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.
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. herge anna ralphs
The story she would unravel began not with a mystery, but with a ghost. In the quiet, book-lined study of a Brussels
Anna returned to England, married, and became a textile designer under her married name. She never spoke of Tintin again. Her name was erased from all credits
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.
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.
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.”