Corto Maltese: The Sailor Who Made Italian Comics Into Literature

In 1967, a Venetian artist named Hugo Pratt published the first Corto Maltese story in an Argentine comics magazine. The character — a lone sailor with a small earring, a battered captain's hat, and a code of ethics he follows with absolute stubbornness — became one of the most admired comic characters in European history. In Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world, Corto Maltese is considered high art. Yet in the English-speaking world, he is barely known. This is one of the great injustices of cultural geography.

Hugo Pratt was born in Rimini in 1927, grew up partly in Ethiopia and Venice, served in the war, and spent much of his adult life travelling between Italy, Argentina, France and Switzerland. His life sounds like a Corto Maltese adventure because it essentially was one. Pratt used the comics medium with a literary ambition that was almost unprecedented — his black-and-white artwork drew on film noir, Expressionism and Japanese illustration, while his stories incorporated genuine historical research, real political events (the Russian Revolution, the First World War, colonial Africa), and philosophical dialogues that would not have been out of place in a Borges story.

Corto Maltese is set between roughly 1904 and 1925, an era of collapsing empires, rising nationalism, and profound moral uncertainty. Corto himself is a man without a nation — his father was a sailor from Cornwall, his mother a Romani woman from Seville — and he navigates a world of colonialism, revolution, and adventure with an ethical compass that is entirely his own. He helps the weak, distrusts the powerful, keeps his word, and moves on. Italian readers have long seen in Corto an ideal of refined, melancholic masculinity that is deeply Mediterranean: the man who knows the world is unjust but acts rightly anyway.

The first Corto Maltese story, 'Una ballata del mare salato' (A Ballad of the Salt Sea), is a masterpiece of adventure literature in any medium. Set in the Pacific in 1913, it involves a castaway sailor, a pair of ship-stealing pirates, two kidnapped young people, and a moral reckoning that unfolds over two hundred pages of extraordinary black-and-white illustration. The writing — conversations about fate, freedom, loyalty, and the sea — is literary in the truest sense. Umberto Eco, Italy's most famous intellectual of the late twentieth century, was an admirer and wrote a preface to one Italian edition.

Hugo Pratt died in 1995, having produced one of the most significant bodies of work in the history of the comics medium. His influence on European comics — on storytelling, on visual style, on the ambition of what the graphic narrative can achieve — is incalculable. Corto Maltese merchandise, exhibitions, and retrospectives continue to appear regularly in Italy and France, where the character has never gone out of fashion. The Venice connection is especially celebrated: Corto is a Venetian soul, and the city treats him as one of its own.