I love to imagine how this must have freaked out the first kids to read it. Remember, this is a serial that was collected into book form later. End of the first installment, bam, the hero’s been shot!

I was four-ish when my father started reading these aloud to me, and at the end of that page, he closed the book and said, “Okay, Tintin’s dead, that’s the end of the series, no more.”

I, being a rational kid, argued that this couldn’t be the case because there was a whole rest of the book, and if Tintin really was dead, this meant that SNOWY was going to be the main character.

(The Black Island was also the first book I read all the way through on my own when I learned to read).

The adventures of Snowy, avenging Tintin!

Your dad is a meanie.

As I also recall He went back and re-penciled a lot of this to update it to the 60s and reflect what he’d seen.