It's actually slightly surprising to see this album is kept in print. In many other comic traditions movies come and go, with a flurry of adaptations made at the time of the initial release but they usually then drop off the radar, going out of print and never being included in subsequent collections without much comment. But some of the Franco-Belgian comics instead keep the adaptations around, regardless of their status in canon. (Another example is the book
The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, which is the illustrated text adaptation of the film of the same name, though the comic adaptation, with the English-language title "
Asterix Conquers Rome", is long out of print.) Another curiosity is the title of this album - "
Tintin and the Lake of Sharks" is almost a literal translation of the French "
Le Lac aux Requins" but the English-language Region 2 DVD calls this "
(The) Mystery of Shark Lake", with the "
The" appearing or not in different places. (Even more strangely the French title is used on the sleeve cover.) It's not clear how this difference arose but one effect is to isolate the album from the source material to the point that it can appear to almost be a twenty-fifth adventure. The back-cover gallery on all of
The Adventures of Tintin relegates this to the list of "Other Tintin Adventures to collect" (yes, plural, even when this sometimes the only one listed) but it can be found along with the other albums in bookshop displays to be obtained with all the rest, in spite of its status in the canon.
