Tintin comic strip sells for record $1.6M at Paris auction

PARIS, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- An original one-page Tintin comic strip featuring the boy detective and his dog in space fetched a record price at an auction on Saturday.

Paris auction house Artcurial announced the 12-panel comic from the book "Explorers on the Moon" sold for a world record $1.64 million.

The drawing features Tintin, his dog Snowy and Captain Haddock wandering around the moon wearing spacesuits.

The comic illustrated by Belgian comic artist Georges Remi, also known as "Herge," was drawn in Chinese ink and was expected to sell for between $741,195 to $952,965, according to the BBC.

The sale set a record for both a one-page comic strip and a world record for a post-war work by Herge.

More than 230 million Tintin albums were sold before Herge died in 1983, according to DW Akademie.

"Explorers on the Moon" was released in 1984 and is considered a masterpiece and one of Herge's most notable works.

"It is one of the most important from Herge's postwar period, on the same level as Tintin in Tibet and The Castafiore Emerald,"Artcurial's comics expert Eric Leroy said.