After arriving in England by ferry in Newhaven, both Tintin and the taxi driver are ambushed by the same criminals, who attempt to kill him over the cliffs of Seaford, but he escapes with Snowy's help.

Discovering the plane wreckage, he finds a torn-up note in the pilot's jacket, and following the writing on it arrives at the estate of Dr. J. W. Müller, a German who owns a mental institution, affiliated with the criminals.

[1] The following morning after recovering in hospital, Tintin finds electric cables and red beacons in the garden, surmising that they are there designed to attract a plane drop.

When Müller takes a plane north, Tintin and Snowy try to follow, but hit a storm and crash land in rural Scotland in foggy conditions.

While Tintin changed into his iconic Scottish outfit, the detectives commandeer another plane, but discover - too late - that the man they told to fly it is actually a mechanic who has never flown before, and after a harrowing air-bound odyssey they end up crash-landing into (and winning) an aerobatics competition.

[9] However, he temporarily set aside that project when he began to experience dreams of white and a car stuck in the snow, having ideas of sending Tintin to the north, considering Greenland or the Klondike as potential locations.

[12] His positive depiction of Britain was in part due to an Anglophilia that he had received from his childhood, with the British government having been a longstanding ally of Belgium, supporting its 1831 creation and liberating it from German occupation during the First World War.

[13] Hergé retained the anti-German sentiment that he had first considered for King Ottokar's Sceptre through the inclusion of a German villain, Dr. Müller,[10] who would go on to become a recurring character in the Tintin series.

[14] He based the character largely on Georg Bell [de], a Scottish forger who had been a vocal supporter of the Nazi regime, and who he had learned about from a February 1934 article of the anti-conformist Belgian magazine La Crapouillot (The Mortar Shell).

[13] Forging banknotes was a topical crime at the time,[10] while the idea of villains using superstition to hide their lair was a common trope, one that Hergé had used previously in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.

They used the ligne claire ("clear line") drawing style that Hergé had developed, in this way ensuring that the earlier stories fitted in visually alongside the new Adventures of Tintin being created.

Methuen believed that many British readers would find the depiction of Britain in the comic inaccurate and out-of-date, and drew up a list of 131 errors that they asked Hergé to rectify before they would publish it in English.

[23] They were also aware that the work would appear particularly dated when compared with some of the most recently published Adventures like Destination Moon and The Calculus Affair, which made use of advanced technologies in their plot.

Instead, he sent his assistant Bob De Moor to Britain in October 1961, where he visited such sites as Batemans and the White Cliffs of Dover, making many observations as to new developments in clothing and architecture.

[16] The multiple aircraft featured throughout the story were redrawn by Studios member Roger Leloup, who replaced the depiction of planes that were operational in the 1930s to those active at the time, such as a Percival Prentice, a D.H. Chipmunk, a Cessna 150, a Tiger Moth, and a British European Airways Hawker Siddeley Trident.

[28] The police were no longer depicted as carrying guns, as was accurate,[28] while the journalists Christopher Willoughby-Drupe and Marco Rizotto, who had first appeared in The Castafiore Emerald (1963), were retroactively added into the background of one scene.

[28] Harry Thompson thought that The Black Island expressed a "convenient, hitherto unsuspected regard for the British" on Hergé's behalf, with Britain itself appearing as "a little quaint".

[23] Commenting on the differences between the third version of the comic and the earlier two, he thought that the latter was "strongly representative" of the artistic talents of Studios Hergé in the 1960s, but that it was nevertheless inferior, because it had replaced the "spontaneity and poetry" of the original with "over-detailed and fussily accurate" illustrations.

[33] Biographer Benoît Peeters thought The Black Island to be "a pure detective story", describing it as "Remarkably well constructed" and highlighting that it contrasted the modern world of counterfeiters, airplanes, and television, with the mysteries of superstition and the historic castle.

[35] Elsewhere he was more critical, stating that "under the guise of modernization, a real massacre occurred", and adding that "the new Black Island was more than just a failure; it also showed one of the limitations of the Hergéan system", in that it was obsessed with repeated redrawing.

[36] Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès of Stanford University believed that The Black Island expanded on a variety of themes that Hergé had explored in his earlier work, such as the idea of counterfeiting and Snowy's fondness for whisky.

Belvision's adaptation, directed by Ray Goossens and written by Michel Greg, divided The Black Island up into 5-minute colour episodes that diverted from Hergé's original plot in a variety of ways.

[42] The French studio Ellipse and Canadian animation company Nelvana subsequently adapted the comic into a 1991 episode of The Adventures of Tintin television series.