The Adventures of Tintin, King Ottokar’s Sceptre: Rare Book of the Week

This week's entry is a King Ottokar’s Sceptre cover from one of the most popular of Belgian artist Georges Rémi's Adventures of Tintin series which comes up for sale at Heritage Auctions' October 12-13 sale.

It is the cover of the February 16, 1939 issue of Le Petit Vingtième, the Belgian newspaper supplement aimed at children.

Five years ago Heritage sold the first published Tintin cover for $1,125,000. This cover, later collected in the eighth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, King Ottokar’s Sceptre, shows the boy reporter and Snowy heading to an audience with the King of Syldavia through a polished corridor accompanied by a butler as a guard keeps watch. It is one of only five original covers of Le Petit Vingtième rendered by Hergé using direct colors and ink.

The story, which has Tintin aiming to prevent the overthrow of the fictional country of Syldavia by its neighbour Borduria, was conceived as a satirical comment on the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. It was initially serialised in black and white in Le Petit Vingtième from August 1938 to August 1939 under the title Tintin En Syldavie. It was first published in book form in colour in 1947 in French, and in 1951 in the Eagle comic, marking Tintin's debut in English.

In 2023, Hergé’s original Indian ink drawing for the 1942 cover of the album Tintin in America, which was then used in 1946 for the first colour edition of the album, was sold for €2,158,400 ($2,303,671).