Though its early pages were published in Le Petit Vingtième, this episode was suspended at the start of World War II. When it finally appeared in 1948, it was in the colorized pages of the new Tintin magazine. Hergé drew on articles and books by the journalist Antoine Zischka for background on the Middle East oil crisis. His character of Emir Ben Kalish Ezab was based on Zischka’s description of the Saudi Arabian monarch Ibn Saud, who had given the American company Standard Oil authorization to exploit the country’s resources.