corto maltese the ballad of the salt sea

Action moves around the islands in the South Pacific, involves both New Zealand aboriginals and island races, Japanese and German destroyers and sub-marines (it’s the war), and pirates. “No one has ever created a synthesis of languid adventure and atmospheric personalities that comes anywhere close to Corto Maltese.”Ī massive 168-page story, complex, detailed, satisfying. Winner of the Harvey Award and nominated for the Eisner Award for Best U.S. This EuroComics edition features 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). The story captures the imagination of the reader from the opening pages with a tight, compelling storyline that can be interpreted on different levels. The pace of the narrative and the drawings are very modern and Pratt permeates the adventure with an extraordinary atmosphere of the great outdoors. The action begins in November 1913 in the South Seas as hints of the Great War were already looming but the romantic ideals of the nineteenth century were still alive.

Pratt was inspired by Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London, but even more directly by Henry de Vere Stacpool’s Blue Lagoon, from which the author got the idea of a small island in the Pacific which he named “Escondida.” The Ballad of the Salty Sea is also hailed as the first example of the literary comic strip. Although Vol 11 in this new series, this is the first in chronological order.

Here we also meet the young and beautiful Pandora, her brother Cain, the mysterious criminal mastermind Monk, the grim and ferocious Rasputin, Lieutenant Slutter of the German Navy, and the natives Skull and Tarao. Corto is just one of a strong ensemble cast of characters whose lives permeate the entire 12-book series. Originally serialized beginning in 1967, this book is universally acknowledged as Hugo Pratt’s masterpiece, in which he introduces Corto Maltese to the world. Pin-Up & Adult –You must be 18 or older.

Corto maltese the ballad of the salt sea