The Black Island () is the seventh volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper for its children's supplement , 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.
The Black Island was a commercial success and was published in book form by Casterman shortly after its conclusion. Hergé continued The Adventures of Tintin with King Ottokar's Sceptre, while the series itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition. In 1943, The Black Island was coloured and re-drawn in Hergé's distinctive style for republication. In the mid-1960s, Hergé's British publishers requested a major revision of the story, for which he sent his assistant Bob De Moor to Britain on a research trip; on his return, Studios Hergé produced a revised, third edition of the story, serialised in Tintin magazine. The Black Island introduces the recurring villain Dr. Müller, and has been widely cited as one of the most popular instalments in the series. The story was adapted for the 1957 Belvision animation Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, the 1980–81 West End play Tintin and the Black Island, the 1991 Ellipse/Nelvana animated series The Adventures of Tintin, and the 1992–93 BBC Radio 5 dramatisation of the Adventures.
Synopsis Tintin witnesses a plane land in the Belgian countryside experiencing engine trouble, 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, while onboard a train 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. Müller, a German who owns a mental institution, affiliated with the criminals. Tintin and Snowy are chased by a large guard dog; Tintin stumbles, but the dog instead goes after a bone held by Snowy. Müller captures Tintin, but during a fight Müller's house catches fire. The fire brigade arrives just in time to extinguish the fire and rescue Tintin from the burning house, while Müller escapes with his accomplice Ivan.
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 Müller is part of a gang of forgers. Tintin pursues Müller 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 Müller takes a plane north, Tintin and Snowy try to follow, but hit a storm and crash land in rural Scotland in foggy conditions. While Tintin changes into his iconic Scottish outfit, 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.
Learning that Müller's plane had crashed off the coast of Kiltoch, a Scottish coastal village, Tintin travels there to continue his investigation. At Kiltoch, an old Scotsman tells him the story of Black Island — an island off the coast where a "ferocious beast" kills any visitors. Tintin and Snowy travel to the island, where they find that the "beast" is a trained gorilla named Ranko. They further discover that the forgers are using the island as their base, and radio the police for help. Although the forgers attempt to capture Tintin, the police arrives and arrests the criminals. Ranko, who was injured during Tintin's attempts to hold off the forgers, becomes docile enough to allow Tintin to bring him to a zoo.
History Background and research
Georges Remi—best known under the pen name Hergé—was employed as editor and illustrator of ("The Little Twentieth"), a children's supplement to ("The Twentieth Century"), a staunchly Roman Catholic, conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native Brussels which was run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez. In 1929, Hergé began The Adventures of Tintin comic strip for , revolving around the exploits of fictional Belgian reporter Tintin. Wallez ordered Hergé to set his first adventure in the Soviet Union as anti-socialist propaganda for children (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets), to set his second adventure in the Belgian Congo to encourage colonial sentiment (Tintin in the Congo), and to set his third adventure in the United States to use the story as a denunciation of American capitalism (Tintin in America). Wallez was subsequently removed from the paper's editorship following a scandal, although Hergé was convinced to stay on the condition of a salary increase.
For his next serial, Hergé planned to put together a story that caricatured the actions of Nazi Germany, developing the plot for King Ottokar's Sceptre. 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. The result was The Black Island, although Hergé 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. 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. Having decided to set most of his story in Britain, Hergé 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. 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.
Hergé retained the anti-German sentiment that he had first considered for King Ottokar's Sceptre through the inclusion of a German villain, Dr. Müller, who would go on to become a recurring character in the Tintin series. He based the character largely on Georg Bell, 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). Müller's counterfeiting operations were inspired by Bell's actions, as he was involved in a plot to destabilise Soviet Russia through counterfeiting Russian roubles. Rather than Germans, Müller'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. Forging banknotes was a topical crime at the time, while the idea of villains using superstition to hide their lair was a common trope, one that Hergé had used previously in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. 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. 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. 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.
Original publication The Black Island was first serialised in Le Petit Vingtième from 15 April to 16 November 1937 under the title Le Mystère De L'Avion Gris (The Mystery of the Grey Plane). From 17 April 1938, the story was also serialised in the French Catholic newspaper, Cœurs Vaillants. In 1938, Éditions Casterman collected the story together in a single hardcover volume, publishing it under the title L'Île noire (The Black Island). Hergé however was unhappy with this publication due to errors throughout, most egregiously that the front cover omitted his name.
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.
Second and third versions In the 1940s and 1950s, when Hergé's popularity had increased, he and his team at Studios Hergé redrew and coloured many of the original black-and-white Tintin adventures. They used the ("clear line") drawing style that Hergé 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. This second version contained no significant changes from the original 1937 one, 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.
In the early 1960s, Hergé'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 Hergé to rectify before they would publish it in English. 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. At the time, Hergé 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.