Lavonardo

The artist of the message-wise sub-optimal, but technically good recent copyright-propaganda album, Anssi Rauhala, has been prolific lately.

This week’s suomen kuvalehti describes how a forthcoming comic album will tie together both global (Mary Magdalena, as expected) and local (Lalli and Henrik) histories of the church.

Sounds interesting, and the few frames of art seem good enough to maintain interest. The style is close to belgian classics from the seventies (Spirou, Natasha), which is definitely a merit in my book.

So it all depends on the execution of the story. If it manages to add something to the well-chewed legend it might be interesting indeed, but in the post-danbrownian era of biblical conspiracies everywhere a new point of view might be a bit too much to ask for.

Surprisingly enough the publishing company’s site has no mention of the album at all. Suomen kuvalehti was a bit premature in pushing information about the last Tintin-album, as it took several weeks as opposed to just one for that one to materialize into the shops.

The last untranslated Tintin-album finally made it to a finnish edition, as the 24th album Tintin and Alph-Art was published this week.

The publication omission may seem curious, the albums have been steady sellers for decades. That is, until the last volume is picked up and browsed. It is very much an unfinished product, with most of the pages filled with pencil sketches and snippets of dialogue. Hergé worked on the book until his death in 1983, and it was posthumously published a couple of years later.

I bought the book in french a few years back, but have never got around to reading it (and it’s by no means the only comic book waiting for me to pick up studying french again). The finnish version is an update from the original edition, and is supplemented by further material (such as an ongoing typewritten narrative on alternate pages – the original only had Hergés scribbled text) than what was originally available in 1986.

Pirate editions, with finished artwork, of the album exist, and I’ve even seen a finnish version thereof available on the web. It was located on a slow server, and the translation was suboptimal, hence I never bothered to browse beyond page four. But now’s the time to curl up on the sofa and read the last pages of the uncrowned master of adventure comic.