Land of Black Gold

Land of Black Gold (Tintin au pays de l'or noir)
Cover of the English edition
Date	1950 1972 (remake)
Series	The Adventures of Tintin
Publisher	Casterman
Creative team
Creator	Hergé
Original publication
Published in	Le Petit Vingtième (unfinished) Tintin magazine
Date of publication	28 September 1939 – 8 May 1940 (unfinished) / 16 September 1948 – 23 February 1950
Language	French
Translation
Publisher	Methuen
Date	1972
Translator	Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper Michael Turner
Chronology
Preceded by	Prisoners of the Sun (1949)
Followed by	Destination Moon (1953)

Land of Black Gold (French: Tintin au pays de l'or noir) is the fifteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children's supplement Le Petit Vingtième, in which it was initially serialised from September 1939 until the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, at which the newspaper was shut down and the story interrupted. After eight years, Hergé returned to Land of Black Gold, completing its serialisation in Belgium's Tintin magazine from September 1948 to February 1950, after which it was published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1950. Set on the eve of a European war, the plot revolves around the attempts of young Belgian reporter Tintin to uncover a militant group responsible for sabotaging oil supplies in the Middle East.

At the request of Hergé's British publisher, Methuen, in 1971 he made a range of alterations to the Land of Black Gold, transferring the setting from the British Mandate for Palestine to the fictional state of Khemed. Many of the visual changes to this third version of the volume were carried out by Hergé's assistant, Bob de Moor. Hergé followed Land of Black Gold with Destination Moon, while The Adventures of Tintin itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition. Critical approaches to the story have been mixed, with differing opinions expressed as to the competing merits of the volume's three versions. The story was adapted for the 1991 animated series The Adventures of Tintin by Ellipse and Nelvana.