Anna was not a Tintinologist by training. She was a typography scholar with a passion for overlooked linework. But when she traced her finger over a signature in the margin of a 1930 proof sheet, she noticed something strange. The signature read “Hergé,” but the ink pressure and character spacing were subtly different from thousands of others she’d been hired to authenticate.
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. herge anna ralphs
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.” Anna was not a Tintinologist by training
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. The signature read “Hergé,” but the ink pressure
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?”
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.
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.