Bob De Moor’s Cori as seen by Michel Pierret in 1981

To celebrate the 35 years of the Tintin Journal in 1981, the younger generation of Tintin comic artists was asked to create their version of the older generation’s work. The results were published under “Brouiller les cartes” in a special of Tintin Journal, issue 39 of 1981. 3 pages were dedicated to Bob De Moor’s work. We already showed you what Michel Weyland and Jean-Claude Servais contributed, today we give you the 3rd tribute, by Michel Pierret this time. Pierret is a Belgian scenarist and comic author mostly known for Les Aventures de Papilio (Éditions Plotch Splaf) but also for his work on Les Aigles décapitées (Glénat, collection Vécu), Hidalgos (Glénat), Les Déesses (Glénat) etc.. He decided to have a go at De Moor’s masterwork Cori, more precisely page 14 from the first story, as originally published in the Tintin Journal issue 51, from 1951.

Bob De Moor's version on the left, Michel Pierret's version on the right.
Bob De Moor’s version on the left, Michel Pierret’s version on the right.

Let’s take a closer look. Michel Pierret has 11 frames in his version, that’s one more than Bob De Moor‘s original version, but that’s due to Pierret using a standalone frame for the caption which De Moor had integrated in frame 4. The frame composition is also somewhat different as you can see, De Moor’s being more traditional.

Textually only frame 8 from De Moor’s version is different in Pierret’s version. Pierret decided to remove the line ‘Timonnier Coster’. Note that the original dutch text differs even more with the french translation, but that’s material for another article.

So let’s have a look at the action in the drawings. Whereas Pierret follows the drawings quite closely for his first and final frames, he decides to inverse the action in the Bob De Moor‘s cases numbers 5 and 7. You can see that Cori is looking to the left in De Moor’s version and to the right in Pierret’s version of case 5, this way keeping the flow of the action in the reading direction. The same happens in De Moor’s case number 7 where Michel Pierret puts the unconscious Cori on the left, again keeping the action going towards the right.

Thanks to the late Daniel Bellier for scanning these Tintin journal pages.

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