Tintin breaks a new record!

It seems that not a month goes by these days without a new record being broken at a comic strip auction. As the hammer falls the prices of artwork by Hergé, Hugo Pratt and Enki Bilal get higher and higher.

On Sunday 14 December more than 300 collectors came together to battle it out at a sale organised by Millon & Associés. The sale, held in Paris and Brussels simultaneously, brought in more than 1.89 million Euros. Drawings by Uderzo, Morris and Franquin were sold alongside the star piece: Hergé's artwork for the cover of King Ottokar's Sceptre! This pencil and Indian ink drawing, dating from 1939, was drawn for a cover of Le Petit Vingtième magazine and was estimated at 350,000 Euros. After a protracted fight the lot was sold to an anonymous bidder for 539,880 Euros, including fees, a record for this particular magazine front-cover type of drawing.

Earlier this year, in May, an American bidder scooped the centrepiece of a sale – the original artwork for the blue flyleaf pages of a certain series of Tintin albums, showing Tintin and Snowy in 34 poses – for 2.6 million Euros.