Herge — Anna Ralphs

Anna Ralphs was an English-born illustrator living in Brussels, known for her clean, geometric ink work in textile pattern books. Hergé’s publisher, Paul Lombard, hired her as a ghost inker on a six-month trial in 1936. Her job was simple: fill in the large black spaces, trace the backgrounds, and copy the secondary characters from Hergé’s rough pencils.

Art historians re-examined The Broken Ear (1937) and The Black Island (1938). In dozens of panels—the feathers of a parrot, the ripples of a lake, the texture of a stone wall—they found Anna’s touch. Her contribution was not large, but it was distinct. She had taught Hergé that a clean line could still carry emotion.

Anna Ralphs died in 2001, but not before her name was added to the official credits of two Tintin albums. The “Hergé” signature on those early proofs, she explained in her final interview, was often her own. “He was busy,” she said with a shrug. “I had neat handwriting.” herge anna ralphs

What followed was a quiet revolution in Tintin scholarship. Anna produced a small portfolio of personal sketches from 1936–37, including a full-page ink of “Tintin in a Forest” that had never been published. The trees, she pointed out, were drawn with a stippling technique Hergé never used—but that matched English textile patterns of the era.

Georges Remi, known to the world as Hergé, was a meticulous but overwhelmed artist by the mid-1930s. Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America had made him a celebrity in Belgium, but his deadlines were crushing. His studio, though small, needed help. History remembers his later assistants—Edgar P. Jacobs, Bob de Moor—but before them, there was a shadow figure: a young woman named Hermine “Anna” Ralphs. Anna Ralphs was an English-born illustrator living in

But Anna did more than that. She had a flair for expressive line weight—something Hergé’s ligne claire (“clear line”) style would later become famous for. In the margins of rejected panels, she sketched tiny jokes: a dog that looked like Snowy but with a curled tail; a sailor with a pipe who resembled a young Captain Haddock years before he was created.

In the quiet, book-lined study of a Brussels townhouse, a young graphic designer named Anna Ralphs made a discovery that would reshape how the world saw one of its most beloved artists. The year was 1998, and she was cataloging a donation of vintage Le Petit Vingtième newspapers—the youth supplement where a certain boy reporter first appeared. Art historians re-examined The Broken Ear (1937) and

The story she would unravel began not with a mystery, but with a ghost.