Land Of Black Gold – Hergé, 1939-1940/1948-1950 [Revised 1971] ★★★★

Worth the Wait

How much can you expect from a Tintin book that took five calendar decades to reach us in its final form? Logically not a lot, but logic has a way of being happily ignored in the world of Tintin.

Such is the case for Land Of Black Gold, at least for me.

Critical consensus around this book is harsh. Its labor pains were legion, and are well-documented. Stopped by war, then resumed when author Hergé found himself too creatively spent to start something new, Land Of Black Gold can be seen as a holding action; the two newest main characters of the series, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus, mostly kept on the sidelines. Examine it critically, and you see the patches.

But you see something else, too. Hergé was never more clever or witty than when his back was up against it. The jokes come faster this time, and so do the cliffhangers, everything landing just right and hardly betraying a sign of creatis interruptus.

Tintin goes undercover in Khemed, land of black gold. The website Tintin.com notes the unusually alluring eyes of the woman in the niqab in the foreground, as females in "The Adventures Of Tintin" were usually not depicted so glamorously. Image from pinintest.com.

The set-up is certainly promising: A mysterious act of global sabotage renders fuel prone to exploding when used. Cars are reduced to wrecks on the highway, planes grounded out of fear. Markets everywhere are collapsing. “There could be war any day,” a petrol boss notes.

Clueless detectives Thomson and Thompson suspect the local auto shop (“Remember the old police maxim: Who profits from the crime?”) and go undercover as incompetent repairmen. But Tintin investigates more reasonably and learns the doctoring has its source in the war-torn oil fields of the Middle East. He and his dog Snowy journey to the land of Khemed to investigate.

“There is a row going on there between the Emir Ben Kalish Ezab and Sheik Bab El Her who’s trying to depose him…Khemed is dynamite…”

In Khemed, Tintin soon finds himself at the mercy of Arab rebels led by Sheik Bab El Her, whose name was a pun on the Brussels dialect term for "chatterbox." He lives up to the billing. Image from https://tintin.eugraph.com/features/lobg/index.html.

In past volumes, I have noticed how Tintin, for all his heroics, doesn’t seem much of a reporter. We haven’t seen him file a story since Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets back in 1930. But here we do see him conduct an interview with an oil-company executive in a couple of early panels. So he’s still plying his trade in some capacity.

Or maybe Hergé was just running out of ideas for what else to do with his aging “boy reporter.” As noted, putting this together was a struggle. The first writing attempt was interrupted by the invasion of Hergé’s home country, Belgium, in World War II. Because the chief villain was a returning German character, Müller, Hergé was forced to halt his latest comic adventure eight months in and move on to the more politically neutral Crab With The Golden Claws, which introduced Haddock.

Then, after exhausting himself through the 1940s with a run of well-regarded Tintin adventures that cemented the series’s cultural imprint and its lasting template, culminating in a pair of globetrotting two-part epics, he reluctantly pulled this half-finished idea out of mothballs in the late 1940s, giving it a fresh coat of paint by recasting it around the struggle between British and Zionists for control of Palestine.

The same panel in two different versions of Land Of Black Gold, the first set in British-occupied Palestine, the latter in the fictional oil kingdom of Khemed. Image from http://en.tintin.com/albums/show/id/39/page/0/0/land-of-black-gold.

This worked alright in 1948-50 when it first ran, but clearly needed an update by 1971 with Israel now firmly established and Hergé already under the microscope for his depiction of Jewish characters. So he altered the conflict as between rival Arab factions in the invented kingdom of Khemed and pushed the material whole hog into the funny side of the series.

The result represents a dramatic shift in tone from harder-edged material like The Seven Crystal Balls. The entire second half of Land Of Black Gold reads like a sustained goof, with Thomson and Thompson at their most cheerfully moronic, Tintin’s fortunes swinging like a pendulum as the story takes a number of hairpin turns, and callbacks to people both good and otherwise from past Tintin stories.

Tintin also meets two new recurring characters who punch up the laugh quotient, Emir Ezab and his handful of a son, Prince Abdullah, who doesn’t let being kidnapped spoil his fun:

“Whoopee! Just like a real gangster film!”

Abdullah is up to his old tricks. Even when his life is in danger, the little prankster just can't resist. Image from http://en.tintin.com/albums/show/id/39/page/0/0/land-of-black-gold.

Geopolitical intrigue and the ongoing battle over energy resources (“oil…the world’s black gold”) give this book resonance, but what makes it click so well for me is its infectious energy and spirit, personified by Abdullah, who like Hergé seems to derive cruel merriment from messing with others for the pure hell of it.

My theory for what makes Land Of Black Gold so enjoyable connects to the very problematic nature of its creation. Hergé was tired of working to make all the pieces connect in the same painstaking way he had done with his other books, and so he just busked his way through the plot, giving audiences what he thought (correctly) they wanted and playing little tricks on them along the way to keep himself engaged.

An earlier view of Land Of Black Gold, as it first appeared in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième back in 1939-40. The Nazi invasion of Belgium shuttered the periodical, Tintin's birthplace, for good, and by the time the story was revived, this desert episode with Tintin dowsing for water was abandoned. Image from https://sauvikbiswas.com/2015/04/12/tintin-land-of-the-black-gold/. 

Thus we get a sequence where Tintin finds himself in the enemy lair, hiding under a table where silence every second is worth rubies, just so the villain can unknowingly knocks over a container of sneezing powder…

Or a little later on, Tintin narrowly avoids a guard armed with a tommy gun, who manages to jam his gun through a crack in the door and opens fire, emptying his magazine but missing Tintin entirely. Tintin can only breathe a tiny sigh of relief, though, because after knocking out the guard, he discovers the bullets have set afire a wall crammed with ammunition boxes…

Then there is the return of Captain Haddock, which Hergé doesn’t even try to explain but shakes off so brazenly you have to laugh anyway…

With Haddock and Calculus not as much in the mix, more of this story is taken up by the antics of Thomson and Thompson, here singing along with a song on the radio that serves up an unexpectedly explosive chorus. Image from http://www.mheu.org/en/timeline/tintin-land-black-gold.htm

The whole infiltration of the enemy lair is a missed opportunity in one way: We never do get a sense of the lair’s dimensions, just that it stands on a cliff and is built inside like the Maginot Line. A chance for a thematic return to the adventure high point of the entire series, The Black Island with that amazing Scottish castle, is thus oddly averted. Instead, the whole episode is played for laughs, from how Tintin locates the abducted prince to the way his infiltration is covered for by an endless story related by Tintin’s Portuguese pal, Senhor Oliveira da Figueira:

…Alas! The poor woman never got over it. She died of grief and shame, at the age of ninety-seven. Her husband, broken-hearted, followed her to the grave. But that wasn’t the end of the terrible tragedies this unhappy family had to suffer…

Just the expressions of the lair guards tearfully listening to Senhor Figueira’s endless tale of woe is funny. In another Tintin adventure, the bad guys wouldn’t be played so much for laughs, but like the similarly underrated The Broken Ear, this book offers a comedy-adventure, not an adventure-comedy.

Even a dangerous sandstorm in the desert wastes of Khemed becomes the stuff of slapstick comedy in a typically light moment in Land Of Black Gold. Image from https://theslingsandarrows.com/the-adventures-of-tintin-land-of-black-gold/, a review site that rates this book nearly as high as me.

The other thing I really enjoy about Land Of Black Gold is the way it moves, with some new big twist on every page. In some ways, this is a callback to the earlier Tintin stories, which were produced as a series of cliffhangers rather than more immersive, atmospheric experiences which came over time and Hergé’s more serious approach to his craft. There are no big panels in this adventure, and less of an accent on superb draftsmanship that makes prior entry Prisoners Of The Sun so beloved by many to this day.

Land Of Black Gold does boast a good story, and some nice images, but mainly it’s the one you remember for how Thomson and Thompson keep running into trouble by driving around the desert in circles and grow crazy beards. That latter gimmick would later be called back in the debut book of another Franco-Belgian comic-book series, Asterix The Gaul. People wondering what connects these two tonally disparate cornerstones of European album comics should begin here.

There are times Tintin fans will want a book that better coheres to the only-slightly-bent realism that defines the series, and I get it. Land Of Black Gold is a break from this approach, but a lovely one that showcases something else quite wonderfully, its author’s sense of fun.