Tintin was born from the pencil and pen of Hergé seventy-five years ago. He lives today in the collective imagination of millions of readers for whom, in the most ordinary or the most unexpected circumstances, come reminders of one moment or another of his adventures—immediate, spontaneous, heart-warming.
Hergé's final creation begin in 1978 and remains unfinished: he worked on Alph-Art not knowing where the story would lead. He left more than an outline, a little less than an adventure, but so many possibilities, so many flights of imagination, so many dreams.
In 1986, a lavish album reproduced in facsimile the principal sketches from this work in progress.
Today, like a gift for Tintin's seventy-fifth birthday, Alph-Art has been given an entirely new presentation. The format and pagination, just like the other albums, are familiar. The layout, with its excellent legibility, enhances the drawings, the roughs, the sketches, with an ease of access that draws the reader ever more closely into the story.
The last pages—a series of unpublished documents recently discovered—shed fresh light on the 'incomplete conclusion' of the story.
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