Tintin drawing sells for record €1.55m at auction

The comic strip page by Herge sold for a world record €1.55m by Artcurial auction house in Paris (copyright Hergé/Moulinsart 2016)

A comic strip depicting the famous boy detective Tintin has sold for a record €1.55m (£1.33m; $1.64m) in Paris.

The original plate, drawn in Chinese ink, is taken from the Explorers on the Moon story by the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known as Herge.

It shows Tintin, his dog Snowy and Captain Haddock in spacesuits walking on the moon and looking at Earth.

The sale was a record for a one-page comic strip by Herge, the Artcurial auction house said.

It said that the 50x35cm drawing also set a world record for a post-war work by the artist sold at auction.

The drawing was bought by a European collector. It had been expected to fetch between €700,000-900,000 before Saturday's sale.

The 1954 book is regarded as one of Herge's masterpieces.

"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.

Tintin is one of the most recognisable comic book characters ever created.

Translated into 90 languages and selling in excess of 200 million copies, the cartoons remain popular to this day.