Tintin was a major player in a sale of Comic Strip art staged in Belgium.

Extracted from Antiques Trade Gazette | Anne Crane

Works relating to Hergé’s famous creation accounted for the three highest prices and several of the top 20 lots in an online-only auction also including related items held by Millon in Brussels on March 29.

The highest-priced lot was a 7in x 10½in (18 x 27cm) pencil drawing on paper accompanied by its tracing paper transfer, showing the young reporter and his dog Milou (Snowy) opening a box from which a dove flies.

The drawing was a project for a greeting card in 1959 and was produced during the publication of the episode Tintin in Tibet in the Tintin newspaper.

The lot came with a copy of a letter from Philippe Goddin attesting that the drawings are by Hergé and realised €7000 (£6250).

Following at an upper-estimate €6000 (£5360) was a well-preserved 1930 black and white Petit Vingtième first edition of Tintin au pays des Soviets.

A 1946 coloured first edition of Le Lotus Bleu provided the third-highest price of the sale at an upper-estimate €4500 (£4020).