ALTESE
“Hugo Pratt is among the greatest storytellers in all of literature, but what’s more, he also draws like a god.”
Milo Manara “In his verbal-visual genius, it's impossible to distinguish between the art and the writing; in Pratt's stories there's only one line…. At first sight, Pratt seems to be inspired by all of the orientalism and exoticism of the last two centuries, but instead of parasitically clinging to it, he criticizes it and turns it on its head…[he] recognizes his sources of inspiration but he bravely fights his battle with the angel, he elaborates and resolves, as [Harold] Bloom would say, his anxiety of influence, and creates stories that are solely and unequivocally his own.”
Umberto Eco
Hugo Pratt at the opening of his exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1986. Photograph by Carlos Saldi.
© SALDI/SIPA & DUKAS
Frank Miller “Wow, where has Corto Maltese been all my life? Apparently, he's just been waiting for this beautifully translated, exquisite new edition of Hugo Pratt's masterpiece. A must-own for everyone who cares about graphic novels.”
Brian K. Vaughan “I read my first Corto Maltese story when I was ten years old and, ever since, this was the version of Corto I’ve wanted on my shelves. At long last, Pratt’s masterpiece washes up on American shores the way it was intended to be seen and read, the way fans all over the world have known and loved it for decades. If you’re like me, rejoice: our long wait is over. And if this is the first time you’ve experienced the world of Corto Maltese, I envy you. There’s a perfect comic just waiting for you between these covers.”
Matt Fraction “Corto Maltese was the first European strip to advance a mature, artistically serious sensibility within the traditional adventure format. The elliptical narrative of the stories, the pervasive sense of destiny and tragedy, the side trips into the worlds of dreams and magic—all capped off with the exotic, guarded nature of the hero—combined with Pratt’s hard-won craft, worldly experience, and scrupulous research to form a work of breathtaking scope and power.”
Kim Thompson “I bet you thought you had a kick-ass graphic novel collection that included all of the essential works by all the essential authors, but if you didn’t have this brand-new, first-rate, high-quality edition of Hugo Pratt’s masterpiece, then you did not have a kick-ass graphic novel collection. Now you do. (And so do I.)”
Brian Michael Bendis
$29.99 • EuroComics.us • idwpublishing.com
C O R T O M A L T E S E
UNDER THE SIGN OF CAPRICORN
Hugo Pratt (1927-1995) is considered one of the great graphic novelists in the history of the medium. His strips, graphic works, and watercolors have been exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Vittoriano in Rome, and a landmark show in 2011 at the Pinacotheque in Paris drew 215,000 visitors, hailing Pratt as “the inventor of the literary comic strip.” His far-flung travels—he lived on three continents and was multilingual—gave him a healthy skepticism toward nationalistic, ideological, and religious dogmas, as well as a sympathy for the underdog that was reflected in his fictional creations, providing them a verisimilitude rarely seen in comics. Born on June 15, 1927 in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, he spent his childhood in Venice, where he was raised in a meltingpot of races, beliefs, and cultures. From his mother, Evelina Genero, he was exposed to esoteric studies, including Kabbalah and cartomancy. His father, Rolando, a soldier in the Italian army, was transferred to Abyssinia in 1936, and the family followed. When Hugo was just fourteen he was forced to join the colonial police. It brought him in contact with an international menagerie of soldiers and the charm of those different uniforms, crests, colors, and faces would remain steadily present in his work. Simultaneously he made friends with his Abyssinian peers, which allowed him to learn the local languages and integrate into a world that most colonizers never knew. He eagerly read adventure novels by James Oliver Curwood, Zane Grey, Kenneth Roberts, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others; and discovered the early American adventure comic strips, particularly Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff, which impressed him so much that he decided to become a cartoonist. After his father’s death in 1943, Pratt returned to Italy and, because of his facility in English, became an interpreter for the Allied army until the end of the war. His comics career began in Venice in 1945 and in 1949 he was invited with several other cartoonists to become part of the thriving comics community in Argentina, where he lived for nearly twenty years, with a brief detour drawing comics in London in 1959-1960. Pratt’s Argentine years were productive—he published many series including Sgt. Kirk, Ernie Pike, Ticonderoga, Capitan Cormorant, and Wheeling—and he discovered Latin-American writers such as Octavio Paz, Leopoldo Lugones, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Arlt. In the early-to-mid 1960s he split his time between Argentina and Italy, and drew children’s adventure stories for an Italian magazine. In 1967 Pratt and Florenzo Ivaldi published the magazine Sgt. Kirk to reprint his Argentine comics in Italy. The first issue also contained nine pages of a new story entitled “The Ballad of the Salty Sea” featuring the enigmatic sea captain and adventurer Corto Maltese. Two years later he resurrected Corto for the French weekly magazine Pif and moved to Paris, while continuing his travels throughout the world. The success of Corto Maltese in France spread first to Italy and then to many other countries. From that point forward, all of Pratt’s works would ultimately be collected in graphic novels. He was made a “Knight of Arts and Letters” by the French Minister of Culture. In addition to Corto Maltese, Pratt also created the series The Scorpions of the Desert and four graphic novels in the One Man, One Adventure collection, among others. He eventually moved to Grandvaux, Switzerland, on the Lake of Lausanne, where he died on August 20, 1995.
“One of the true masters of comic art…that rarest, most valuable sort of talent in any field, an authority on times and places beyond your own.”
HUGO PRATT
Praise for HUGO PRATT and CORTO
Long before the term “graphic novel” entered the popular lexicon, the Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt pioneered the long-form “drawn literature” story in 1967 when he introduced Corto Maltese in the epic adventure “The Ballad of the Salty Sea.” Pratt set the standard for all adult adventure comics in Europe and by the mid-1970s Corto was the continent’s most popular series and Pratt the world’s leading graphic novelist. His books remain best sellers in Europe and are published in a dozen languages, yet until now Corto Maltese has been poorly represented in English. This volume—the first of twelve—at long last affords Pratt’s masterpiece an American edition in the original oversized black-and-white format in which Pratt created the work. The EuroComics editions feature new translations from Pratt’s original Italian scripts by Dean Mullaney, the Eisner and Harvey Award-winning editor of the Library of American Comics, and Simone Castaldi, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Hofstra, and the author of Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s (University Press of Mississippi). Hugo Pratt’s peripatetic sailor was featured in a series of twenty-nine stories. The adventures of this modern Ulysses are set during the first thirty years of the 20th Century in such exotic locales as Pratt’s native Venice, the steppes of Manchuria, the Caribbean islands, the Danakil deserts, the Amazon forests, and the waves of the Pacific. The stories in this volume take place in 1916 and 1917.
The waterfront of Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), as it looked when Corto Maltese docked his boat at its port in this volume’s first story.
EDITED AND DESIGNED BY Dean Mullaney
Lorraine Turner Patrizia Zanotti
ART DIRECTOR AND CO-COVER DESIGNER CONSULTING EDITOR
Lettering font based on hand-lettering by Frank Engli.
EuroComics.us EuroComics is an imprint of IDW Publishing a Division of Idea and Design Works, LLC 5080 Santa Fe Street San Diego, CA 92109 www.idwpublishing.com Distributed by Diamond Book Distributors 1-410-560-7100 ISBN: 978-1-63140-065-0 First Printing, December 2014 IDW Publishing Ted Adams, Chief Executive Officer/Publisher Greg Goldstein, Chief Operating Officer/President Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief Matthew Ruzicka, CPA, Chief Financial Officer Alan Payne, VP of Sales Dirk Wood, VP of Marketing Lorelei Bunjes, VP of Digital Services THANKS TO:
Diana Schutz, Greg Goldstein, Dana Renga, Bob Schreck, Scott Tipton, Justin Eisinger, and Alonzo Simon. © 1970 Cong S.A., Switzerland. Corto Maltese ® and Hugo Pratt™ © Cong S.A. Art © 2014 Casterman, Bruxelles. Translation © 2014 Dean Mullaney and Simone Castaldi. All rights reserved. The IDW logo is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. All rights reserved. The EuroComics logo and colophon is a trademark of The Library of American Comics, LLC. All rights reserved. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of the comic strips in this publication may be reprinted without the permission of the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Korea.
UNDER THE OF
SIGN CAPRICORN A CORTO MALTESE Graphic Novel
Translated by Dean Mullaney and Simone Castaldi
An imprint of IDW PUBLISHING
Chapter ONE:
The Secret of Tristan Bantam
CORTo MALTEse was relaxing on the quiet veranda of the JavA InN in paramaribo, dutch GuiANA. even in repose, it was obvious that he was [a man of destinY.]
SUDDenly the SHow was interRupted‌
With a deliberate gesture HE lit one of those thin cigars that are only smoked in Brazil or New Orleans--as if he were performing for an invisible Audience.
My Apologies TO Everybody, My:
Get lost, you bastard. I don't want to see you here any more, Jeremiah!
‌My ApologiES to you, too, if you want.
What's the MatTer? Don't you feEl well/
9
It’s been a long time since I Felt well and unfortunately there's nothing you can do about it.
I never said I wanted to do anything about it... so far as I'm concerned, you can go to helL@ Someone who speaks his mind! I'll try to follow your Advice. Goodbye!
You're right, Corto Maltese.
hE wasn't always like this. There was a time when professor Jeremiah Steiner belonged to a distinguished elite, sought after by the very best of international society.
A touchy character, that Jeremiah.
PRofesSor StEineR?
Yes, ProfESsoR StEiner of the UnivErsity of PrAgUe.
with all he drank from Prague to Paramaribo, however, He has no more thirst for philosophical knowledge.
10
He wAs an importanT man. What he wrote and tAUGHT is still the subject of study AND rEsearCh.
All that's left for me to do is moderate his great thirst for rum and keep him away from here for a few hours.
YOU judgE others based on your own view, Corto Maltese. But this time you’re wrong. I have the HiGhEST ESTEem for Professor Steiner.
HerE’s a nEw aspecT oF YOUR PERSONALity. you never struck me as the charitable type. Do you DO it FOr his OWN GoOd oR because he doesn’t pay for WHAT HE Drinks?
Good Day! Is this Madame Java’s Inn?
THEN you KNEW My Father…Ronald Bantam? RONALD BANtAM? You are the son of Ronald Bantam?
My NAME is…
YES, Ma’am. My father told me a lot about you …before he died.
Ahem! Pardon me, [Madame Java,] but I see that you’re busy at the moment. I’lL go down to the port and have a look at my boat.
very welL. I’lL see you tonight.
11
I am MadAMe Java.
Your FATHER was a dear friend and his death saddens me.