Completing an arc begun in The Secret of the Unicorn, the story tells of young reporter Tintin and his friend Captain Haddock as they launch an expedition to the Caribbean to locate the treasure of the pirate Red Rackham.

Red Rackham's Treasure has been cited as one of the most important installments in the series for marking the first appearance of eccentric scientist Cuthbert Calculus, who subsequently became a core character.

Tintin and his friend Captain Haddock plan an expedition to the West Indies aboard a fishing trawler, the Sirius, to search for the treasure of the pirate Red Rackham.

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

[6] Faced with the reality of Nazi oversight, Hergé abandoned the overt political themes that had pervaded much of his earlier work, instead adopting a policy of neutrality.

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

[9] However, as Tintin expert Michael Farr related, whereas Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus had been largely "self-sufficient and self-contained", the connection between The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure is far closer.

[11] Hergé had made use of various eccentric professors in earlier volumes of the series, such as Sophocles Sarcophagus in Cigars of the Pharaoh, Hector Alembick in King Ottokar's Sceptre, and Decimus Phostle in The Shooting Star, all of whom prefigure the arrival of Calculus.

[13] Visually, Calculus was based on a real scientist, the Swiss inventor Auguste Piccard, who had been the first man to explore the stratosphere in a hot air balloon in 1931.

[17] The shop where Haddock and Tintin buy the diving equipment, including the suit, was inspired from a picture of a bar which was featured in the German magazine, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung.

Hergé had sketched this ship in Ostend docks before obtaining both detailed plans of the trawler from the builders, Jos Boel & Son, and a small-scale model of it from a collector.

It combines three actions encapsulating a sequence of events into one drawing: Haddock striding up the beach in the foreground, Tintin, Thomson and Thompson bringing the rowboat ashore in the midground, and the Sirius weighing anchor in the background.

[27][c] Rather than immediately embark on the creation of a new Tintin adventure, Hergé agreed to a proposal that Le Soir's crime writer, Paul Kinnet, would author a detective story featuring Thomson and Thompson.

[29] The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure were the first two Adventures of Tintin to be published in standalone English-language translations for the British market, as King Ottokar's Sceptre had previously been serialised in Eagle in 1951.

[34] Focusing on the character of Calculus, he noted that the idea of the eccentric professor was "so universal that it would be inaccurate to point to any one source", suggesting possible influences from Charlie Chaplin and Hergé's own father.

[34] He added that both Red Rackham's Treasure and its predecessor "reveal Hergé at a new level in his art", and suggested that the reason for their popularity lay in the fact that they were "the visual continuation of a literary universe that stretches from Jules Verne to Pierre Benoit".

[40] Michael Farr said that the scene introducing Calculus was "a comic tour de force" marking the start of the "rich vein of humour" that the character brought to the series.

[44] Commenting on the introduction of Calculus' shark submarine, Apostolidès states that it "allows them to cross a boundary previously restricting human beings and to penetrate into another universe, the one beneath the seas that holds secrets hitherto unknown".

[45] Literary critic Tom McCarthy highlighted what he perceived as scenes in Red Rackham's Treasure which reflected common themes in The Adventures of Tintin.

[50] In 1991, a collaboration between the French studio Ellipse and the Canadian animation company Nelvana adapted 21 of the stories into a series of episodes, each 42 minutes long.