“India will be our testing ground before taking it to other countries,” says Uday Mathur, MD of Euro Books, which has been distributing The Adventures of Tintin series for 10 years and has now procured the rights for Quick and Flupke. In fact, to start with, the series will be available only in India, which is known to have a phenomenal Hergé fan-following — the books will be priced Rs 199 each.

The cartoon series is about two goofy boys who unintentionally cause trouble much to the annoyance of their parents and the police — it had a parallel run with Tintin in the Le Petit Vingtième for nearly a decade. “Hergé’s humour here is different from that in Tintin. But Hergé fanatics will discover the creator appearing as a character in some Quick and Flupke books,” says Mathur.

Quick and Flupke made their debut in January 1930 in the short story format while Tintin first appeared in the same newspaper in June 1929. But with the stupendous success of Tintin, and after publishing some 310 gags of Quick and Flupke, Hergé decided to devote his time to explore the adventurous of the Belgian reporter, teamed with his terrier Snowy and Captain Haddock. Still the lovable troublemakers from Hergé’s hometown refused to take a bow. They made brief appearances in Tintin in the Congo, in both the 1931 and 1946 editions. They were spotted running towards the docks in The Shooting Star as the expedition is about to set off. Unlike Belgian cartoonist’s other series, there is no chronological order to the books, though often the order that they were published in is used.

The English version of Quick and Flupke—two books containing their selected antic—-was brought out in the ‘90s. Obviously, Tintin fans in India are excited about the year-end date. Says Piyush Raghani, a passionate graphic book collector: “I loved Tintin’s outlandish adventures. I’m eager to discover what Quick and Flupke are up to.” Poet Sampurna Chattarji agrees: “I was an avid reader of Tintin in my childhood, and now I look forward to other works of Hergé”.