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 was not a Tintinologist by training. She was a typography scholar with a passion for overlooked linework. But when she traced her finger over a signature in the margin of a 1930 proof sheet, she noticed something strange. The signature read “Hergé,” but the ink pressure and character spacing were subtly different from thousands of others she’d been hired to authenticate. herge anna ralphs
The story she would unravel began not with a mystery, but with a ghost. Art historians re-examined The Broken Ear (1937) and
For reasons lost to time—perhaps a salary dispute, perhaps a clash of egos—Anna Ralphs left Hergé’s studio in late 1937. Her name was erased from all credits. Hergé never mentioned her publicly. When he fled Brussels during the Nazi occupation, many of her original inkings were left behind or destroyed. She had taught Hergé that a clean line