Land of Black Gold - The Revisions

Many of the Tintin books, beginning with "The Black Island", were subject to a number of changes. But in the whole history of the strip cartoon, no book has gone through more ups and downs than "Land of Black Gold". It went through three versions, each very different from the other!

The first version (1939):

The first version began to appear in 1939, in Le Petit Vingetieme where it took over from King Ottokar's Sceptre. 

The first (1939) version

The context of war, which gives the opening of the book a mood of foreboding, was to bring it to an abrupt halt. The Le Petit Vingetieme ceased to be published on May 8th, 1940 and with it Land of Black Gold, which was abandoned at the bottom of page 56 of the original black & white version (or page 26 of the later color version).

The second version (1949):

After an interval of eight years the story was finally resumed, this time in "Tintin Magazine". In September 1948, having concluded Prisoners of the Sun, he returned to the pages of Land of Black Gold and decided to complete them. Before being able to pursue the rest of the story, he had to carry through some recasting of already completed pages. The years which had passed had brought new elements into The Adventures of Tintin:  Haddock, Calculas and the Marlinspike Hall, to name the most important, had meanwhile appeared in the series. 

The second (1949) version
(The British Royal Navy sailors 
are in their usual blue dress)

The reader of 1948 would have found the story hard to understand if these were not taken into account. So Herge had to integrate the new elements into the old story, or at least explain their absence. This explains the Captain's mobilization on page 3 of the story and his sudden reappearance on page 54. So in a bizarre way Haddock slips into an adventure where he would not originally have appeared.

The third version (1969):

The third version of the story was made in the late 1960s at the request of Herge's British publisher Methuen, who had already instigated the revised version of "The Black Island". Here the main concern was to eliminate those elements which were considered too dated -- the portrayal of Jews and Arabs battling the British, or each other, in British mandated Palestine in the late 1940s. The book could not appear in Britain in its original version where it showed the struggle of Jewish underground organisations. For the young English reader who is in the process of discovering Tintin, the allusions in Land of Black Gold would have been missed and so they disappeared from the new version: the conflict became one between the Emir Ben Kalish Ezab and his rival who tries to usurp his emirate and become Caliph in his place.

The third (1969) version
(The British Royal Navy sailors
replaced by Arab military police)

The simplifying of the content was accompanied by a freshening up of the book. Uniforms were updated and Bob de Moor went to Antwerp to make sketches of an oil tanker that dated from the 1940s and which was to be the model for the "Speedol Star".

Apart from its various transformations, Land of Black Gold also saw the return of Dr Muller, whom readers had not come across since The Black Island and who appears here under the alias of Professor Smith. The role of Thomson twins was also enhanced and they both fall victim to one of the strangest illness known to modern medicine.

But it is the invention of the Emir Ben Kalish Ezab and his delinquent son Abdullah which is the most striking innovation in the story.

Captain & Abdullah

Herge could not resist their later reappearance --- to the consternation of Nestor the butler and Captain Haddock.

SOURCE: "TINTIN and the World of Herge" (by Benoit Peeters).