Tintin Forums

Rereading my copy of The Blue Lotus now that I'm home over winter break, I noticed that in addition to the well-known redrawn first few pages of the story, there are several individual frames throughout the story which appear to have been redrawn.

I'm thinking of:

1. The large frame on p. 6, of Tintin being pulled in the rickshaw

2. The fourth frame on p. 12 ("All very mysterious...")

3. <maybe?> The third-last frame on p. 17 (Tintin meeting Wang)

4. The fourth frame on p. 22 (Tintin is discovered by Mitsuhirato)

5. The fourth fram on p. 58 ("Bravo, Chang!")

6. <maybe?> The large frame on p. 59 (The Blue Lotus)

The two big ones, I imagine, were done for layout purposes. But does anyone know why the others might have been redrawn, while no others around them were?

If I remember correctly, these frames were not redrawn but actually added (also for layout purposes) when the original pages were edited into 62 pages with four panels each. In other frames, backgrounds and other things have also been added (in a way similar of the colour edition of "King Ottokar's Sceptre").

Well spotted Jyrki21, some of these aren't particularly obvious!

1. A redrawn and enlarged frame - added to the 1946 version to fill out the available space on the page. The original was a much smaller frame, the same height and size as others on the page.

2. A redrawn frame (actually, two) - originally one frame showed Tintin reading the telegram, and another showed him reading the letter. Now, both the telegram and letter are shown in a single frame, and a new frame adds the new dialogue: "All very mysterious..."

3. A new frame - the dialogue in this frame was originally given in what is now the first frame of p.18. This sequence has been substantially re-edited, and the order of the frames has been changed.

4. A redrawn frame - the original was much narrower and taller, making it unsuitable for the modern format. But the composition of the characters in the frame is near-identical in both versions.

5. A new frame - not existing at all in the original version.

6. A redrawn and enlarged frame, as with 1.


There are several other examples of modified and deleted frames in the modern version of "The Blue Lotus", but I've just concentrated on Jyrki21's examples for the moment.

Ed