The Black Island
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The Black Island (originally L'Ile Noire) is a one of a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero.
The Black Island is the seventh in the series.
When The Black Island came to be published in English, Hergé's British publishers, Methuen, decided that the book did not portray Britain correctly, so Hergé had to rework it completely. Mostly Methuen's proposed changes were minor, and perhaps pedantic, like the uniform of a policeman or the style of a train. One quite ironic one was the removal of a colour television in favour of a monochrome one, only a year before colour television was invented.
The storyline
Tintin sees a plane coming down, and goes out to help, but as he comes near, the man piloting the plane shoots him down. Tintin eventually recovers at a hospital, and goes to England, only to find that the plane he saw had crashed in an airfield in Sussex. A police officer cannot tell him yet whether the occupants have been found. It's time for Tintin's dog Snowy to come to the rescue! He helps to catch the criminals by getting drunk at a bar, and there Tintin meets Thompson and Thomson, who try to arrest him for stealing a man's wallet on a train coach in Belgium. He ends up crashing in a plane wreck in Scotland, where a friendly farmer gets him a kilt to wear. He visits the pub at Kiltoch, where he is told strange stories about the Black Island, a legendary island where an evil beast is said to roam, killing humans. He buys a boat from a villager and heads for the island. He has no idea the note forgery he was looking for was on the isle, until he nearly drowns when Ranko the ape tries to murder him with his owner Puschov. He calls the police on their radio signalling device after watching Thompson and Thomson win an air show race on a black and white television set. He returns to mainland Kiltoch, the media and press not staying very long after Ranko appears. He then gets the police to take a picture of him for the news, while he takes Ranko to a barred zoo in Glasgow.
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