The Tintin comics magazine will be reborn with a special issue after a 35-year hiatus, Le Lombard editions announced Thursday during the Angoulême Festival.
“The Tintin newspaper is back!” Said this comic publisher in a press release, announcing this publication for September 8.
This special issue, for the 77th anniversary of the editions of Le Lombard, will include “almost 400 pages of stories created especially to celebrate the history of this newspaper”, by some 80 authors. But it will not have a sequel for the moment, Le Lombard not reconstituting a newsroom dedicated to a revival of the magazine.
This publishing house belongs to Média Participaciones, a different group from the one that publishes the records of tintin, namely Casterman, a subsidiary of Madrigall. The name and figure of Tintin are owned by a company owned by the heirs of its creator Hergé, Tintinimaginatio (formerly Moulinsart SA).
special condition
These beneficiaries, and in particular the British Nick Rodwell, husband of the widow of Hergé Fanny Vlamynck, agreed with this exceptional number.
“I received a curious and interested welcome from Nick Rodwell. Barely thirty minutes will have been enough to decide,” Lombard’s editorial director, Gauthier Van Meerbeeck, explained to the newspaper ‘Le Figaro’.
However, the content of the special issue illustrates Tintinimaginatio’s very strict policy regarding Tintin characters: they must not be drawn by anyone other than Hergé.
industry in trouble
Previously known for print runs of hundreds of thousands of copies, the comics press today suffers, like the rest of the magazine press, the effects of changes in reader habits, with minimal sales at newsstands and a base of subscribers difficult to expand.
The weekly Tintin, launched in 1946, had paid the price in 1988. Competition with a rival launched by Moulinsart SA, “Tintin Reporter”, had then precipitated the disappearance of the two titles.
Following a compilation of the best of the Belgian version of the newspaper in 2016, Le Lombard will publish, also in September, a volume 2 with nearly 800 pages drawn from the archives of the French version of the weekly.
Source: BFM TV
