Ninety years on, Tintin and The Blue Lotus return in new colour edition

Hergé's cover drawing for the first colour edition of "The Blue Lotus", published in 1946.

The Blue Lotus, the story of Tintin's adventures in Shanghai, has this week been reissued, as Hergé's legacy enters the public domain in the United States.

The Moulinsart and Casterman publishing houses are reissuing the original 1936 version of The Blue Lotusin a newly colourised version.

This new edition contains "a palette of unprecedented colours, with shades that particularly enhance the night scenes, thus revealing the intensity of the action and the beauty of the vignettes".

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America received the same treatment between 2017 and 2020.

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"The purists didn't particularly expect them, but with their large format, they have the charm of today's larger comic book images," said Benoît Peeters, an expert on Hergé's work.

Hergé and Chinese art

The preface reminds readers that Hergé held a deep appreciation for Chinese art, which he studied in order to create his backgrounds.

"I drew my taste for order, my desire to combine meticulousness with simplicity, harmony with movement from it," Hergé said in 1975, quoted in this 2025 edition of The Blue Lotus.

In his home country of Belgium, the Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve, 30km outside Brussels, explores this influence in an exhibition entitled "In China with Tintin", which opened on Friday.

(with AFP)


Read more on RFI English

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