The Crab with the Golden Claws

As the Belgian army clashed with the invading Germans in May 1940, Hergé and his wife fled by car to France along with tens of thousands of other Belgians, first staying in Paris and then heading south to Puy-de-Dôme, where they remained for six weeks.[4] On 28 May, Belgian King Leopold III officially surrendered the country to the German army to prevent further killing, a move that Hergé agreed with. Germany placed Belgium under occupation. Hergé followed the king's request that all civilians who had fled the country return; he arrived back in Brussels on 30 June.[5] There, he found that an officer of the German army's Propagandastaffel occupied his house, and he also faced financial trouble, as he owed back taxes yet was unable to access his financial reserves (his fee due from Casterman eventually arrived).[6] All Belgian publications were now under the control of the German occupying force. The Catholic publication Le Vingtième Siècle and its supplement Le Petit Vingtième, where Hergé had always worked serialising The Adventures of Tintin, no longer had permission to continue publication. Land of Black Gold, the story that Hergé had been serialising there, had to be abandoned.[7][lower-alpha 1] Victor Matthys, the Rexist editor of Le Pays Réel, offered Hergé employment as a cartoonist, but Hergé perceived Le Pays Réel as an explicitly political publication and thus declined the position.[8]

Instead, he accepted a position with Le Soir, Belgium's largest Francophone daily newspaper. Confiscated from its original owners, the German authorities permitted Le Soir to reopen under the directorship of Belgian editor Raymond De Becker, although it remained firmly under Nazi control, supporting the German war effort and espousing anti-Semitism.[9][lower-alpha 2] After joining Le Soir on 15 October, Hergé created its new children's supplement, Le Soir Jeunesse. Appointed editor of this supplement, he was aided by old friend Paul Jamin and the cartoonist Jacques Van Melkebeke.[11] The first issue of Le Soir Jeunesse was published with a large announcement across the cover: "Tintin et Milou sont revenus!" ("Tintin and Snowy are Back!").[12] Some Belgians were upset that Hergé was willing to work for a newspaper controlled by the occupying Nazi administration; he received an anonymous letter from "the father of a large family" asking him not to work for Le Soir, fearing that The Adventures of Tintin would now be used to indoctrinate children in Nazi ideology, and that as a result "they will no longer speak of God, of the Christian family, of the Catholic ideal ... [How] can you agree to collaborate in this terrible act, a real sin against Spirit?"[13] Hergé however was heavily enticed by the size of Le Soir's readership, which reached 600,000, far more than what Le Vingtième Siècle had been able to accomplish.[14] 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.[15] Without the need to satirise political types, Harry Thompson observed that "Hergé was now concentrating more on plot and on developing a new style of character comedy. The public reacted positively".[16]

A 1943 copy of Le Soir dating to the occupation

The Crab with the Golden Claws began serialisation in Le Soir Jeunesse on 17 October 1940.[17] However, on 8 May 1941, a paper shortage caused by the ongoing war led to Le Soir Jeunesse being reduced to four pages, with the length of the weekly Tintin strip being cut by two-thirds. Several weeks later, on 3 September, the supplement disappeared altogether, with The Crab with the Golden Claws being moved into Le Soir itself in September, where it became a daily strip. As a result, Hergé was forced to alter the pace at which his narrative moved, as he had to hold the reader's attention at the end of every line.[18] As with earlier Adventures of Tintin, the story was later serialised in France in the Catholic newspaper Cœurs Vaillants from 21 June 1942.[17]

Following serialisation, Casterman collected together and published the story in book form in 1941; the last black-and-white Tintin volume to be released. For this collected edition, Hergé thought of renaming the story, initially considering The Red Crab (to accompany earlier adventures The Blue Lotus and The Black Island) before re-settling on Le Crabe aux pinces d'or (The Crab with the Golden Claws).[19] Hergé became annoyed that Casterman then sent the book to the printers without his final approval.[20] Nevertheless, as a result of Le Soir's publicity, book sales markedly increased, to the extent that most of the prior Adventures of Tintin were reprinted as a result.[21] German authorities made two exceptions: Tintin in America and The Black Island could not be reprinted at the time because they were set in the United States and Britain respectively, both of which were in conflict with Germany.[22]

The serial introduced the character of Captain Haddock. Haddock made his first appearance in Le Soir adjacent to an advert for the anti-Semitic German film, Jud Süß.[23] Hergé chose the name "Haddock" for the character after his wife, Germaine Remi, mentioned "a sad English fish" during a meal.[24] The inclusion of the Japanese police detective Bunji Kuraki as an ally of Tintin's in this story was possibly designed to counterbalance Hergé's portrayal of the Japanese as the antagonists in his earlier story, The Blue Lotus, particularly given that the occupying government was allied with Japan at the time.[25] The use of Morocco as a setting was likely influenced by The White Squadron a novel by French writer Joseph Peyré, which had been adapted into an Italian film in 1936 (Hergé had read the novel and seen the film).[15] The depiction of the French Foreign Legion in North Africa was possibly influenced by P. C. Wren's novel Beau Geste (1925) or its cinematic adaptations in 1926, 1928, and 1939.[26]

Whereas Hergé's use of Chinese in The Blue Lotus was correct, the Arabic script employed in The Crab with the Golden Claws was intentionally fictitious.[27] Many of the place names featured in the series are puns: the town of Kefheir was a pun on the French Que faire? ("what to do?") while the port of Bagghar derives from the French bagarre (scrape, or fight).[27] The name of Omar ben Salaad is a pun meaning "Lobster Salad" in French.[28]

Hergé deemed this frame from the story to be one of his two favourites from the entire Adventures of Tintin.

In February 1942, Casterman suggested to Hergé that his books be published in a new format; 62-pages rather than the former 100 to 130 pages, and now in full colour rather than black-and-white.[29] He agreed to this, and in 1943 The Crab with the Golden Claws was re-edited and coloured for publication as an album in 1944.[30] Due to the changes in how the adventure had been serialised at Le Soir, the album at this juncture was only 58 pages long, and thus Hergé filled the missing pages with four full-page colour frames, thus bringing it up to the standard 62-page format.[31] The Crab with the Golden Claws contained one of Hergé's two favourite illustrations from The Adventures of Tintin. It depicts Berbers reacting to Haddock's manic ravings, eventually becoming terrified of him and running away.[lower-alpha 3] Hergé described the action as "a series of movements, broken up and distributed among several characters. It could have been the same individual, lying down first, then getting up slowly, hesitating and finally running away. It's like a short cut in space and time".[33]

When the book was published in America, Hergé was asked to redraw scenes that depicted the mixing of black and white races. Initially, Jumbo was black (left), while in the redrawn edition he is white (right).

In the 1960s, The Crab with the Golden Claws, along with King Ottokar's Sceptre, became the first Tintin adventures published in the United States, in Little Golden Books.[34] Meanwhile, Casterman, working with the American publisher Western Publishing, made a number of changes: Jumbo, the sailor who Tintin leaves bound and gagged in Captain Haddock's cabin, as well as another man who beats Haddock in the cellar, could not be black Africans as depicted in the original; these were changed to a white sailor and an Arab due to the American publisher's concerns depicting blacks and whites mixing together.[35] The accompanying text was not changed and Haddock still refers to the man who beat him as a "Negro".[35] Also by request of the Americans, scenes of Haddock drinking directly from bottles of whiskey on the lifeboat and the plane were blanked out, keeping only the text.[36] The edited albums later had their blanked areas redrawn by Hergé to be more acceptable, and they appear this way in published editions around the world.[34] Casterman republished the original black-and-white version of the story in 1980, as part of the fourth volume in their Archives Hergé collection.[17] In 1989, they then published a facsimile version of that first edition.[17]