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Who is Hugo Pratt?

The Navigator of Worlds: The Enduring Legacy of Hugo Pratt

Although the Italian comic artist died in 1995, we can ask this question in the present tense due to the enormous influence and importance he had on his successors. The figure of Hugo Pratt stands majestically on the horizon of the ninth art, comparable to the recognizable silhouette of his most famous alter ego, Corto Maltese, outlined against a watercolor sky. So great is the renown of this character and his author that he has been called the “Picasso of comics” and the “Master of illustrated literature” before the term “graphic novel” even existed.

Pratt was not just an exceptional artist, but a true navigator between cultures, an explorer of the human and literary realms who managed to capture the very essence of travel and adventure in every stroke of his pen. His work transcends the boundaries of traditional comics to become a form of visual literature with deep roots in the great classics of universal narrative.

At the same time, the origins of Pratt’s work come from his readings, and we can notice the seeds of authors such as R. Kipling, H. Hesse, Chretíen de Troyes, Shakespeare, Borges, Jack London, Rimbaud, Thomas More, among others. Therefore, for the artist: “A journey is a search that arises from reading” and he has also stated:

“What I draw resembles writing. It is writing. To get there, I’ve had to read an enormous number of books, record thousands of facts, often unconsciously, to realize today that all that work is a work of memory.”

For his part, according to the semiologist and friend of Pratt, Umberto Eco: “Pratt turns his own nostalgia for literature into adventure story material and thus displays it.” This confluence between literature and drawing is precisely what makes Pratt’s work so unique and enduring, an approach to comics that transcends mere illustration to become a unique way of telling stories.

The Clear Line that Hides Oceans: Pratt’s Distinctive Style

Keith Page explains that, according to Pratt, his purpose was “portraying all that is to be understood in a single line”. His style has been described as raw and is characterized by not having complex visual arrangements with sophisticated effects or extravagant elements. The pages of Corto Maltese usually vary between five and six panels with some appearances of speech bubbles, all hand-drawn and painted with watercolors.

This apparent simplicity hides extraordinary sophistication: every line in Pratt’s work is carefully calculated, each stroke contains exactly what is necessary to tell the story, no more, no less. This visual minimalism, far from impoverishing the narrative, enriches it by forcing the reader to actively participate in the construction of the story. Discover here how to master the art of visual and narrative synthesis in the style of the great masters.

One of the common elements in his illustrations has to do with the representation of calm, tranquility, and inner reflection. For this reason, we can appreciate that he was quite removed from commercial circuits which, on the contrary, use action stories and shock effects to achieve mass appeal. Pratt understood that true drama often unfolds in silence, in those seemingly empty moments where characters reflect, doubt, or simply contemplate the horizon.

In a world where contemporary comics tend toward visual and narrative overload, Pratt’s minimalist approach represents a necessary counterpoint, a lesson on how less can be more when one masters the visual language. His panels breathe, they have space for the reader’s imagination to expand and complete what is not explicitly shown.

Corto Maltese: The Sailor Who Conquered the World

His most famous character, sharing the same name as his comic, made his first appearance in 1967 with “Una Ballata del Mare Salato” (A Ballad of the Salt Sea). This masterpiece not only introduced the world to one of the most iconic characters in comic history but also established a new standard for graphic adventure narratives, moving away from superheroes and simplistic stories to offer a more mature and complex vision of the genre.

Corto Maltese is a romantic sailor, a stateless adventurer who travels the seas of the world in the early 20th century, witness and sometimes participant in crucial historical events. He is not a conventional hero: he is ambiguous, complex, sometimes contradictory. He doesn’t always do the right thing, but he always follows his own code of honor. This moral complexity makes him a deeply human character and, therefore, one with whom readers can identify despite his extraordinary adventures.

In 1991, Eco wrote a prologue to this work titled “The Imperfect Geography of Corto Maltese” in which he affirmed the wandering nature of its narrative, its character, and its author in this way:

“Everything in the Ballad follows the rhythm of the maritime courses it narrates, even the psychology of the characters, who love each other after having shot at each other, or kill each other out of friendship, and lose control, and reinvent themselves with a new lineage, a clinical history on each page – and we don’t know who the Monk really is (I don’t believe in Slütter’s reconstruction, too precise), nor what face he has, nor if he has a face, and where Rasputin comes from, and why Cain has that name (perhaps a Byronian reference), and, above all, we know very little about Corto, of whom successive stories, however, will tell us everything, without even sparing his mother-. The drawing is also uncertain and Corto does not have the essential and defined features, I don’t mean of the last stories (where he even rejuvenates and becomes angelic, losing the marks of a not entirely upright life), not even of his more mature epic, when he moves with ease between the Venetian lagoon, Brazil, Ireland and the terrestrial routes of the Trans-Siberian.”

This “uncertainty” that Eco identifies is precisely one of the great strengths of Pratt’s work. The characters are not completely defined, they have areas of shadow, unrevealed mysteries, exactly like real people. This calculated ambiguity allows Corto Maltese and the characters surrounding him to evolve, surprise the reader, and maintain their freshness throughout decades of publications.

The Roots Behind the Traveler: Hugo Pratt and His Life of Searching

Corto Maltese, like his creator, is marked by travel and the sea. This makes sense when we consider that the mind that conceived this romantic adventurer spent his childhood in Venice and lost his father, an officer in the Italian colonial army in Abyssinia, when he was imprisoned by enemy soldiers. The early loss of his father became one of the most powerful creative drivers in Pratt’s life, an absence he would try to fill through his travels and, later, through his art.

Venice, a city of water and a bridge between East and West, left an indelible mark on young Pratt’s imagination. The stories of sailors, merchants, and travelers he heard in his childhood, along with the omnipresence of the sea and canals, nurtured his fascination with oceans and distant cultures. It is no coincidence that Corto Maltese is a sailor and that so many of his adventures take place at sea or in exotic ports.

Both character and artist are in constant search and remembrance of a future that could be. We can link this to Pratt’s own personal and reading experience. Before disappearing from his son’s life, the man had asked that he be given a copy of Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” with the dedication: “You’ll see that one day you too will find your treasure island” and that was the motivation he followed for the rest of his days.

This paternal gesture, this literary legacy turned prophecy, would mark the course of Hugo Pratt’s life. Literature, and particularly adventure literature, would become his compass, his personal treasure map. Want to express your own stories through drawing? Explore resources here to bring your personal narratives to life.

This is how he traveled the world and even lived for several years in Ethiopia learning languages such as Abyssinian and Swahili. But, unlike his father, he learned to appreciate the colonized territories more than the colonizers. This anticolonialist perspective, quite ahead of its time, permeates all his work and turns it into a subtle but effective commentary on power relations between cultures and nations.

For this reason, his love for indigenous peoples can be noted in his work, especially in the case of North Americans such as the Iroquois and the Mohawk, to whom he dedicated several of his panels. Pratt took the representation of these cultures very seriously, meticulously researching their customs, clothing, and worldviews to portray them with the utmost respect and possible accuracy, avoiding falling into the typical stereotypes of Western fiction.

Image 1

This panel, which might seem simple or even unfinished to untrained eyes, demonstrates Pratt’s mastery in the evocation of atmospheres. Far from being “half-done,” each element is precisely where it should be, and his choice of colors perfectly captures the desired ambience. With astonishing economy of means, Pratt manages to transport us to a specific place and time, demonstrating that sometimes what is not shown is as important as what is.

Pratt’s drawing is a constant lesson on the power of suggestion. He doesn’t need to show every detail for the reader to understand what is happening; he trusts in the visual intelligence of his reader, in their ability to complete what is barely hinted at. It is an act of respect toward the reader, whom he considers an active collaborator in the construction of meaning.

Image 2

Another of Pratt’s distinctive elements can be seen in this image: the fascination with military clothing and symbolism. This has to do with his experience in World War II and the life of his ancestors. The uniforms, insignias, weapons, everything is represented with an almost documentary precision that reveals the deep knowledge Pratt had about these subjects.

This attention to historical detail is another hallmark of his work. Despite the apparent simplicity of his stroke, Pratt was extremely meticulous in historical documentation. Each object, each garment, each weapon that appears in his comics has been carefully researched to ensure its authenticity. This historical precision, combined with fantastic or legendary elements, creates that particular mixture of realism and magic that characterizes Corto Maltese’s adventures.

A Drawn Atlas: Global Settings in Pratt’s Work

With the wandering personality of both creator and creation, it is not surprising to find work on different cities such as Buenos Aires and, likewise, deserts through which we accompany the protagonist. The locations in Pratt’s work are not mere backdrops; they are characters in their own right, with unique personality and character. Click here to learn how to create backgrounds and settings that tell stories by themselves.

Image 3

The representation of Buenos Aires in this panel exemplifies how Pratt captures the essence of a place without needing to recreate it with photographic meticulousness. With few visual elements, he manages to convey the atmosphere, the light, the particular character of the port city. This capacity for visual distillation of the essence of places is one of Pratt’s greatest artistic achievements.

Throughout Corto Maltese’s various adventures, we travel through practically all continents, from the islands of the South Pacific to the Venetian canals, from the Amazonian jungles to the Siberian steppes. Each of these settings is represented with the same economy of means and the same atmospheric precision. Pratt doesn’t need an overload of details to transport us to these places; with a few masterful strokes and his characteristic watercolors, he allows us to feel the suffocating heat of Africa, the enveloping humidity of Venice, or the desolate vastness of the desert.

This mastery of spatial representation is not just an aesthetic matter but a narrative one. The places in Pratt’s work determine the rhythm of the story, influence the characters, condition their actions. Space is not neutral but actively interacts with the plot and the protagonists, creating a perfect symbiosis between background and figure, between setting and action.

The World Through the Pratt Filter: Colonialism, Culture, and Magic

One of the most notable characteristics of Pratt’s work is his deeply anticolonialist vision. Despite being the son of an Italian colonial officer, or perhaps precisely because of it, Pratt developed a critical view of European colonialism and a deep empathy for colonized cultures. This perspective permeates all his stories, especially those starring Corto Maltese.

In his adventures, Corto often aligns himself with the oppressed against the oppressors, with local cultures against foreign invaders. However, Pratt avoids falling into simplistic Manichaeism; his European characters are not all villains, nor are his non-Western characters all noble savages. Moral complexity is a constant in his work, and all characters, regardless of their origin, are portrayed with their virtues and defects.

This nuanced vision also extends to his representation of different cultures. Pratt felt a genuine fascination for the traditions, mythologies, and worldviews of the peoples he portrayed in his comics. Far from exoticizing them or reducing them to simple curiosities, he treated them with the same respect and seriousness as Western cultures. Explore here how to represent diverse cultures and traditions with authenticity in your drawings.

A particularly interesting aspect of his work is the way he integrates magical or supernatural elements into his stories. In Corto Maltese’s world, magic and the supernatural are not fantasies but alternative realities, systems of knowledge as valid as Western science. This vision, far ahead of its time, anticipates contemporary interest in non-Western epistemologies and the questioning of the monopoly of truth by European science.

Magic in Pratt’s work is not spectacular or gratuitous; it is subtle, mysterious, often ambiguous. The reader is never completely sure whether the supernatural elements are real within the universe of the story or if they are the product of the characters’ imagination, their beliefs, or altered states of consciousness. This deliberate ambiguity enriches the reading and allows multiple interpretations.

The Footprints of Literature: Pratt as Reader and Creator

As we mentioned at the beginning, literature was a fundamental influence in the life and work of Hugo Pratt. His personal library contained more than twenty thousand volumes, a treasure he constantly consulted to nourish his stories. This reading voracity is reflected on every page of his comics, which are full of literary, historical, and cultural references.

From Stevenson, he inherited the love for maritime adventure and the romanticism of travel; from Conrad, the critical look at colonialism and the exploration of moral ambiguity; from Borges, the taste for narrative labyrinths and parallel realities; from Kipling, the fascination with Oriental cultures and the vision of the encounter between East and West. All these authors, and many more, form the literary substrate on which Pratt built his work.

But Pratt did not limit himself to reproducing or adapting what he had read; he transformed it, reinterpreted it, made it his own. His genius lies precisely in this ability to take elements from classical literature and turn them into something completely new and personal. The result is a work that can be appreciated on multiple levels: as pure adventure for those seeking entertainment, as philosophical reflection for those seeking depth, as literary homage for erudite readers.

This richness of possible readings partly explains the endurance of Pratt’s work. Decades after their creation, Corto Maltese’s adventures continue to be read with the same pleasure, new nuances, new connections, new meanings continue to be discovered in them. They are classics in the best sense of the term: works that resist the passage of time because they contain universal human truths.

The Enduring Legacy: Pratt in the 21st Century

More than twenty-five years after his death, Hugo Pratt’s influence in the world of comics and illustration continues to be immense. His visual style has inspired generations of artists, and his narrative approach has opened paths that many others have traveled afterward. Enter here to perfect your style and find your unique artistic voice.

His legacy extends beyond the strictly artistic realm. Pratt’s multicultural and anticolonialist vision, his interest in non-Western cultures, his respectful representation of human diversity, all of this is surprisingly current in our globalized and multicultural world. In many ways, Pratt was ahead of his time, anticipating concerns and sensibilities that we now consider essential.

His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in contemporary art museums, thus recognizing its value not only as entertainment or as a minor form of art but as an artistic expression in its own right. Critics, academics, and semiologists have dedicated extensive studies to analyzing the multiple levels of significance in his comics, elevating them to the category of visual literary works.

But perhaps the greatest testimony to his relevance is that new readers continue to discover and fall in love with Corto Maltese and Pratt’s other creations. In a world saturated with visual stimuli, spectacular special effects, and accelerated narratives, the apparent simplicity of his stroke, the measured cadence of his stories, and the depth of his characters continue to captivate those who seek something more than superficial entertainment.

A Map for the Journey: Discovering Hugo Pratt

Reading Corto Maltese is reading its artist, it is understanding, in some way, his searches and questions regarding his own history. His passions and motivations were not found in one place but were dispersed throughout the world and its seas, his various characters and lives to tell between silences and distant horizons to explore.

Among his watercolors, we can lose ourselves and get to know the silenced world of the conquered, visit distant cultures that are brought to us by pencils committed to them. In the same way, it is a call to fiction and to that library which, even in his death, did not remain silent with its more than twenty thousand books but is revisited again and again in his pages.

For those who wish to enter the Pratt universe, “A Ballad of the Salt Sea” is the obligatory starting point, the work that introduces Corto Maltese and establishes many of the narrative and stylistic coordinates that would define his later work. From there, each Corto adventure takes us to a new corner of the world, to a new historical moment, to a new set of fascinating characters.

But Pratt’s work goes beyond Corto Maltese. “The Man from the Caribbean,” “The Scorpions of the Desert,” “Joan of Arc,” or “The Gaucho” are just some of his other notable creations, each with its own flavor and distinctive characteristics, but all marked by that unmistakable Pratt style. Dare to take the step and begin your own creative adventure with our specialized tools.

If a volume of all these journeys has not yet reached your hands, do not hesitate to take possession of the next one that crosses your path. A unique reading experience awaits you, a journey through time and space in the company of one of the most extraordinary visual narrators that the art of comics has given. Because, as Pratt himself pointed out, a journey is a search that arises from reading, and few readings are as traveling as those he left us.

Join us

Who is Hugo Pratt?

The Navigator of Worlds: The Enduring Legacy of Hugo Pratt

Although the Italian comic artist died in 1995, we can ask this question in the present tense due to the enormous influence and importance he had on his successors. The figure of Hugo Pratt stands majestically on the horizon of the ninth art, comparable to the recognizable silhouette of his most famous alter ego, Corto Maltese, outlined against a watercolor sky. So great is the renown of this character and his author that he has been called the “Picasso of comics” and the “Master of illustrated literature” before the term “graphic novel” even existed.

Pratt was not just an exceptional artist, but a true navigator between cultures, an explorer of the human and literary realms who managed to capture the very essence of travel and adventure in every stroke of his pen. His work transcends the boundaries of traditional comics to become a form of visual literature with deep roots in the great classics of universal narrative.

At the same time, the origins of Pratt’s work come from his readings, and we can notice the seeds of authors such as R. Kipling, H. Hesse, Chretíen de Troyes, Shakespeare, Borges, Jack London, Rimbaud, Thomas More, among others. Therefore, for the artist: “A journey is a search that arises from reading” and he has also stated:

“What I draw resembles writing. It is writing. To get there, I’ve had to read an enormous number of books, record thousands of facts, often unconsciously, to realize today that all that work is a work of memory.”

For his part, according to the semiologist and friend of Pratt, Umberto Eco: “Pratt turns his own nostalgia for literature into adventure story material and thus displays it.” This confluence between literature and drawing is precisely what makes Pratt’s work so unique and enduring, an approach to comics that transcends mere illustration to become a unique way of telling stories.

The Clear Line that Hides Oceans: Pratt’s Distinctive Style

Keith Page explains that, according to Pratt, his purpose was “portraying all that is to be understood in a single line”. His style has been described as raw and is characterized by not having complex visual arrangements with sophisticated effects or extravagant elements. The pages of Corto Maltese usually vary between five and six panels with some appearances of speech bubbles, all hand-drawn and painted with watercolors.

This apparent simplicity hides extraordinary sophistication: every line in Pratt’s work is carefully calculated, each stroke contains exactly what is necessary to tell the story, no more, no less. This visual minimalism, far from impoverishing the narrative, enriches it by forcing the reader to actively participate in the construction of the story. Discover here how to master the art of visual and narrative synthesis in the style of the great masters.

One of the common elements in his illustrations has to do with the representation of calm, tranquility, and inner reflection. For this reason, we can appreciate that he was quite removed from commercial circuits which, on the contrary, use action stories and shock effects to achieve mass appeal. Pratt understood that true drama often unfolds in silence, in those seemingly empty moments where characters reflect, doubt, or simply contemplate the horizon.

In a world where contemporary comics tend toward visual and narrative overload, Pratt’s minimalist approach represents a necessary counterpoint, a lesson on how less can be more when one masters the visual language. His panels breathe, they have space for the reader’s imagination to expand and complete what is not explicitly shown.

Corto Maltese: The Sailor Who Conquered the World

His most famous character, sharing the same name as his comic, made his first appearance in 1967 with “Una Ballata del Mare Salato” (A Ballad of the Salt Sea). This masterpiece not only introduced the world to one of the most iconic characters in comic history but also established a new standard for graphic adventure narratives, moving away from superheroes and simplistic stories to offer a more mature and complex vision of the genre.

Corto Maltese is a romantic sailor, a stateless adventurer who travels the seas of the world in the early 20th century, witness and sometimes participant in crucial historical events. He is not a conventional hero: he is ambiguous, complex, sometimes contradictory. He doesn’t always do the right thing, but he always follows his own code of honor. This moral complexity makes him a deeply human character and, therefore, one with whom readers can identify despite his extraordinary adventures.

In 1991, Eco wrote a prologue to this work titled “The Imperfect Geography of Corto Maltese” in which he affirmed the wandering nature of its narrative, its character, and its author in this way:

“Everything in the Ballad follows the rhythm of the maritime courses it narrates, even the psychology of the characters, who love each other after having shot at each other, or kill each other out of friendship, and lose control, and reinvent themselves with a new lineage, a clinical history on each page – and we don’t know who the Monk really is (I don’t believe in Slütter’s reconstruction, too precise), nor what face he has, nor if he has a face, and where Rasputin comes from, and why Cain has that name (perhaps a Byronian reference), and, above all, we know very little about Corto, of whom successive stories, however, will tell us everything, without even sparing his mother-. The drawing is also uncertain and Corto does not have the essential and defined features, I don’t mean of the last stories (where he even rejuvenates and becomes angelic, losing the marks of a not entirely upright life), not even of his more mature epic, when he moves with ease between the Venetian lagoon, Brazil, Ireland and the terrestrial routes of the Trans-Siberian.”

This “uncertainty” that Eco identifies is precisely one of the great strengths of Pratt’s work. The characters are not completely defined, they have areas of shadow, unrevealed mysteries, exactly like real people. This calculated ambiguity allows Corto Maltese and the characters surrounding him to evolve, surprise the reader, and maintain their freshness throughout decades of publications.

The Roots Behind the Traveler: Hugo Pratt and His Life of Searching

Corto Maltese, like his creator, is marked by travel and the sea. This makes sense when we consider that the mind that conceived this romantic adventurer spent his childhood in Venice and lost his father, an officer in the Italian colonial army in Abyssinia, when he was imprisoned by enemy soldiers. The early loss of his father became one of the most powerful creative drivers in Pratt’s life, an absence he would try to fill through his travels and, later, through his art.

Venice, a city of water and a bridge between East and West, left an indelible mark on young Pratt’s imagination. The stories of sailors, merchants, and travelers he heard in his childhood, along with the omnipresence of the sea and canals, nurtured his fascination with oceans and distant cultures. It is no coincidence that Corto Maltese is a sailor and that so many of his adventures take place at sea or in exotic ports.

Both character and artist are in constant search and remembrance of a future that could be. We can link this to Pratt’s own personal and reading experience. Before disappearing from his son’s life, the man had asked that he be given a copy of Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” with the dedication: “You’ll see that one day you too will find your treasure island” and that was the motivation he followed for the rest of his days.

This paternal gesture, this literary legacy turned prophecy, would mark the course of Hugo Pratt’s life. Literature, and particularly adventure literature, would become his compass, his personal treasure map. Want to express your own stories through drawing? Explore resources here to bring your personal narratives to life.

This is how he traveled the world and even lived for several years in Ethiopia learning languages such as Abyssinian and Swahili. But, unlike his father, he learned to appreciate the colonized territories more than the colonizers. This anticolonialist perspective, quite ahead of its time, permeates all his work and turns it into a subtle but effective commentary on power relations between cultures and nations.

For this reason, his love for indigenous peoples can be noted in his work, especially in the case of North Americans such as the Iroquois and the Mohawk, to whom he dedicated several of his panels. Pratt took the representation of these cultures very seriously, meticulously researching their customs, clothing, and worldviews to portray them with the utmost respect and possible accuracy, avoiding falling into the typical stereotypes of Western fiction.

Image 1

This panel, which might seem simple or even unfinished to untrained eyes, demonstrates Pratt’s mastery in the evocation of atmospheres. Far from being “half-done,” each element is precisely where it should be, and his choice of colors perfectly captures the desired ambience. With astonishing economy of means, Pratt manages to transport us to a specific place and time, demonstrating that sometimes what is not shown is as important as what is.

Pratt’s drawing is a constant lesson on the power of suggestion. He doesn’t need to show every detail for the reader to understand what is happening; he trusts in the visual intelligence of his reader, in their ability to complete what is barely hinted at. It is an act of respect toward the reader, whom he considers an active collaborator in the construction of meaning.

Image 2

Another of Pratt’s distinctive elements can be seen in this image: the fascination with military clothing and symbolism. This has to do with his experience in World War II and the life of his ancestors. The uniforms, insignias, weapons, everything is represented with an almost documentary precision that reveals the deep knowledge Pratt had about these subjects.

This attention to historical detail is another hallmark of his work. Despite the apparent simplicity of his stroke, Pratt was extremely meticulous in historical documentation. Each object, each garment, each weapon that appears in his comics has been carefully researched to ensure its authenticity. This historical precision, combined with fantastic or legendary elements, creates that particular mixture of realism and magic that characterizes Corto Maltese’s adventures.

A Drawn Atlas: Global Settings in Pratt’s Work

With the wandering personality of both creator and creation, it is not surprising to find work on different cities such as Buenos Aires and, likewise, deserts through which we accompany the protagonist. The locations in Pratt’s work are not mere backdrops; they are characters in their own right, with unique personality and character. Click here to learn how to create backgrounds and settings that tell stories by themselves.

Image 3

The representation of Buenos Aires in this panel exemplifies how Pratt captures the essence of a place without needing to recreate it with photographic meticulousness. With few visual elements, he manages to convey the atmosphere, the light, the particular character of the port city. This capacity for visual distillation of the essence of places is one of Pratt’s greatest artistic achievements.

Throughout Corto Maltese’s various adventures, we travel through practically all continents, from the islands of the South Pacific to the Venetian canals, from the Amazonian jungles to the Siberian steppes. Each of these settings is represented with the same economy of means and the same atmospheric precision. Pratt doesn’t need an overload of details to transport us to these places; with a few masterful strokes and his characteristic watercolors, he allows us to feel the suffocating heat of Africa, the enveloping humidity of Venice, or the desolate vastness of the desert.

This mastery of spatial representation is not just an aesthetic matter but a narrative one. The places in Pratt’s work determine the rhythm of the story, influence the characters, condition their actions. Space is not neutral but actively interacts with the plot and the protagonists, creating a perfect symbiosis between background and figure, between setting and action.

The World Through the Pratt Filter: Colonialism, Culture, and Magic

One of the most notable characteristics of Pratt’s work is his deeply anticolonialist vision. Despite being the son of an Italian colonial officer, or perhaps precisely because of it, Pratt developed a critical view of European colonialism and a deep empathy for colonized cultures. This perspective permeates all his stories, especially those starring Corto Maltese.

In his adventures, Corto often aligns himself with the oppressed against the oppressors, with local cultures against foreign invaders. However, Pratt avoids falling into simplistic Manichaeism; his European characters are not all villains, nor are his non-Western characters all noble savages. Moral complexity is a constant in his work, and all characters, regardless of their origin, are portrayed with their virtues and defects.

This nuanced vision also extends to his representation of different cultures. Pratt felt a genuine fascination for the traditions, mythologies, and worldviews of the peoples he portrayed in his comics. Far from exoticizing them or reducing them to simple curiosities, he treated them with the same respect and seriousness as Western cultures. Explore here how to represent diverse cultures and traditions with authenticity in your drawings.

A particularly interesting aspect of his work is the way he integrates magical or supernatural elements into his stories. In Corto Maltese’s world, magic and the supernatural are not fantasies but alternative realities, systems of knowledge as valid as Western science. This vision, far ahead of its time, anticipates contemporary interest in non-Western epistemologies and the questioning of the monopoly of truth by European science.

Magic in Pratt’s work is not spectacular or gratuitous; it is subtle, mysterious, often ambiguous. The reader is never completely sure whether the supernatural elements are real within the universe of the story or if they are the product of the characters’ imagination, their beliefs, or altered states of consciousness. This deliberate ambiguity enriches the reading and allows multiple interpretations.

The Footprints of Literature: Pratt as Reader and Creator

As we mentioned at the beginning, literature was a fundamental influence in the life and work of Hugo Pratt. His personal library contained more than twenty thousand volumes, a treasure he constantly consulted to nourish his stories. This reading voracity is reflected on every page of his comics, which are full of literary, historical, and cultural references.

From Stevenson, he inherited the love for maritime adventure and the romanticism of travel; from Conrad, the critical look at colonialism and the exploration of moral ambiguity; from Borges, the taste for narrative labyrinths and parallel realities; from Kipling, the fascination with Oriental cultures and the vision of the encounter between East and West. All these authors, and many more, form the literary substrate on which Pratt built his work.

But Pratt did not limit himself to reproducing or adapting what he had read; he transformed it, reinterpreted it, made it his own. His genius lies precisely in this ability to take elements from classical literature and turn them into something completely new and personal. The result is a work that can be appreciated on multiple levels: as pure adventure for those seeking entertainment, as philosophical reflection for those seeking depth, as literary homage for erudite readers.

This richness of possible readings partly explains the endurance of Pratt’s work. Decades after their creation, Corto Maltese’s adventures continue to be read with the same pleasure, new nuances, new connections, new meanings continue to be discovered in them. They are classics in the best sense of the term: works that resist the passage of time because they contain universal human truths.

The Enduring Legacy: Pratt in the 21st Century

More than twenty-five years after his death, Hugo Pratt’s influence in the world of comics and illustration continues to be immense. His visual style has inspired generations of artists, and his narrative approach has opened paths that many others have traveled afterward. Enter here to perfect your style and find your unique artistic voice.

His legacy extends beyond the strictly artistic realm. Pratt’s multicultural and anticolonialist vision, his interest in non-Western cultures, his respectful representation of human diversity, all of this is surprisingly current in our globalized and multicultural world. In many ways, Pratt was ahead of his time, anticipating concerns and sensibilities that we now consider essential.

His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in contemporary art museums, thus recognizing its value not only as entertainment or as a minor form of art but as an artistic expression in its own right. Critics, academics, and semiologists have dedicated extensive studies to analyzing the multiple levels of significance in his comics, elevating them to the category of visual literary works.

But perhaps the greatest testimony to his relevance is that new readers continue to discover and fall in love with Corto Maltese and Pratt’s other creations. In a world saturated with visual stimuli, spectacular special effects, and accelerated narratives, the apparent simplicity of his stroke, the measured cadence of his stories, and the depth of his characters continue to captivate those who seek something more than superficial entertainment.

A Map for the Journey: Discovering Hugo Pratt

Reading Corto Maltese is reading its artist, it is understanding, in some way, his searches and questions regarding his own history. His passions and motivations were not found in one place but were dispersed throughout the world and its seas, his various characters and lives to tell between silences and distant horizons to explore.

Among his watercolors, we can lose ourselves and get to know the silenced world of the conquered, visit distant cultures that are brought to us by pencils committed to them. In the same way, it is a call to fiction and to that library which, even in his death, did not remain silent with its more than twenty thousand books but is revisited again and again in his pages.

For those who wish to enter the Pratt universe, “A Ballad of the Salt Sea” is the obligatory starting point, the work that introduces Corto Maltese and establishes many of the narrative and stylistic coordinates that would define his later work. From there, each Corto adventure takes us to a new corner of the world, to a new historical moment, to a new set of fascinating characters.

But Pratt’s work goes beyond Corto Maltese. “The Man from the Caribbean,” “The Scorpions of the Desert,” “Joan of Arc,” or “The Gaucho” are just some of his other notable creations, each with its own flavor and distinctive characteristics, but all marked by that unmistakable Pratt style. Dare to take the step and begin your own creative adventure with our specialized tools.

If a volume of all these journeys has not yet reached your hands, do not hesitate to take possession of the next one that crosses your path. A unique reading experience awaits you, a journey through time and space in the company of one of the most extraordinary visual narrators that the art of comics has given. Because, as Pratt himself pointed out, a journey is a search that arises from reading, and few readings are as traveling as those he left us.

Workbook