Note that most of these (French language) magazines have been archived - digitized. You can find them at various places online, for example the network of sites that offer college textbooks for free. Anna’s *cough* place, Library *cough* and similar.
Those magazines are quite interesting for a variety of reasons. About once a month you’ll see a couple pages of whatever Tintin adventure is running at the time, plus a bunch of other running series and single-pagers, mixed with ads and editorial stuff. Little time capsules, if you will. As for those early Tintin pages, you’ll be seeing stuff that later got edited, condensed, or simply cut from the collected books. Not to mention, almost all of them were later redrawn by Hergé’s assistants.
My personal take is that most of the other series seen in the magazine aren’t near the level of classic Tintin, and some of them are completely forgettable, but it’s interesting to see the variance in quality… the stuff that had potential and the other stuff that was completely locked in to that time and place, rarely to be seen again.
These magazines have always been a super important part of the bande dessinée landscape. When I was a kid I would read modern versions of the descendants of the journals like Le journal de Tintin.
My take was always that writers could try stuff out and make solidify content for their albums they would later publish. At the end of the day, all the extra one pagers or adventures were always refreshing. When you have read all of Tintin 46 times over, anything more will do!
My take was always that writers could try stuff out
Excellent point. The magazines were definitely at more of the ‘testing level’ than the book level, serving a hugely important role across BD. AFAIK there’s very little counterpart in the States, and I would think that probably hasn’t been a good thing.
