I'm currently re-reading another classic of European comic book art, Hugo Pratt's great "Corto Maltese" series. These tales feature the deeply romantic globetrotting adventures of Corto Maltese: sailor, dreamer, adventurer and son of a British sailor and an Andalucian gypsy witch woman.
Corto gets into all sorts of adventures around the time of World War I. We get tales of politics, revolution, war, art, magic and mysticism. The first Corto tale, the great 160 page graphic novel "Ballad of the Salt Sea" (1969) about various character roaming the Pacific Ocean during WWI, is still a fairly traditional adventure tale inspired by Milton Caniff's immortal "Terry and the Pirates":
("Salt Sea")
It was followed by a series of shorter tales (released 1970-1973) where Corto is romaing around Europe, Africa, the Carribean and various other global locations. Then followed a series of longer graphic novels in the 1970s and 80s that got increasingly more weird, dreamy, mystical and personal.
Lots of historical characters characters are featured in the stories: Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Hesse, The Red Baron etc. He also gets involved with celtic mythological characters like Oberon and Titania and he gets to visit the lost continent of Mu.
Pratt's use of Black and white graphics is legendary. He builds on the mighty work of Milton Caniff, but with increasing focus on black and white graphical spaces. It's comes as no surprise that Frank Miller is a big Hugo Pratt Fan: An island in his classic "The Dark Knight Returns" is named 'Corto Maltese', and his later black and white work in "Sin City" seems to owe much to Pratt.
Hovewer, Pratt is also known for his stunning use of water colors, for various graphical work (covers, posters, supplemental material) outside the stories:
And here is the official Corto Maltese Tarot Deck:
It's really great re-reading these stories. By the time I got to the story where Corto is walking around Stonehenge having a conversation with a black raven who's really Puck the hobgoblin in disguise, and helping Oberon and Merlin save the ancient Celtic islands from a German submarine attack, it kinda struck me that Pratt was doing much of the same stuff as Neil Gaiman did in "The Sandman", only almost 20 years earlier.
A few Corto books have been released in English. They are out of print, but it's not that hard to track down used copies on Amazon or Ebay.
Further reading:
("Salt Sea")
And here is the official Corto Maltese Tarot Deck:
It's really great re-reading these stories. By the time I got to the story where Corto is walking around Stonehenge having a conversation with a black raven who's really Puck the hobgoblin in disguise, and helping Oberon and Merlin save the ancient Celtic islands from a German submarine attack, it kinda struck me that Pratt was doing much of the same stuff as Neil Gaiman did in "The Sandman", only almost 20 years earlier.
