At this point it consisted of around 150 pages of pencil-drawn notes, outlines and sketches – not yet rendered in Hergé's trademark ligne claire drawing style – with no ending having been devised for the story.

Tintin and Captain Haddock receive a phone call from their friend, the opera singer Bianca Castafiore, who informs them about a new spiritual leader whom she has begun following, Endaddine Akass, stating her intention to stay at his villa in Ischia.

Later that day, Haddock enters the Fourcart Gallery in Brussels, where Jamaican avant-garde artist Ramó Nash convinces him to purchase one of his "Alph-Art" works, a perspex letter "H" ("Personalph-Art").

Trickler (from The Broken Ear), Emir Ben Kalish Ezab (from Land of Black Gold), Luigi Randazzo (a singer), and Ramó Nash.

During the night, Tintin witnesses men loading canvases into a van, and exploring the villa discovers a room full of faked paintings by prominent artists.

Akass declares his intention to kill Tintin by having him covered in liquid polyester and sold as a work of art by César Baldaccini.

[6] Given his age, and the length of time that it was taking him to produce each Adventure, British literary critic Michael Farr suggested that Hergé likely knew that this would be his final installment in the series.

[7] The story's main antagonist, Endaddine Akass, was based on a real-life art forger, Fernand Legros, whom Hergé had learned about through reading a biography of him.

[8] The Akass character was also influenced by an article about the Indian guru Rajneesh which Hergé had read in a December 1982 edition of the Paris Match.

[12] Three months before he died, Hergé stated that "unfortunately I cannot say much about this forthcoming Tintin adventure because, though I started it three years ago, I have not had much time to work on it and still do not know how it will turn out.

[14] To do so, the sketches were edited by a team of experts, including Benoît Peeters, Michel Bareau and Jean-Manuel Duvivier, with forty-four being selected for publication.

[6] "Hergé's final, incomplete book Tintin and Alph-Art betrays in its massive self-reflexiveness a desire to be taken seriously, to be seen to be considering the highly conceptual issues in contemporary art with which its author is clearly au fait, alongside a desire to mock the highness of the establishment that never accepted him as highbrow, to expose its pretentiousness, its fraudulence".

For Michael Farr, Tintin and Alph-Art provided "an almost perfect ending to more than fifty years of defying danger, threats to his life and a succession of villains".

[15] He believed that it was "full of a vigour and enthusiasm disappointingly absent from the two previous adventures", and that as a result "it promised to be Hergé's most accomplished Tintin story for twenty years".

[21] Hergé biographer Benoît Peeters felt that "despite its limitations, and perhaps on account of them, this unfinished story fits perfectly alongside the other 23 Tintin adventures.