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 Lotus – in 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.
"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.
One key figure in Hergé's fascination with Chinese art was Tchang Tchong-Jen, a young Chinese student he met at the Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
According to the Musée Hergé: "For both artists, this cultural encounter between East and West was a tremendous opening to the world, but also, and above all, the start of a beautiful friendship. Their complicity is such that it extended onto paper, giving birth to a new Tintin adventure, one that was more sensitive and human than the previous stories, as it symbolised the brotherhood forged between Tintin and [Tchang]."
A biography, Tchang Tchong-Jen: Travelling Artist, written by his daughter Tchang Yifei and Tintin expert Dominique Maricq, was also released by Casterman and Moulinsart on Wednesday.
Copyright in the US vs EU
The original black and white edition of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is no longer protected by copyright in the United States, as of 1 January. Under US law, works older than 95 years can be freely exploited, regardless of the author's date of death.
But for the Belgian artist's heirs, this is a "non-event," as they told French broadcaster BFMTV in December.
"The economic stake is low. Tintin is barely present in the US, as seen with the relatively modest success of Spielberg's film," confirms Peeters, referring to The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, released in 2011.
In Europe and Canada, Tintin remains fully protected until 1 January, 2054. European Union copyright terms extend 70 years past creators' deaths, and Hergé died in 1983.
The heirs – Hergé's widow, Fanny Vlamynck, 90, and her second husband, Nick Rodwell, 72 – maintain a strict stance in line with the creator's last wishes: a strict ban on anyone drawing Tintin and his companions.
Peeters explained: "There is often talk of abuse on their part. However, it must be reiterated that in the era of piracy and the theft of books by AI, it is normal to protect an author's work, even long after their death. And that's what they are doing."
(with AFP)
