Tintin Forums

Hi, there. I was looking at the various copies of Le Petit Vingtième for sale on Ebay and came across an interesting item.

It's from the twenty-fifth of June, 1931; the week after Tintin au Congo ended (or at least the week after the traditional ending). The cover shows an Arab saying: "By the beard of the prophet!... That huge bird you see up there, it's the famous young Tintin's plane, who's returning to the country of Belgium!" and then his colleague replies in Hergé's improvised "Arabic" - then it seems like it has pages with Tintin's plane landing and having a talk with them.
Now, while certainly not in the usual comic strip format (excepting the two rather nice drawings at the bottom of each page) it looks like it continues the story, in a way.

The head of the double-pages reads "By Special Wireless Telegraph"; and I can just make out at the end of the dialogue the French for "End of transmission".

Does anyone know anything about this? Or does anyone happen to have a copy of this issue? What exactly are the contents? ... I realize I probably won't get any answers to those questions, but...

Kind of delayed, but I can get back to you by the end of December(not definitely). I have purchased a copy of the English black-and-white edition, but it hasn't arrived. When I'm done reading it, I may answer.

Why so down...? Finding answers to this sort of stuff is what we try and do here! ;-)

It's a coda to the adventure in the original Petit Vingtième issue mentioned, and as such isn't included in any version of the album, and hasn't been made available in English.

It purports to be the transcript of a radio transmission from Tintin and Snowy, flying over the Sahara in a 'plane called the Vol au Vent, which has been recieved by the editorial staff at the XXème.

It mentions "Uncle Joe" (L'oncle Jo was another of the pseudonyms adopted by Paul "Jam" Jamin, who was a staff writer and cartoonist), and Hergé (who himself has a Captain Haddock-type moment, and is heard to shout "Parasites!").

The 'plane has to land in the desert because the radiator has run dry, at which point they are intercepted by Berbers; in a somewhat patronising passage, the Tuareg tribesmen think that Tintin and Snowy have been sent to them by God from heaven, and prostrate themselves on the ground. They then give the travellers water to refill the radiator, and at that point they take off and fly back to Brussels.

It's an odd little incident, and is basically a piece of filler, comprising two half pages of text and two illustrations (plus a cover) by Hergé. It was followed the next week by a two-page spread of a bull-fight being disrupted as the Vol au Vent flies over Spain.

I found a page which looks like Tintin in the Congo, but...
It shockingly has more words than pictures!
Here is the link [Link removed by Moderator, as related site does not look to be official]
Does somebody have information about this? I have never seen anything like this.

Thanks!

Ah, I thought we might have had something about this before, but I've not been able to find it, so that must have been my imagination.

I did find this thread about other relate scenes, so I've moved your post here to keep them together.)
The scenes discussed above were a coda to the main story of Congo.
The ones you have seen were a sort of preamble to it.

The two weeks before the Congo adventure began, readers of Le Petit Vingtième were presented with double-page spreads, in which Tintin and Snowy conversed, with illustrations by Hergé, and the words in a sort of play-script fashion.
Week one, the issue for Thursday, the 22nd of May, has a cover showing Snowy and Tintin contemplating an enormous globe of the world; inside the first two pages of the interlude can be found, captioned Tintin et Milou s'ennuient ("Tintin and Snowy are bored"), with have our heroes at a loose end in their Brussels flat, until Snowy leaps into action.
The page you linked to was actually one of the pair which appeared in the issue for Thursday, the 29th of May, 1930 (the week before Tintin au Congo commenced, which is annpunced on the cover with a picture of Tintin in his sola topee), under the title Milou a une idée ("Snowy has an idea").
It takes up the conversation between Snowy and Tintin, and reveals that Snowy is the instigator of the Congo trip, and that he believes the readers of the Petit Vingtième would be interested in reading reports from Africa of their adventures and observations there.

The four pages are reproduced in Benoît Peeters' invaluable tome, Le Monde d'Hergé.