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A Day at the Airport (French: Un jour d'hiver, dans un aéroport) was a proposed work in Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin series.
History[]
In 1973, during a stopover at Rome-Fiumicino airport, Hergé came up with the idea for a new Tintin album. He began to sketch out the story three years later, when the album Tintin and the Picaros was completed. Like the album The Castafiore Emerald, which takes place entirely at Marlinspike Hall and its immediate surroundings, the entire plot of this project takes place in an airport terminal, and Hergé imposed two principles on himself:
The reader must be able to open the album at any page and continue the story to the last page, which picks up where the first page left off.
Nothing happens in this album. Every time the reader thinks the action is about to start, it is a misunderstanding.
For several years, Hergé explored several avenues, including the idea that Tintin would encounter a multitude of characters from previous albums: Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, R.W. Trickler, Bianca Castafiore, Jolyon Wagg, J. W. Müller, General Alcazar, Thomson and Thompson, Professor Cuthbert Calculus, Nestor, the CEO of Whisky Loch Lomond, Bunji Kuraki (the detective from The Crab with the Golden Claws), Abdullah, and even the Maharajah of Gopal, a character mentioned in The Castafiore Emerald but who mainly comes from Jo, Zette and Jocko. However, the workload was phenomenal. Discouraged, Hergé gave up and decided to tackle a completely different story, retaining certain ideas from the project, notably the fact that Captain Archibald Haddock takes up painting, attends exhibitions and becomes infatuated with Ramó Nash, creator of Alph-art.
Yves Rodier had planned to finish this album as soon as his version of Alph-Art was completed. However, given the reception, it received from Hergé's beneficiaries, he put an end to the project. Only a few sketches and one inked page survived.