Tintin and Alph-Art

In March 1983, Georges Prosper Remi, better known as Hergé, died, leaving the final volume of The Adventures of Tintin, Tintin and Alph-Art, unpublished.

Although there have been many unlicensed attempts to finish the incomplete work over the decades (after Hergé's widow withdrew permission for his colleague Bob de Moor to finish it), there have also been several releases of what was done - which was outlines and sketches only.

There have been two UK releases of the unfinished adventure: the 1990 Casterman edition, and the 2004 Egmont edition. The Casterman edition either splits the book in two, with one half having the sketches and the other half a transcription of the text (as was done for the original Belgian edition), or has a separate supplementary booklet with the English translation which was expensive to produce and caused it to be discontinued. I can see evidence for both existing and I'm not entirely sure which is right; maybe the booklet version was discontinued and replaced with the one with the transcription included?

The Egmont version, however, goes for a rather different approach, in doing so bringing it up to the same page count and format as the other albums. And I'm not sure it's one which satisifies anyone. Take a look:

Surely it'd have been nice to have a full-page version of the sketched page? To be fair, the very first pages, which are more detailed, are in full-page format... but even so, the original version sounds much nicer than this one. A lot of Egmont's edition is tiny pictures of the sketched pages accompanied by a text translation and inexplicable giant versions of certain sketches.

So what is the happy medium here? I really want the full versions of the sketched pages, so I'd go for whichever version Casterman published. If you want a 'readalong' English translation, the obvious solution would seem to be a version with the original sketch on one page and a transcript on the other... but that would probably be prohibitively expensive. It's a tricky one, and it's likely that no viable solution would please everyone. But there's got to be something better than what Egmont did?

Anyway, there's something a bit different to the norm. I'll be back with something about Robot Wars next week, don't worry.