Talk:The Black Island/Sandbox

The Black Island (French: L'Île Noire) is the seventh volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper [Le XXe Siècle] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) for its children's supplement [Le Petit Vingtième] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), it was serialised weekly from April to November 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to Great Britain, where Tintin is framed for a theft, hunted by detectives Thomson and Thompson, and is on the trail of a gang of counterfeiters.

The Black Island was a commercial success and was published [passive voice] 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 ligne-claire 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, Studio Hergé produced a revised, third edition of the story, serialised in Tintin magazine. The Black Island introduces the recurring villain Doctor Müller, and has been widely cited as one of the most popular installments in the series. [run-on sentence] The story was adapted for both the 1957 Belvision animation, Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, and for the 1991 Ellipse/Nelvana animated series The Adventures of Tintin.

Synopsis

Upon discovering a plane in the Belgian countryside, Tintin is shot [passive voice] by the pilot. Awaking in hospital, he is visited [passive voice] by Thomson and Thompson, who inform him that the plane subsequently flew to Sussex, England, where it crashed. Tintin and Snowy proceed to Sussex, along the way being framed [passive voice] for robbery by two criminals. Arriving in England, the criminal kidnap Tintin and attempt to kill him, but with Snowy's help, he escapes. 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. Müller captures Tintin, but the young reporter again escapes, and in a scuffle, Müller's house catches ablaze, and the criminals escape. [run-on sentence]

The next morning, Tintin finds some electric cables and red beacons in the garden, surmising that they are there designed to attract a plane drop. At night, he lights the flares, and finds that sacks of counterfeit money are dropped [passive voice], revealing that Müller was running a gang of forgers. He pursues Müller and his accomplices, along the way being joined [passive voice] by Thompson and Thomson. When Müller takes a plane north, Tintin, Snowy and the Thom(p)sons follow, but hit a storm and crash land in rural Scotland.

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 man 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 island is being used [passive voice] as the base for the forgers, and radio the police for help. Although the criminals attempt to capture Tintin, the police arrive and arrest the criminals, with Ranko being sent [passive voice] to a zoo.

History

Background and research

[Note on caption of image: don't end caption with a period if it isn't a complete sentence] Georges Remi—best known under the pen name Hergé—was employed as editor and illustrator of [Le Petit Vingtième] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) ("The Little Twentieth"), a children's supplement to [Le XXe Siècle] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) ("The 20th 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 [Le Petit Vingtième] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), 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. [Note: It may be time to stop mentioning all this same history yet again.]

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, he briefly visited London and the southern English coast to learn more about the country. There, he purchased a stainless steel Gillotts 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.[say, no passive voice at all!]

He retained the anti-German sentiment that he had first considered for King Ottokar's Sceptre through the inclusion of a German villain, Mr Müller, who would go on to become a recurring character in the series. The character was based [passive voice] largely on Georg Bell, a Scottish forger who had been a vocal supporter of the Nazi regime, and who Hergé had learned about from an article in anti-conformist Belgian magazine La Crapouillot (The Mortar Shell). The character was also partly influenced [passive voice] by the British soldier John Bagot Glubb. Rather than Germans, Müller's henchmen were given the Russian names Ivan and Wronzoff, although the later 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 which 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 alleged to have lived in Loch Ness. It may also have been influenced [passive voice] by Gaston Leroux's character of Balaoo the gorilla, who had appeared in a 1911 book and a 1913 film. 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, it was collected [passive voice] in a single hardcover volume and published [passive voice] by Éditions Casterman under the title L'Île Noire (The Black Island). Hergé however was unhappy with this publication due to a variety of errors throughout, namely ["especially"?] that his name had been omitted [passive voice] from the front cover.

The inclusion of a television in the original version would have surprised many readers. The BBC had only introduced television in ["to"?] Britain several years previously, and it would not be introduced [passive voice] to Belgium 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 using the ligne claire ("clear line") drawing style he had developed so that they visually fitted in with the new Tintin stories being created. Casterman published this second, colourised version of 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 United Kingdom.

In the early 1960s, Hergé's English language publishers, Methuen, were planning on translating and publishing The Black Island for the British market. However, they felt that many British readers would find the depiction of Britain in the comic incredulous and out-of-date, drawing up a lists of 131 errors in story that they asked Hergé to rectify before it could be published [passive voice] in English. They were also concerned 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, and so did not have the time to undertake research into contemporary British society and culture. Instead, Hergé sent his assistant Bob de Moor to Britain in May 1937, 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 was lent a contemporary police constable's uniform from which to draw on, although the staff at British Rail were suspicious when he asked them for a uniform, refusing to do so.

The new version was serialised in Tintin journal from May 1965, before being published [passive voice] in a collected volume by Casterman in 1966. Many changes to the illustrations were made throughout the story as a result ["because"?] of de Moor's research. Reflecting the fact that television had become increasingly commonplace in Western Europe, the prose was changed [passive voice] from "It's a television set!" to "It's only a television set!" However, as colour television had yet to be introduced [passive voice] to Britain, the screen on the television encountered in Britain was once again reverted to black-and-white. The multiple aircraft featured throughout the story were redrawn by Studio 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. The clothing worn by characters was brought [passive voice] up-to-date, while the old steam railways were replaced by electrified alternatives. Adverts for the genuine Johnnie Walker whisky were replaced by adverts for a fictional alternative, Loch Lomond whisky, while a Sussex County Council signpost was added to page 11. Various English towns and villages were renamed, with Puddlecombe becoming Littlegate, and Eastbury becoming Eastdown, while Scottish pub Ye Dolphin was renamed The Kiltoch Arms. The police were no longer depicted as carrying guns, as was accurate, 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. With the backgrounds and other elements of the new version drawn by staff members of the Studio, the only thing drawn by Hergé in the 1966 version was the characters themselves.

Later publications

Casterman republished the original black-and-white version of the story in 1980, as part of their Archives Hergé collection. In 1986, they then published a facsimile version of that first edition, which they followed in 1996 with the publication of a facsimile of the second, 1943 edition.

Critical analysis

The Tintinologist Harry Thompson thought that The Black Island expressed a "convenient, hitherto unsuspected regard for the British" on Hergé's behalf, with Britain itself being depicted [passive voice] as "a little quaint." He thought that it "outstrips its predecessors" both artistically and comedically, describing it as "one of the most popular Tintin stories." He felt that some of the logically implausible slapstick scenes illustrated "the last flicker of 1920s Tintin", but that the 1966 version was "a fine piece of work and one of the most beautifully drawn Tintin books." Tintinologist Michael Farr commented on the "distinct quality and special popularity" of The Black Island. He thought that the inclusion of many airplanes and a television in the first version was symptomatic of Hergé's interest in innovation and modernism. Commenting on the differences between the third version of the comic and the earlier two, he thought that the latter was "strongly representative" of the artistic talents of Studio Hergé in the 1960s, but that it was nevertheless inferior, because it had replaced the "spontaneity and poetry" of the original with "over-detailed and fussily accurate" illustrations.

Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier described The Black Island as "a clever little thriller" that bore similarities with the popular detective serials of the era. The Lofficiers thought that the 1966 version "gained in slickness" but became less atmospheric, awarding it two out of five. Biographer Benoît Peeters thought The Black Island to be "a pure detective story", describing it as "Remarkably well constructed" and highlighting that it contrasted the modern world of counterfeiters, airplanes, and television, with the mysteries of superstition and the historic castle. He nevertheless considered the 1966 version to be "shorter on charm" than the earlier versions. Elsewhere, he described it as "an adventure full of twists and turns", with the characters Thompson and Thomson being "on top form".

Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès of Stanford University believed that The Black Island expanded on a variety of themes that Hergé had explored in his earlier work, such as the idea of counterfeiting and Snowy's drunkenness. He thought that there was a human-animal link in the story, with Tintin's hair matching Snowy's fur in a similar manner to how Wronzoff's beard matched Ranko's fur coat. However, he thought that Wronzoff represented evil while Tintin represented good. By living on an island, Apostolidès thought that Wronzoff was like "a new Robinson Crusoe", also highlighting that it was the first use of the island theme in Hergé's work. Literary critic Tom McCarthy thought that The Black Island linked to Hergé's other Adventures in various ways; he connected the counterfeit money in the story to the counterfeit idol in The Broken Ear and the fake bunker in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. He also connected Tintin's solving of the puzzle in the airman's jacket to his solving of the pirate puzzles in The Secret of the Unicorn, and that in transmitting from a place of death, Ben Mor, or mort (death), it linked to Tintin's transmitting from the crypt of Marlinspike Hall in The Secret of the Unicorn. [wonderful job for this section]

Adaptations

The Black Island is one of The Adventures of Tintin that were adapted for the second series of the animated Hergé's Adventures of Tintin by the Belgian studio Belvision in 1957. The Black Island was divided up [passive voice] into a number of 5-minute colour episodes that diverted from Hergé's original plot in a variety of ways. Directed by Ray Goossens, they were written [passive voice] by Michel Greg. The comic was subsequently adapted [passive voice] into a 1991 episode of The Adventures of Tintin television series by French studio Ellipse and Canadian animation company Nelvana. Directed by Stéphane Bernasconi, Thierry Wermuth voiced the character of Tintin.

On 19 March 2010, the British TV network Channel 4 broadcast a documentary titled Dom Joly and The Black Island in which the comedian Dom Joly dressed up as Tintin and followed in Tintin's footsteps from Ostend to Sussex and then to Scotland. Reviewing the documentary in The Guardian, Tim Dowling commented that [strike word] "it was amusing in parts, charming in others and a little gift for Tintinophiles everywhere. A Tintinologist, I fear, would not learn much he or she didn't already know."