!!better!! - 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.
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.
Today, the “Herge Anna Ralphs” provenance mark is a coveted notation in rare comic art auctions. A small museum in Louvain-la-Neuve displays her inking pens beside Hergé’s own. And every year, a scholarship is awarded in her name to a woman working in European comics—a quiet tribute to the ghost who helped draw a clear line for the boy reporter who never grew up. herge anna ralphs
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 returned to England, married, and became a textile designer under her married name. She never spoke of Tintin again. What followed was a quiet revolution in Tintin scholarship
Back in 1998, Anna Ralphs—then an 86-year-old widow living in Dorset—received a letter from the young designer who had found her signature. The letter asked a simple question: “Were you the second hand of Hergé?”
The story she would unravel began not with a mystery, but with a ghost. Anna Ralphs was an English-born illustrator living in
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.
