Tintin auction
A student looks at a lightbox depicting the comic strip character Tintin by Brussels-born author Georges Remi, better known as Herge, displayed in a shop at the Herge Museum in Louvain-La-Neuve Yves Herman/Reuters

A colour drawing by legendary Belgian cartoonist Herge depicting Tintin and his dog Snowy, has sold for more than half a million euros at an auction in Paris. The ink and watercolour picture shows the pair with a butler in a royal palace.

The drawing was the cover illustration for a serialisation of Herge's story King Ottokar's Sceptre published in newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle in 1939. The story became the eighth volume of the stories about young reporter Tintin.

Le Vingtieme Siecle originally published the drawing in black and white.

It was sold for €505,000 (£450,000) at auction house Artcurial as part of a larger collection of drawings, toys and figurines by the artist known as Herge, whose real name is Georges Prosper Remi.

"Original Tintin works are today becoming more and more rare at auction, especially those from the 1930s and 1940s," said Eric Leroy, cartoons expert at Artcurial told AFP.

The sale of the painting follows the sale of a comic strip for £1.3 million in November 2016. The artwork depicted Tintin and boozy sailor Captain Haddock walking on the lunar surface in one of the author's most famous works Explorers on the Moon.

At the time, Leroy described the sale as "a key moment in the history of comic-book art... it has become mythic for many lovers and collectors of comic strips".