The Hague: Two rare original drawings of Tintin from the comic album The Red Sea Sharks go under the hammer Saturday, in a seldom-seen sale expected to rake in huge sums.
A pencil-on-paper 35.2×50 cm (13.8 x 19.6 inch) design and a 30.7×47.7 cm India ink copy, drawn by the Belgian cartoonist known as Herge in 1957, could fetch between USD 720,000 to USD 960,000 (618,000 to 825,000 euros), auctioneers said.
The two drawings depict page 58 of the intrepid boy reporter’s adventures in the 19th album by Herge, known as ‘Coke en Stock’ in French and published in 1958.
They show 12 panels starting with Tintin , his crusty sea-going friend Captain Haddock , his faithful canine companion Snowy and the eyepatch-wearing Estonian pilot Piotr Skut looking out to sea.
The pages are excellent examples of Herge’s clear-line drawing technique, said Brussels-based comic art expert Eric Verhoest.
“But it’s not just the drawings, it’s also the way he moves the story forward. Herge was a master in doing this,” Verhoest told AFP.
Heritage Auctions is putting the drawings up for sale in Dallas, Texas Saturday. The auction house will also livestream the event at its Dutch headquarters outside Utrecht.
Original Herge drawings rarely appear on the open market as the artist did not have to sell his original artworks, but occasionally gave them away to close friends as gifts, Heritage Auctions added in a statement.
Herge gave the set on auction Saturday to a Scandinavian friend in the 1970s who later sold it to a buyer in a German-speaking part of Europe, Verhoest said.
Earlier this month a rare original 1939 illustration from the comic book album King Ottokar’s Sceptre sold for more than 600,000 euros at an auction at Christie’s in Paris.
The record for an original page of Herge’s drawings dating from 1937 was set in 2014 when it sold at over two million euros.
