The Adventures of Tintin Continue at Heritage Auctions As an Original 1939 Hergé Cover Tops International Comic Art Event

Oct. 12-13 auction features iconic covers starring Juan Giménez’s Metabarons, Matt Wagner’s Batman, Charles Burns’ Big Baby and more DOWNLOAD DIGITAL PRESS KIT DALLAS, Texas (Sept. 27, 2024) — Heritage’s October 12-13 International Comic Art Signature® Auction, now open for bidding, counts among its hefty highlights an original work featuring comicdom’s most cherished and celebrated world traveler: perennial teen titan Tintin as rendered by his creator, the Belgian artist Georges Rémi, better known as Hergé. This clever, colorful work is among the most desirable Tintin illustrations ever offered at auction, hailing from the cover of the Feb. 16, 1939, Le Petit Vingtième, long ago a Belgian newspaper supplement aimed at children. Now, 85 years on, grown-ups will wrangle over this landmark artwork considered among the most prized pieces in Hergé’s portfolio. Iconic images of superheroes abound in this event alongside strips and sketches whose makers impacted generations of creators to come. Here, you will find something for everyone by someone from everywhere — from Batman to the Watchmen, a Krazy Kat to a Big Baby, the X-Men to the X-rated Little Annie Fanny, Donald Duck to the Swamp Thing, Tarzan to Vampirella. These are the first drafts of franchises, the templates for tentpoles, the origins of myth. Yet towering above them all is the 95-year-old teenage boy who, The New York Times once noted, is “the antithesis of a superhero” — an orphaned kid reporter-turned-world adventurer with a tuft of upswept hair whose sidekick is a dog named Snowy. Tintin made his debut in 1929 and was born fully formed: “excessively virtuous, chivalrous, brave, a defender of the weak and oppressed, never looks for trouble but always finds it,” Pierre Assouline wrote in the 1996 biography Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin. Since his creation, Tintin has been forever 15, which explains why children so adored the hero before, perhaps, moving on to slam-bang stories about men in tights. Five years after Heritage sold the first published Tintin cover for $1,125,000, the auction house is delighted to offer this historic cover, later collected in the eighth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, King Ottokar’s Sceptre. The image is that of a boy and his faithful companion strolling through a polished corridor accompanied by a butler as a guard keeps watch. Tintin seeks an audience with the King of Syldavia to warn him of a plot hatched by traitors. It looks deceptively simple. Yet, as Tintinomania has noted, Hergé archivist Dominique Maricq wrote extensively about this piece, noting that “the scene is cleverly constructed, with a very particular dynamism, playing on the contrast produced between the grid of the slabs, doubled by that of the windows, and the presence of the different protagonists, all in curves and roundness. We are in the presence of an image in motion, a movement underlined by the use of vanishing lines in which the head and feet of Tintin and the butler are inscribed.” Matt Wagner’s cover of Batman No. 635 certainly has dynamism, too, pitting Batman against the Red Hood for the first time as lightning splits the sky behind them (shades of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns!). This issue, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in December, marked writer Judd Winick’s bow on the book and reintroduced Jason Todd — the second Robin, murdered by the Joker and later resurrected — beneath the mask worn decades earlier by the once-and-future Joker. Speaking of: Batman No. 251 features one of the Joker’s most famous cover appearance, rendered by the late Neal Adams, who penciled the entire book about the Bat-villain’s murderous revenge plot against gangsters who helped land him in the Mental Hospital for the Criminally Insane. A page from this landmark book, a rare one both penciled and inked by Adams, is likely to stand among the most fought-over in this auction given its five fabulous frames of Batman, among them a signature Adams close-up of the Dark Knight. No less iconic is revered Argentine comic book writer and artist Juan Giménez’s cover of The Metabarons: No Name, The Last Metabaron No. 8, which wrapped that series about a fierce, celestial clan of warriors pit against the Techno Empire with this powerful, poignant portrait of the title character. This late into the epic saga, by the artist and his co-creating collaborator, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, it has been essentially pared down to One Man Against an Entire Empire — and that one man, the so-called ultimate warrior, stares out of this cover looking like a steely-eyed, space-age Terence Stamp. “In every piece of comic art, there lies a story not just of the characters, but of the creators and fans who breathe life into them,” says Olivier Delflas, Heritage Auctions’ Director of International Comic Art and Anime. “This auction is a tribute to the artistry and passion that have shaped generations, uniting timeless icons like Tintin, Batman and Metabarons in a shared legacy. It's not just about owning a piece of history; it’s about celebrating the imagination that continues to inspire us whether we’re readers or collectors.” Heritage has been fortunate enough over the years to offer several of Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen covers — including those paintings Gibbons and John Higgins made for the French hardback iterations, Les Gardiens, which each contained two issues of the comic book about comic books (and their readers). One of those appears here: the cover of Les Gardiens No. 6, featuring Adrian Veidt as Ozymandias, which DC later included in the hard-to-find Watchmen portfolios published in 1988. But to a certain demographic — underground-dwellers raised on RAW, for whom limited-edition one-shots by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s proteges were the equivalent of numbered baseball cards — Charles Burns’ cover of the 1991 Curse of the Molemen reissue ranks high on the list of most-coveted covers. Burns was the artist of the Sub Pop generation, a graphic novelist who rendered the unsettling as perfectly normal and the perfectly normal as profanely disquieting. Curse of the Molemen, featuring his Big Baby, was originally printed in black-and-white by RAW, then reissued by Kitchen Sink as a colorized homage to the EC Comics of the pre-Code 1950s. This cover belongs alongside the works of Johnny Craig, Wally Wood and Al Feldstein. British artist and author Don Lawrence started working on superhero titles, including Mick Anglo’s original 1950s Marvelman long before the character’s resurrection as Miracleman. By the 1960s, he had worked in nearly every genre, from Westerns to sci-fi to swashbucklers to religious stories. By the late 1970s, Lawrence was best known for his Storm series, about a 21st-century astronaut caught in a space storm that lost him in time. Heritage is thrilled to present at auction for the first time Lawrence’s original cover of Storm: The Legend of Yggdrasil No. 7, featuring the title character trapped on a post-apocalyptic earth where intelligent, sword-wielding dinosaurs square off against time-traveling humans. Click here to browse the entire spinner rack in the October 12-13 International Comic Art Signature® Auction. Heritage Auctions is the largest fine art and collectibles auction house founded in the United States, and the world's largest collectibles auctioneer. Heritage maintains offices in New York, Dallas, Beverly Hills, Chicago, Palm Beach, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Heritage also enjoys the highest Online traffic and dollar volume of any auction house on earth (source: SimilarWeb and Hiscox Report). The Internet's most popular auction-house website, HA.com, has more than 1,750,000 registered bidder-members and searchable free archives of 6,000,000 past auction records with prices realized, descriptions and enlargeable photos. Reproduction rights routinely granted to media for photo credit. For breaking stories, follow us: HA.com/Facebook and HA.com/Twitter . Link to this release or view prior press releases . Hi-Res images available: Robert Wilonsky, VP Public Relations and Communications 214-409-1887 or RobertW@HA.com