Hergé

The world’s most famous travelling reporter solves the mystery of the Black Island. Wrongly accused of a theft, Tintin is led to set out with Snowy on an adventure to investigate a gang of forgers. Join the most iconic character in comics as he embarks on an extraordinary adventure spanning historical and political events, and thrilling mysteries. Still selling over 100,000 copies every year in the UK and having been adapted for the silver screen by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson in 2011. The Adventures of Tintin continue to charm more than 80 years after they first found their way into publication. Since then an estimated 230 million copies have been sold, proving that comic books have the same power to entertain children and adults in the 21st century as they did in the early 20th.

The Black Island

Sarah Sammis

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.

Gavin

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...

Itzel

The classic graphic novel. Investigating a mysterious plane crash, Tintin discovers he's onto something big! The case leads Tintin to Scotland, where he learns of a monster that stalks a lonely island.

The Black Island

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