« The poet is a madman lost in adventure. » — Paul Verlaine
Today, we’ll examine the early history of Italian fumetti maestro Ugo Eugenio Prat’s (aka Hugo Pratt, 1927-1995) most famous personage, Corto Maltese.
Maltese (named, indeed, after Dashiell Hammett’s famous novel… or rather its John Huston-helmed cinematic adaptation) created in 1967 for the Italian magazine Sgt. Kirk… saddled with a modest print run of 3000… and rather soon cancelled owing to low sales! There, Corto turned up — as a minor player — in a tale entitled Una Ballata del Mare Salato (“A Ballad of the Salt Sea”). Corto’s peregrinations then followed their tortuous course in French bédé weekly Pif Gadget from 1970-73, where the strip mostly baffled — or even enraged — readers but was tirelessly championed by the enlightened editorial team. In his Prix Goncourt-winning biography*, Hugo Pratt, trait pour trait, Thierry Thomas states: « With each new episode, the magazine received letters from readers who couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and demanded Rahan, nothing but Rahan. » Clearly, the world wasn’t ready for Corto… but that acceptance would gradually arrive, at least in the non English-speaking world**.
While the Corto saga has been made available over the years in several fine editions in most of the European languages, it took a long time for English to be added to the roster. In the USA, IDW has managed the fairly monumental but inarguably laudable task; I only wish the covers weren’t so ill-conceived, sadly a feature, rather than a bug, of editor-designer (and translator!) well-meaning Dean Mullaney‘s reprint collections at IDW**.
« You’ve met him while leafing through your PIF, last week… you may have deemed him, at first glance, cynical and cold… but you quickly realised that this nonchalance was but an appearance: Corto Maltese is a kind-hearted adventurer and his attitude serves only to mask a generosity that pulls him into adventures he’d rather avoid… adventures that drag him to the four corners of Central America, from Chile to the Caribbean, in savage lands where magic and ancient superstitions yet reign… in a search for lost civilisations and treasures.
Our friend, artist Hugo Pratt, has spent nearly ten years in patiently piecing together the history of Corto Maltese… in gathering all the documents that speak of these vanished worlds, in questioning the old sailors of the ports along the coasts of the Atlantic and of the Caribbean Sea…
Today, he reveals to us the fruit of his research… adventures that, we are sure, will enthral you. Hurry over to page 11 and join Corto Maltese and his friends aboard their boat. »
Rieu’s successor as Pif’s editor-in-chief, Richard Médioni, wrote: « In brief, in the Fall of 1969, Hugo Pratt found himself out of work. » After Pratt is crowned, that year, Best Italian Cartoonist at the Salone Internazionale dei Comics in Lucca (Europe’s oldest comics festival)… « It was expected that all publishers (French, Italian, and others, all present at the Salon) would push and shove their way to Hugo Pratt to propose a collaboration… but no such thing happened. Only Pif Gadget showed interest. »
Bonus factoid: Hugo Pratt was related to another artistic giant, William Henry Pratt, aka Boris Karloff!
-RG
*Imagine, if you will, a biography of, say, Will Eisner winning a Pulitzer.
**According to his biographer, one of Pratt’s eternal regrets is that his work never broke through in America, land of his childhood cartooning heroes George Herriman, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond and Burne Hogarth.
***One need only look at Mullaney’s Rip Kirby, where a blobby, lazy Photoshop shadow directly contradicts the light source indicated by Alex Raymond, a guy you’d assume it would be unwise to second-guess.
Who's Out There? 