ThompsonandThomson:
there were two coups in Oman which took place in 1955 and 1957, which is just the time when The Red Sea Sharks is coming out(1956-58).
Maybe, but the time line is quite narrow. Herge would have been working on Red Sea Sharks much earlier than 1956. I don't know how long it took for the average Tintin adventure to be written and drawn at this period of his life but I imaging that he would have started work more around 1954 or something.
Herge worked with newspapers and journalists most of his life and got a lot of inspiration from them. Oman could have been just one of many coups that could have inspired him.
Slave trading was and sadly still is quite common these days.
One notable thing is that there is a scene where Doctor Muller of "Black Island" and "Black Gold" orders the Mosquito planes to go and attack Tintin and Haddock while they are escaping on horseback and then downgrades Colonel Ahmed when they attack the armoured cars by mistake. He is renamed Mull Pasha and takes that name from Glubb Pasha, aka John Bagot Glubb, a British officer who led Transjordan's Arab Legion during and after the war. Some claimed that Glubb was the real ruler of Transjordan rather than King Hussein and Muller certainly gives the impression that he is running the show rather than Sheikh Bab El Ehr.
