The Adventures Of Tintin The Black Island

[Theodora Andy]

TheBlack Island (French: L'le noire) is the seventh volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Herg. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtime Sicle for its children's supplement Le Petit Vingtime, it was serialised weekly from April to November 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to England in pursuit of a gang of counterfeiters. Framed for theft and hunted by detectives Thomson and Thompson, Tintin follows the criminals to Scotland, discovering their lair on the Black Island.

Tintin witnesses a plane land in the Belgian countryside, and is shot by the pilot when he offers his help. While he recovers in hospital, detectives Thomson and Thompson visit him and inform him that the plane subsequently flew to Sussex, England, where it crashed. Tintin and Snowy proceed to Sussex, but along the way, two criminals frame Tintin for robbery, and he is arrested by Thomson and Thompson; he escapes, but is pursued by the detectives. After arriving in England by ferry in Newhaven, both Tintin and the taxi driver are ambushed by the same criminals, who attempt to kill him over the cliffs of Seaford, but he escapes with Snowy's help. Discovering the plane wreckage, he finds a torn-up note in the pilot's jacket, and following the writing on it arrives at the estate of Dr. J. W. Mller, a German who owns a mental institution, affiliated with the criminals. Mller captures Tintin, but, during a fight, Mller's house catches fire. The fire brigade arrives just in time to extinguish the fire and rescue Tintin from the burning house, while Mller escapes with his accomplice Ivan.[1]

The following morning after recovering in hospital, Tintin finds electric cables and red beacons in the garden, surmising that they are there designed to attract a plane drop. At night, he lights the beacons, and a plane drops sacks of counterfeit money, revealing that Mller is part of a gang of forgers. Tintin pursues Mller and Ivan by car and by train across the country. Along the way, Thompson and Thomson try to arrest him again, but Tintin convinces them to join him in the pursuit of the criminals. When Mller takes a plane north, Tintin and Snowy try to follow, but hit a storm and crash land in rural Scotland. The detectives commandeer another plane, but discover - too late - that the man they told to fly it is actually a mechanic who has never flown before, and after a harrowing air-bound odyssey they end up crash-landing into (and winning) an aerobatics competition.[2]

For his next serial, Herg planned to put together a story that caricatured the actions of Nazi Germany, developing the plot for King Ottokar's Sceptre.[9] However, he temporarily set aside that project when he began to experience dreams of white and a car stuck in the snow, having ideas of sending Tintin to the north, considering Greenland or the Klondike as potential locations.[9] The result was The Black Island, although Herg only sent Tintin as far north as Scotland, and he instead used the idea of the car stuck in a snowdrift on a greetings card that he designed.[10] He also had an idea of Tintin combating a group of anarchists bent on destroying Europe's iconic buildings, but again this idea did not make it into the eventual story.[11] Having decided to set most of his story in Britain, Herg briefly visited London and the southern English coast to learn more about the country. There, he purchased a stainless steel Gillott's Inqueduct G-2 pen, a type that he would continue to use throughout his life.[12] His positive depiction of Britain was in part due to an Anglophilia that he had received from his childhood, with the British government having been a longstanding ally of Belgium, supporting its 1831 creation and liberating it from German occupation during the First World War.[13]

Herg retained the anti-German sentiment that he had first considered for King Ottokar's Sceptre through the inclusion of a German villain, Dr. Mller,[10] who would go on to become a recurring character in the Tintin series.[14] He based the character largely on Georg Bell [de], a Scottish forger who had been a vocal supporter of the Nazi regime, and who he had learned about from a February 1934 article of the anti-conformist Belgian magazine La Crapouillot (The Mortar Shell). Mller's counterfeiting operations were inspired by Bell's actions, as he was involved in a plot to destabilise Soviet Russia through counterfeiting Russian roubles.[13][15] Rather than Germans, Mller's henchmen were given the Russian names Ivan and Wronzoff, although the latter would be renamed Puschov by Michael Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper for the English translation.[13]Forging banknotes was a topical crime at the time,[10] while the idea of villains using superstition to hide their lair was a common trope, one that Herg had used previously in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.[16]The idea of Ranko brought together two popular fictional creatures of the 1930s; the giant ape King Kong, who had been introduced in the film King Kong (1933), and the Loch Ness Monster, a cryptid who was to have lived in Loch Ness.[17] Gaston Leroux's character of Balaoo the gorilla, who had appeared in a 1911 book and a 1913 film, might also have been an influence on Ranko.[16] The plot and themes of the story were also influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film The 39 Steps, itself an adaptation of John Buchan's 1915 adventure novel.[18]

The Black Island was first serialised in Le Petit Vingtime from 15 April to 16 November 1937 under the title Le Mystre De L'Avion Gris (The Mystery of the Grey Plane).[19] From 17 April 1938, the story was also serialised in the French Catholic newspaper, Cœurs Vaillants.[20]In 1938, ditions Casterman collected the story together in a single hardcover volume, publishing it under the title L'le noire (The Black Island).[20] Herg however was unhappy with this publication due to errors throughout, most egregiously that the front cover omitted his name.[21]

The inclusion of a television in the original version would have surprised many readers. The BBC had only introduced television to Britain in the late 1930s (suspended entirely until 1946) and Belgium would not have television until 1955.[22]

In the 1940s and 1950s, when Herg's popularity had increased, he and his team at Studios Herg redrew and coloured many of the original black-and-white Tintin adventures. They used the ligne claire ("clear line") drawing style that Herg had developed, in this way ensuring that the earlier stories fitted in visually alongside the new Adventures of Tintin being created. Casterman published this second, colourised version of the story in 1943, reduced from 124 pages to 60.[20]This second version contained no significant changes from the original 1937 one,[22] although the black-and-white television screen that had appeared in the 1930s version was now depicted as a colour screen, despite the fact that such technology was not yet available.[23]

In the early 1960s, Herg's English language publishers, Methuen, were planning on translating and publishing The Black Island for the British market. Methuen believed that many British readers would find the depiction of Britain in the comic inaccurate and out-of-date, and drew up a list of 131 errors that they asked Herg to rectify before they would publish it in English.[23] They were also aware that the work would appear particularly dated when compared with some of the most recently published Adventures like Destination Moon and The Calculus Affair, which made use of advanced technologies in their plot.[22] At the time, Herg was busy producing the twenty-second Tintin story, Flight 714 to Sydney, and so did not have the time to undertake research into contemporary British society and culture. Instead, he sent his assistant Bob De Moor to Britain in October 1961, where he visited such sites as Batemans and the White Cliffs of Dover, making many observations as to new developments in clothing and architecture. While in England, De Moor sought out various contemporary uniforms to use as a basis for more accurate illustrations. A police constabulary lent him a police uniform, although when he asked British Rail if he could borrow one of their uniforms, their staff were suspicious and refused.[24]

The new version was serialised in Tintin magazine from June to December 1965,[25] before Casterman published it in a collected volume in 1966.[20] Studios Herg made many alterations to the illustrations as a result of De Moor's research. Reflecting the fact that television had become increasingly commonplace in Western Europe, Herg changed the prose from "It's a television set!" to "It's only a television set!"[10] However, as colour television was not yet available in Britain, the screen on the television encountered in Britain was once again reverted to black-and-white.[23] Additionally, at least one line of dialogue was "softened" from the original version - in one scene where Tintin aims a pistol at two of the counterfeiters, he states, "Get back! And put up your hands!" compared to the original's "One more step and you're dead!".[16] The counterfeit notes that Tintin finds were also increased in value, from one pound to five pounds.[16] The multiple aircraft featured throughout the story were redrawn by Studios member Roger Leloup, who replaced the depiction of planes that were operational in the 1930s to those active at the time, such as a Percival Prentice, a D.H. Chipmunk, a Cessna 150, a Tiger Moth, and a British European Airways Hawker Siddeley Trident.[26]

The clothing worn by characters was brought up-to-date, while the old steam locomotives that were initially featured were replaced by more modern diesel or electrified alternatives.[27] Adverts for the genuine Johnnie Walker whisky were replaced by adverts for the fictional in-universe Loch Lomond whisky,[27] while a Sussex County Council signpost was added to page 11.[27] Various English towns and villages were renamed, with Puddlecombe becoming Littlegate, and Eastbury becoming Eastdown,[27] while Scottish pub Ye Dolphin was renamed The Kiltoch Arms.[28] The police were no longer depicted as carrying guns, as was accurate,[28] while the journalists Christopher Willoughby-Drupe and Marco Rizotto, who had first appeared in The Castafiore Emerald (1963), were retroactively added into the background of one scene.[29]With the backgrounds and other elements of the new version drawn by staff members of the Studios, the only thing drawn by Herg in the 1966 version was the characters themselves.[30]

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