Tintin’s Adventures have always been everybody’s favorite. And Herge’s drawings have been favorites at auctions too. But now, one of his masterpieces set a new record. An original drawing from the popular Tintin adventure “Explorers on the Moon” sold for a whopping 1.55 million euros at a Paris auction, auction house Artcurial announced. The amount is a record for a single cartoon drawing. In 2012, the 1932 cover illustration of “Tintin in America” fetched 1.3 million euros. Herge already holds the record for the sale of a comic strip. The record-breaking ‘Explorers on the Moon’ is a 50 cm X 35 cm drawing in Chinese ink by the Belgian cartoonist which shows the boy reporter, his dog Snowy and crusty sailor Captain Haddock wearing spacesuits and walking on the moon while looking at Earth. It surpassed its expected selling price, which was estimated between 700,000 and 900,000 euros ($741,00 and $952,000). Artcurial’s comics expert Eric Leroy described the “Explorers on the Moon” as “a key moment in the history of comic book art… it has become legendary for many lovers and collectors of comic strips. It is one of the most important from Herge’s postwar period, on the same level as ‘Tintin in Tibet’ and ‘The Castafiore Emerald.”
