The Adventures of Tintin. Tintin in the Land of Black Gold

A strange epidemic has struck car engines: they suddenly began to explode for no apparent reason. Newspapers are shouting about the catastrophe: oil company shares are plummeting, wells are closing, air travel is being curtailed due to poor fuel quality... Specialists spend days in their laboratories, but they cannot find an explanation for the mysterious phenomenon, because the methods of oil extraction and refining have remained the same; fuel samples have also yielded nothing... So, maybe this is someone's evil intent? If so, who is behind it? Tintin undertakes to answer all the questions and solve the mystery of exploding gasoline. To do this, he is hired as a radio operator on the tanker "Speedol Star", sailing to Hemed Arabia - the land of black gold.

Another album with a complicated fate. To begin with, it changed its name twice, each time becoming a little longer: Black Gold (1939, black-and-white magazine version), In the Land of Black Gold (1950, first album version, already in color) and, finally, Tintin in the Land of Black Gold (starting with the 1956 reissue of the same color version). And the huge time gap between the first magazine and first album versions immediately catches the eye: no matter how you look at it, 11 years (from 1939 to 1950) is a lot even for Hergé! The fact is that the idea for this adventure was born in Hergé back in 1939, just before World War II. The idea quickly grew into a full-fledged story, which even began to be published: about a third of it appeared in the magazine "Little XX Century", and a detailed synopsis, according to Tintinologists, was almost completely ready. However, the outbreak of war, the occupation of Belgium and the subsequent closure of the newspaper "XX Century" (naturally, along with the supplement for children) completely changed the situation - not to mention the fact that under the new conditions, continuing the plot with a German spy as the main villain was out of the question. Hergé had to switch for a long time to stories that were as far removed from the current political moment as possible.

However, Hergé did not forget the idea of ​​"exploding petrol" as an element of the struggle between the powers and the fuel corporations associated with them. He generally did not like unfinished work: if some idea seemed worthy to him, he would definitely return to it. And so, in the late 1940s, when the appearance of German spies in the plot became not only possible but also welcomed, Hergé remembered the old adventure that remained unfinished (the story was then interrupted at the episode where Professor Smith abandons Tintin in the desert). But then one "small" (but in fact gigantic) obstacle arose in his path: in the years since the first publication of "Black Gold", the series had undergone truly tectonic changes - new characters appeared in it, whose popularity was at least as popular as the title hero. And if the album could still be imagined without Professor Tournesol, then the absence of Captain Haddock would have been absolutely unappreciated by no one! But the story was essentially ready, and the author did not want to change it much - he had enough other things to worry about. Then Hergé came up with a virtuoso script move: with a single frame he moved the time of the album's action to the current time slice (see commentary to 3-4), and a brilliant sense of humor coupled with a deep understanding of his own characters allowed him to solve a problem that seemed absolutely insoluble (see commentary to 62-15).

The updated (and first album) version of the 15th volume was published in 1950 (with pre-publication in the magazine "Tintin" from September 1948 to February 1950). However, the adventures of the new "Adventures..." did not end there! The English publisher of the series once again (see the comments to "Black Island", by the way, there is something "black" in both: a coincidence?) demanded that the author make a number of significant changes to the album - this time related not so much to decorative as to purely political motives (mainly, they concerned the role and place of England in the post-war events in Palestine, which was at that time under the British mandate). Hergé did not argue and made the changes, but something else is more interesting: he liked the reworked version even more, since it tore the album away from the historical immediacy, making it more universal, timeless. The result of the reworking was the third (and if you count the color magazine pre-publication, then the fourth) version of the story, published in 1971, which eventually became canonical; it is the one that is regularly published and republished under the number “15”.

Recommended reader age: 7+

Author: Hergé
Artist: Herge
Translation: Mikhail Khachaturov
Number of pages: 64
Publisher: Melik-Pashayev
Cover type: Hardcover
Dimensions: 290 × 217 × 10 mm
ISBN: 978-5-00041-570-2
Series: The Adventures of Tintin