'The blue lotus': the controversy after the sale (for three million euros) of the most expensive comic in history

In 'The Blue Lotus' Tintin appears, in the company of his dog and wearing a silk tunic and Chinese bonnet, gazing in perplexity at a huge dragon from inside a ceramic vase.

Tintin's original illustrations are trading very high.

In recent years, unpublished plates, drafts and vignettes of the adventures of the intrepid Belgian reporter have been sold for amounts that sometimes exceed one million euros.

A few weeks ago, without going any further, a cover sketch for the album

El loto azul

(published in 1936) was put up for sale in Paris by the Artcurial auction house and became the most expensive piece of comic in history. .

An anonymous collector took the bid by putting a record amount of 3.2 million euros on the table, about half a million more than what experts expected to be paid for it.

The one in charge of wielding the hammer, the professional auctioneer Arnaud Oliveux, said that it was "an exquisite work of art that is worth every last euro invested in buying it."

The figure is perplexing, but has a precedent: in 2014, Artcurial had already sold a Hergé original for 2.65 million euros.

At that time, it was speculated that Steven Spielberg, a fan of Tintin and director of the most lavish film adaptation of his adventures (

The Secret of the Unicorn

, 2011), might be interested in bidding on the work.

If he did, it was anonymously.

The fact is that the comic book saga, which at the time was considered an editorial phenomenon of very relative cultural and artistic value, is today an object of worship.

It inspires exhibitions, lecture series, doctoral theses and retrospectives, not to mention television series or Hollywood blockbusters, and has entered the radar of art collectors very firmly.

Unsurprisingly, so much money has brought with it some controversy.

The one created by those who think that such extravagances are an unfounded eccentricity, a mere passing fad, and that it is ridiculous that Hergé's originals are priced (almost) at the level of works by Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons.

And also that of those who believe that, in this case at least, the auctioned work should never have gone on sale, because it actually belongs to the Hergé family and is part of the Belgian cultural heritage.

Journalistic chronicle in real time

In the opinion of his biographer, Dominique Maricq, the Belgian George Remi 'Hergé' is one of the great creators of literary fictions of the 20th century.

Maricq considers him to be a brilliant illustrator and an impeccable storyteller, who was as good with the pen as the brush.

Hergé (1907-1983) barely had the opportunity to make long trips until he was 60 years old, but he looked out into the big world thanks to reading and what he called his “private network of correspondents”: politicians, journalists, diplomats and travelers Unrepentant whom this human sponge, indefatigable conversationalist, questioned conscientiously to soak up information about China, Congo, the Pacific atolls, the United States or the then impenetrable Soviet Union.

The cartoonist turned all that exhaustive but second-hand knowledge into the series of graphic novels starring Tintin, the reporter with the baggy pants and the lock of carrot-colored hair, a kind of everyday hero, a la James Stewart, who toured the planet undoing wrongs and unraveling mysteries in the company of his dog Snowy.

In the book

Hergé by himself

, Maricq notes that Remi chronicled the contemporary world in real time as seen from Belgium.

In the process, he created pop mythology, surrounding his hero with a fascinating cohort of supporting characters worthy of any great literary saga: the drunken, angry and always loyal Captain Haddock;

the twin policemen Hernández and Fernández with their olympic contempt for common sense;

the deaf, autistic, and visionary professor Calculus;

the rebel (and despot) Latin American leader Colonel Tapioca;

the opera singer Bianca Castafiore, owner of a prodigious throat that shattered glass and pierced eardrums ...

The adventures of the reporter began to be published as episodic cartoons in 1929, in the children's supplement of the Belgian conservative and monarchical newspaper

Le Vingtième Siècle

.

The last album was released almost half a century later, in 1976. Between one date and another, Hergé had time to create his own studio and focus on Tintin a total of 24 graphic novels translated into 70 languages ​​and of which they have been sold around 200 million copies.

He took popular children's and youth comics to another dimension, created a contemporary icon and is one of the few European cartoonists capable of competing in success, quality and long-term impact with the great legends of American comics.

The journalist Álex Serrano, an expert in comics and owner, according to what he tells us, of a modest collection of originals related to the graphic novel, attributes the high value of Hergé's works to the fact that “tintinophiles are enthusiastic and very active, especially in France".

In addition, "there are not so many relics of this author in circulation and available, which makes the expectation soar when something new appears."

For Serrano, "the market for comic book originals is an area for collecting and investing in exponential growth."

Those who land in it "bet on the great masters because they consider them a safe value, and that is where Hergé comes in, who is one of the greatest."

As if that were not enough, everyone knows Tintin, a product / franchise hardly comparable: “A Michelangelo, a Picasso, a Warhol or a Bansky are something within the reach of fewer and fewer pockets, while an original by Hergé, Jack Kirby or Richard Corben is kept, with some exceptions like the cover of

The Blue Lotus

, within comparatively reasonable parameters and, in addition, it has the added sentimental value ”.

After all, "who has not grown up with a Tintin comic, the Fantastic Four or the X-Men?"

For all these reasons, the price escalation that has been taking place around Hergé and his world in recent years is, for Serrano, "a phenomenon as striking as, basically, logical".

He follows it with somewhat distant interest: "I admit that Tintin does not excite me."

Dragon ink

The illustration auctioned two weeks ago is a true rarity, a much cleaner and more detailed version of what would end up being the final album cover.

In it Tintin appears, in the company of his dog and wearing a silk tunic and Chinese bonnet, gazing in perplexity at a huge dragon from inside a ceramic vase.

The superb fantasy reptile, with a reddish body and covered with scales, is projected in a spectacular arabesque on a background full of Chinese ideograms.

According to comics expert Eric Leroy, it is a sketch sent to the Casterman publishing house for a proofing press.

Its author suggested that the cover be printed in trichotomy, which would have given a very special color and spectacularity to the album that he, at that time, considered his masterpiece, “the best I have written and drawn since I dedicated myself to this ”.

The publisher asked for a quote and the printing company replied that it would cost 1,150 francs, more than double what they were willing to spend, so the idea was scrapped.

A version with a much more basic finish was chosen, with a black dragon and hardly any relief on a red background from which the ideograms had been suppressed.

From there, the stories differ.

Hergé's heirs insist that it was agreed that the discarded original be returned to its author, which the publisher did not do.

Before the auction, Artcurial published on his website that Hergé himself had already chosen in 1936 to give it to Jean-Paul Casterman, the seven-year-old son of his publisher, a fan of Tintin whom his father took from time to time. to visit the cartoonist's studio.

That would also explain why the illustration is folded: little Jean-Paul thanked the gift and, without the slightest reverence (it was a toy for him, not a work of art), he folded it several times and kept it in the pages of a notepad that he carried in his school bag.

A poisoned gift?

Philippe Goddin, author of the seven volumes of the illustrated series

The Art of Hergé

, says that this version of events is "a beautiful fable, but a fable after all".

What actually happened, according to Goddin's version, is that Casterman kept the original "by negligence or carelessness" and Hergé, who was not yet the highly sought-after author and well aware of the intrinsic value of his work that it would eventually become , forgot to claim it.

The hems are explained because the illustrator did not have time to take it personally to the publisher and sent it by post, so he had to fold it to fit in the envelope.

Archyde

magazine

has devoted a very comprehensive article to unraveling such a thorny issue.

It describes the cover of

The Blue Lotus

as "a disputed treasure" and states that the sale made by Artcurial could end up being canceled.

Archyde

cites sources such as Nick Rodwell, husband of Hergé's second wife, Fanny Vlamynck, and current executor of the Belgian cartoonist's artistic and literary legacy.

For Rodwell, the sketch should be returned, without further ado, to the Hergé museum in Louvain-la-Neuve, thirty kilometers from Brussels.

It was exhibited there on an earlier occasion, at a time when Hergé's heirs and Casterman's heirs cooperated very closely.

The publisher's family was not considering selling an estate that, according to Rodwell, they were not legal owners and that they only had "in provisional custody."

If that were true, the Casterman heirs would have sold a precious object that never belonged to them and that they would have kept irregularly for 84 years.

Rodwell insists that the story of the disinterested gift to Casterman's son is a recent invention, an afterthought attempt to misappropriate the piece.

Artcurial argues that the drawing has not only been exhibited on multiple occasions, but has also been quoted or reproduced in various compilations of Hergé's work without prompting any reaction from Rodwell.

The auctioneers find it clear that the executor is creating an artificial controversy to claim "his share of the pie."

I simply did not expect that this sheet drawn in a few hours in February 1936 and hastily delivered for a test press would sell, at this point, for 400,000 euros more than what was hitherto the most comic-related object. expensive in the world, a Superman comic auctioned in 2011. Be that as it may, the million-dollar sale of the aborted cover of

The Blue Lotus

could end up in court.

At the moment, it is already in the record books.