The Black Island

The Black Island by Georges Remi Hergé is the seventh Tintin adventure. Like The Land of Black Gold, this adventure has been updated a number of times so it's difficult to know which version exactly one has read. An emergency landing of a small aircraft with no registration catches Tintin's attention. He quickly finds himself being shot at and then being framed for a crime. Meanwhile, a similar unregistered plane has crash landed on the Black Island in Scotland. Tintin knows he has to get their to solve the crime and clear his name. From what I've read in posts at Tintinologist and Hergé's Tintin, Hergé's artwork for this story evolved from black and white (the 1937 serial version) to muted colors (1943) to being fully redrawn and recolorized for the 1966 English translation. The British publisher didn't think Hergé had done a very good job depicting Britain. Until 2008 the British reissue was the one English readers would have seen and read. Then a retranslated version with the 1943 artwork was published. As it happens, I read the 2008 (1943) English translation, meaning I saw European cars driving around the British landscapes. Not being British and knowing full well that Tintin is Belgian, I didn't mind the artistic gaffs. The book feels like a late 1930s / early 1940s comic and has a goofy retro appeal to it.

Relentless, and relentlessly charming, and relentlessly contrived. In the first 23 pages he's kidnapped 3 times and hospitalised twice. Random bad guys, accidentally discovered and accidentally confronted, over and over. Nice! The translator uses actual Scots and not the dwarf pastiche of most foreign treatments. I want to see what Hergé did to denote Scots in French...