinsart, and the captain tries to flee the trip in a hurry, but stumbles on a broken step that they have not yet come to fix and breaks his ligaments. The rumor of a sentimental relationship between the singer and the "old sea dog" is born and everything is full of paparazzi. And the jewels disappear... In this album there are no travels or great adventures, and that is the grace of Hergé to maintain the intrigue. All the action takes place in Moulinsart, in and around the gardens of the castle. As Hergé himself tells us: "When I started this album, my intention was also to simplify, to train myself to tell, this time, a story in which nothing happens, without resorting to exoticism. Simply to see if I could keep the reader in suspense until the end.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

This comic masterpiece, published in 1944, is the continuation of 'The Secret of the Unicorn' and tells the story of the search for the treasure of the pirate Rackham the Red. Professor Calculus enters the scene, the endearing scientist inventor, wise and absent-minded, whom we will meet again in the following adventures of Tintin, and who will become one of his good friends.

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

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

This second installment of Tintin's lunar adventure was first published in 1954 (15 years before the first manned Apollo 11 moon landing. As in the first part, Destination Moon, Hergé did exhaustive research for the realization of this album. In fact, the realism of these two books led Paris-Match magazine to commission Hergé to illustrate the explanation of the Apollo 12 mission.

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

Tintin and the Art-Alpha, unfinished album, is finally part of the 23 other adventures of Tintin. In the months following Hergé's death on March 3, 1983, speculation was rife: many readers wanted the master's collaborators to finish the story. But Hergé was clear: there would be no new Tintins after him. Finally, in 1986, a luxurious album was published, in two booklets, with the main sketches of the cartoonist. A few years after the publication of Tintin and the Picaros, and shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of his hero, Hergé chose as the setting for his next album the world of contemporary art, which he knew particularly well. He throws Tintin into it without knowing very well where this story was going to lead him. Hergé works sporadically, wishing not to disappoint his readers, but illness overtakes him and soon convinces him that this adventure will never be finished and that it will become Tintin's last adventure.

"If others were to take up Tintin, they might do it better, or worse, but one thing is certain: they would do it differently, and then it would no longer be Tintin" (Hergé).

Translated by Concepción Zendrera

23 x 30 cm

Cardboard

64 pages

This is a comic masterpiece. We prefer not to explain the plot of the story here, so that those who read it for the first time can fully enjoy it. From the very beginning, the events are chained together at a fast pace: an explosion is heard, a storm breaks out, objects break, the power goes out and Serafin Brass arrives for the first time in the series. There will be virtually no downtime in the entire story. For the creation of the sets, Hergé wanted to be as precise as possible. The story, which takes place mostly in Switzerland, reflects the Cold War, which was going through very tense moments between the two blocs, represented in the rivalry between Borduria and Syldavia. The Calculus Affair was published in 1956.

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

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