Tintin in the land of black gold suffered from its difficult genesis and subsequent modifications: this return by Hergé to a story begun before the war fares poorly, in comparison with the fine series of very great albums which preceded it!
For a long time I didn’t like Tintin in the land of black gold, which I neither “understood” nor really found interesting. It is also the only Tintin which I must have read less than 5 times, compared to dozens of times for the others.
It must also be said that it was not part of the family collection that I inherited in my childhood, and that I therefore discovered it late, in an edition which I later learned should be avoided: At the beginning of the 1970s, the English asked Herge to expunge from black gold any reference to the Palestinian situation of the 1940s… what the Studio Hergé hastened to do so, definitively ruining, both narratively and graphically, a book that had already suffered from its difficult genesis. Interrupted in full publication in the Petit Vingtième by the invasion of Belgium, it was resumed almost ten years later when Tintin had dramatically evolved (his appearance, his personality and especially his integration into a “family” with Haddock and Tournesol… ), black gold turns out to be more interesting in its “1950” version than in its currently available version…
The context is clearly political, for the first time since the Blue Lotus : “war” between Jewish and Arab activist groups, clearly mentioned threat of global conflict and strategic importance of oil, Herge launched in 1939 black gold on subjects that are serious to say the least! The resumption ten years later of the initial story is not perfect: if Herge took care of the graphic transition between his two eras (the break occurs during the sandstorm), and he managed to include Captain Haddock and Professor Tournesol in his story – in a way that is not very convincing but which gives us still offers the only “meta” moment of all ofHergethis astonishing conclusion which sees Captain Haddock himself refuse to explain the reason for his presence -, black gold suffers terribly from an inconsistent, boring scenario, which repeats situations already seen many times in previous albums, when it does not completely delegate the continuation of the action to the Dupondts (Should we put this disarray down to a new depression into which he sank Herge ?)!
We will have to wait for the very last pages, and the delicious liberation of the indescribable Abdallah to rediscover a little of the “Tintin magic”. This is definitely insufficient!
Eric Debarnot
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