Prisoners of the Sun (French: Le Temple du Soleil) is the fourteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé.

Completing an arc begun in The Seven Crystal Balls, the story tells of young reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy, and friend Captain Haddock as they continue their efforts to rescue the kidnapped Professor Calculus by travelling through Andean villages, mountains, and rain forests, before finding a hidden Inca civilisation.

Suspecting the quarantine is staged, Tintin sneaks aboard the ship that night and learns from Chiquito, the former assistant of General Alcazar and one of the abductors, that Calculus is to be executed for wearing a bracelet belonging to the mummified Incan king Rascar Capac.

When they attempt to investigate the whereabouts of Calculus, the local Indios prove to be peculiarly tight-lipped—that is, until Tintin defends a young Quechua boy named Zorrino from being bullied by two Spaniard men.

[1] After many hardships – including being pursued by four Indios who try their best to leave them stranded or dead, and finding their way through the snowy mountains and the jungle beyond – Tintin, Haddock, and Zorrino reach the Temple of the Sun, a surviving outpost of the Inca civilisation.

Afterwards, the Prince of the Sun tells them that the seven crystal balls used on the Sanders-Hardiman expedition members, who had excavated Rascar Capac's tomb, contained a "mystic liquid" obtained from coca that plunged them into a deep sleep.

After swearing an oath to keep the temple's existence a secret, Tintin, Haddock and Calculus head home, while Zorrino remains with the Inca, having accepted an offer to live among them.

[3] Amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, Hergé had accepted a position working for Le Soir, the largest circulation French-language daily newspaper in the country.

[5] Some Belgians were upset that Hergé was willing to work for a newspaper controlled by the then occupying Nazi administration,[6] although he was heavily impressed by the size of Le Soir's readership, which reached 600,000.

[8] Without the need to satirise political types, entertainment producer and author Harry Thompson observed that "Hergé was now concentrating more on plot and on developing a new style of character comedy.

[14] In October 1945, Hergé was approached by Raymond Leblanc, a former member of a conservative Resistance group, the National Royalist Movement (MNR), and his associates André Sinave and Albert Debaty.

[19] In turn, the idea of European explorers discovering a lost city had been found in both H. Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure (1887) and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916).

[22] Part of the ceremonial costume worn by the Incan priest was based upon a colour painting of Mexican Aztecs produced by Else Bostelmann for the National Geographic Society which Hergé had a copy of in his files.

Hergé, however, had grown jealous of the immediate success of Jacobs' other contribution to Tintin magazine, The Secret of the Swordfish (the first entry in his Blake and Mortimer series), and was concerned about his colleague's reputation overshadowing his own.

[36] Angered by his absence, the editorial board decided to command other artists and writers to continue the story, a threat which made Hergé return to work.

[38] He enlisted the aid of Van Melkebeke, Guy Dessicy, and Frans Jageneau to help finish Prisoners; they gathered at his home on the Avenue Delleur and produced many of the backgrounds within the story.

[13] After the story arc finished serialisation, Casterman divided it into two volumes, Les Sept Boules de Cristal and Le Temple du Soleil, which they released in 1948 and 1949 respectively.

[46] The book was banned by the Peruvian authorities because, in the map of South America contained within it, a region whose ownership was disputed by Peru and Ecuador was shown as being part of the latter country.

[20] Michael Farr described both The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun as "classic middle-period Tintin", commenting on their "surprisingly well-balanced narrative" and the fact that they exhibited scant evidence of Hergé's turbulent personal life.

[47] He felt that the inclusion of paranormal elements to the story did nothing to make the narrative less convincing, and observes Hergé's recurring depiction of his character's disturbing dreams.

[48] Farr opined that the Inca costumes were drawn with "a care and flamboyance that would do great credit to a major opera house production", while the Andean landscapes were "worthy of a Cecil B. DeMille film spectacular".

[22] Hergé biographer Benoît Peeters noted that Prisoner of the Sun was one of the Adventures to have "most caught the imagination", something that he attributed to its "exceptional setting or the strength of the plot".

[50] He also thought that, despite all the tribulations Hergé faced while creating it, "the pacing, the retention of suspense right to the end, and the fine balance of humour and drama" do not betray the story's troubled development.

[46] They stated that with Prisoners of the Sun, the story had switched into "Hitchcockian thriller mode", a similar technique that Hergé had adopted into a number of previous adventures.

[56] In his psychoanalytical study of the Adventures of Tintin, the literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès believed that The Seven Crystal Balls–Prisoners of the Sun arc reflects a confrontation between civilisations, and between the sacred and the secular.

[66] In 2018, it was reported that Prisoners of the Sun would be the basis for the sequel to 2011's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, which was directed by Steven Spielberg with Peter Jackson as executive producer.