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Cigars of the Pharaoh - during the scene where Tintin infiltrates the opium smugglers’s hideout and steals the gang-member costume, there is a seating mishap.
On page 54, panel 7 Tintin enters the room. The leader's chair has a rounded top and this can clearly be seen in the panel. The leader then proceeds to start talking and then says there is a spy among them. When he makes everyone whisper the password and one member says it out loud, he makes the suggestion of going into the other room and asking them there. This is definitely the leader who suggests this. However, if you look on page 56 panel 3 you can see that the leader was Tintin. This contradicts the seating placement on page 54, panel 7 as when Tintin entered the room there was already someone at the leader's place.

Jumping forward quite a bit, in Seven Crystal Balls there is a another small mistake. On page 1, panel 3 there is a newspaper article. It says that there are seven members of the Sanders-Hardiman expedition. If you count them up, there are:
Sanders-Hardiman
Clarkson
Reedbuck
Falconer
Cantonneau
Midge
Hercules Tarragon
which makes 7

However, in Prisoners of the Sun when the Inca tells Huaco do destory the voodoo dolls. There are shots then of the members of the expedition waking up, and you see Tarragon, Cantonneau, Sanders-Hardiman, Reedbuck, Clarkson, and Midge and another called Carling. But the newspaper article said 7 and that makes 8.

These mistakes are minor, but I thought some of you might like to know if you haven't already noticed.

Also, I was curious if anyone had anything to say about the placement of Marlinspike, whether it was in England or Belgium. There is strong evidence for both, and I was wondering if anyone knew.

1. I also noticed this and have never been able to work out how it works. Much time has been taken up thinking about it but... nothing.

2. I never noticed this, but it is interesting.

3. I think Marlinspike is in England for English speaking people and Brussels for everyone else. Even though I knew the albums were French originally (at 7 years old or whatever), the books were translated so well into English that I somehow convinced myself that they had always been in English.

No, you counted seven people for the scene where they all recovered from their coma. Somehow Carling stood in for Falconer, most likely as a reference to a first name. Is Carling sometimes used as a first name? If I recall correctly, Carling sort of looked like Falconer, if not him outright.

As for the Cigars of the Pharaoh, yes, there was something funny about that meeting over who went in what order. I thought that Tintin was fast-minded enough to beat up the guy calling the people in. But who knows...

Interesting... I'd always assumed it was Clarkson he was talking to...

For the order of people in Cigars, I think that Tintin was the first person called into the room, and overpowered the person calling the names. Then he called the members one by one into the next room and knocked them out as they came in.

The Ellipse-Nelvana team who made the animated cartoon are of this opinion too - when Tintin knocks the last person out, he says "Finished !" in the 'chief's voice'.

to Snafu

Although it's a good idea that Falconer may be the same as Carling I recall in Seven Crystal Balls Tintin telephones Falconer and he replies with 'Mark Falconer speaking' so, I suppose there must be a mistake.

With regard to the patients in Prisoners of the Sun, this is a translation mistake rather than Hergé's.
In the French version, Falconer is Marc Charlet, and this is what Sanders-Hardiman (or Sanders-Hardmuth) calls him on p.60 of Le Temple du Soleil. The mistake therefore only appears in the English version.

I can only assume that Carling, as a straightforward translation of Charlet, was an early working version of the name. When the translators decided to change it to Falconer, they did so only in their script for The Seven Crystal Balls and not the second part, forgetting this scene. It was then sent to Neil Hyslop to do the lettering with the mistake going unnoticed. Though why it's remained unchanged for all these years is beyond me!

Ed

I have to correct the first point of X35.
It has to do with the orignal reprints of the books just after the war.
Unicorn appeared in 1943 in France in colour with the pre-war backcover and was reprinted in 1946 with the new style backcover.
During these years (1943/46) most of the pre-war (black-and-white) books were completely redrawn, re-edited and colourised and available from 1946 onwards, but not Cigars of the Pharaoh.
The first post-war reprint (both in France and the Netherlands) was 1955, when the name Marlinspike was already familiar due to the reprints and the new stories published between 1946 and 1954/55: (Black Gold, Crystal Balls (both 1948), Prisoners (1949), Destination Moon (1953) and Explorers (1954)).
Quite a strange way of doing things if you consider that The Blue Lotus (the sequel to Cigars) was reprinted in 1946...
There must be a reason for the delayed reprint of Cigars...

thundercars
There must be a reason for the delayed reprint of Cigars...

Do you have any personal hypothesises about that phenomenon?

Such an anachronism matches with a much more recent one, where Lotus also precedes Cigars...

Please see the wrong official (!) cover to the 2004 book about the B&W original Tintin editions here

http://data.magicsquare.be/ouvrages/2203/017/2203017155_0g.jpg

I suppose it wasn't reprinted until 1955 because Hergé chose to redraw the entire book, whereas with Lotus he only redrew the first four pages, plus a few frames here and there. The artwork in the original black and white books improves to such an extent during the course of Lotus that it's easy to see why it was kept. Cigars was a bit naïve in its style, and whilst it worked as a black and white book would have looked out of place next to Hergé's recent masterpieces such as the Inca tale.