Europe
Hugo Pratt
Hugo Pratt · 1927–1995
- Classification
- Writer-artist. Italian. The great literary adventurer of European comics.
- Habitat
- Venice, then Buenos Aires (1949 onwards), London, and back to Europe: Sgt. Kirk (1967), Pif Gadget, and Corto Maltese albums until 1992
- Distinguishing marks
- Bold black shapes, loose watercolour, sailors in peaked caps, quotations from Coleridge and Stevenson, and long silent sequences in which the sea does most of the talking
- Often seen with
- Héctor Germán Oesterheld, who wrote for him in Argentina; Milo Manara, who drew his scripts
- Conservation status
- Endangered in English. IDW's EuroComics translations of the 2010s are hard to find new.
Field-guide card
Pratt grew up in Venice and spent part of his childhood in Ethiopia, which was then an Italian colony, before moving to Argentina in 1949 with a group of Venetian cartoonists. There he worked with the writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld on war and adventure comics. In 1967 he created Corto Maltese, a sailor of fortune who drifts through the early twentieth century, in The Ballad of the Salt Sea, and spent the next quarter of a century following him around the world.
You've seen his influence in the literary adventure comic, which he more or less invented, and in any adventure hero who seems to know more about poetry than guns. Corto Maltese has been adapted into animated films, and Pratt's watercolours are regularly exhibited in European galleries.
The gateway drug is Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea, a South Seas adventure that is part Stevenson, part Conrad. The deep end is Corto Maltese in Siberia, a vast, complicated story set during the Russian Civil War. The curio is Indian Summer, a story about Puritan New England that Pratt wrote for Milo Manara to draw.
The Crowsnest verdict: the most romantic comics ever drawn, and some of the most melancholy. Pack a sea shanty and a book of Coleridge.