Publication
The Crab with the Golden Claws was first published in serial comic strip form in 1941.
The story was written after Hergé had been forced to abandon his previous story, Land of Black Gold, also set in the desert, when Nazi Germany took over Belgium. After the invasion, publication of Le Petit Vingtième, the children's newspaper supplement that had published his previous Tintin adventures, was stopped and Hergé had to look for another means of publication. In addition, Land of Black Gold featured controversial political matter, depicting the conflicts between Jews, Arabs and the British troops in the British Mandate of Palestine. Hergé was asked by the newspaper Le Soir to create a weekly supplement, similar to that of Le Petit Vingtième, called Le Soir Jeunesse, and he began work on a new story about the less controversial subject of drug smuggling.
The Crab With the Golden Claws appeared for the first time on 17 October 1940, and every week Hergé published two full pages. But the supplement disappeared again after 3 September 1941, due to paper shortage during World War II, when only 98 pages had appeared. The interruption continued until 23 September 1941, when Hergé and Tintin got a daily strip in Le Soir. It continued for 24 days until the story was finished on 18 October. This meant a major change in the method of working of Hergé, with a daily instead of a weekly publication, and a consequent rethinking of the layout of the comic and the rhythm of the storytelling. This version was republished as an album in 1941.
The strip was completely reedited and colourized for publication as an album in 1943. The appearance of four whole-page panels at arbitrary places throughout the album is the result of the original black & white album not having enough material to fit the required 62 page format of the colour albums.
In the 1960s, the book was published in America with a number of changes. In the original, the sailor Tintin leaves bound and gagged in Captain Haddock's cabin, and the man who beats Haddock in the cellar, are black Africans. These were changed in the 1960s to a white sailor and an Arab due to objections by American publishers of having blacks and whites mixing together. However, Haddock still refers to the man who beat him as a "Negro" in the English version. Also at the request of the Americans, scenes of Haddock drinking directly from the bottles of whiskey on the lifeboat and the plane were taken out.
In an interview, Hergé sarcastically stated that these moves were "justified" because "Everyone knows that Americans never drink whiskey(!)" and "that there are no blacks in America(!)".
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