A Corto Maltese of modern times – Francesco Boille

Corto Maltese – Black Ocean
from the work of Hugo Pratt
by Bastien Vivès and Martin Quenehen
Cong 2021, 168 pages, € 19.50

What binds nostalgic Japanese fascists, trawling, the ecowarrior, the poor people exploited without restraint in the Peruvian mines or the drug traffickers?

You will find out in part in the latest issue of Internazionale, which publishes a preview of 15 color pages (with a coloring created by Patrizia Zanotti in an Italian exclusive for the newspaper) of Black Ocean, a new adventure by Corto Maltese, and then in a more complete way from 1 September, when the volume will arrive in bookstores.

After the classic version of Juan Dìaz Canales and Rubén Pellejero (another story of the Spanish couple is scheduled for the spring of next year), the new Corto Maltese should be the first of a series where the hero of Hugo Pratt will be freely interpreted by signatures of international comics. The title marks the editorial debut of Cong, the company that manages the rights to Hugo Pratt’s work worldwide.

But this is not the only news. Bastien Vivès, who among the French authors of the new generation is the closest to young people and manga (see the saga of Lastman released for Bao), and the screenwriter and documentary maker Martin Quenehen give us the first Corto Maltese totally transposed into the contemporary era. To be exact, on the eve of September 11, during and immediately after.

In a black and white enriched by the gray of the screen, with Vives we are in the delicate and mobile sign, indeed in the triumph of the graphic sign. The result as a whole is admirable, although it is practically impossible to match the density in the simplicity of the graphic sign that Hugo Pratt has developed, where the lessons of Chinese calligraphic painting and the great American cartoonist Milton Caniff, that of Matisse and of many illustrators, even little known, abstract art, much loved by Hugo Pratt, and poetry, which Pratt saw as the supreme art, for its synthesis that produces strong images. A proof is contained in the Trilogy of religions, released in July by Rizzoli Lizard, which brings together three masterful comic novels by the Venetian author in which, as noted at the time by Pratt himself, the relationship between religions (or beliefs), madness and revolution (or revolt) is analyzed , far from easy schematisms.

Ever wider horizon
Really sail in a black ocean, both literally and figuratively, this new Corto Maltese of modern times. It is dense in the atmosphere, especially in the part in Japan, sensitive in the landscapes, especially the Peruvian ones, although they are not the strong point of Vives, as opposed to Pratt. Metaphysical in the night sequences or in framing the geometries of an aseptic motorboat. On the narrative level, it is rich not only in twists, but also in micro twists within them and in the overturning of situations that seem consolidated: you never go in the direction you expect. The thematic horizon is as broad as that of adventure, because true adventure is like this: unpredictable. It can only come to mind the first graphic novel by Milo Manara starring Giuseppe Bergman, H.P. e Giuseppe Bergman (1978), where the title HP, the master of adventure in a modern reality that no longer knows what it is because alienation is in force, was obviously Hugo Pratt.

And if Pratt’s horizon line is almost absent, in his work declined in that of the sea and that of the desert as two equivalences, it is to leave evocation to the grays of the net.

As for the inevitable Rasputin, “the ideal deuteragonist”, as Oreste del Buono defined him, but also a negative mirror of Corto, his very affectionate psychopath (“you always manage to make me do stupid and poetic things”, Rasputin launches at Corto) , is the most successful character from this point of view, because if he is full of life and expressiveness in the dialogues as in the actions, it is first of all thanks to the sign of Vivès, which for him is not only wriggling but also disheveled while remaining sharp and precise. The narrative always remains credible, coherent and with a great linearity despite the profusion of themes, really close to the Prato tradition. There are sects and treasures, but revised in modern prosaicity. And here a more subtle level emerges: the whole story seems like a reinterpretation of the classic situations of Corto Maltese’s stories immersed in vulgarity, in the obviousness of the modern era, stripped of romantic poetry.

Eloquent dialogue
The Corto di Pratt set out in an illusory search for a treasure and then always found the true treasure in the other, which he invariably ended up helping. The concreteness of the suffering or the needs of the derelict was mirroring the dissolution of the mirage of the treasure. It is as if the modern Corto Maltese were aware of Pratt’s now almost ancient Corto, of the difficulty of elaborating an enchanted gaze on the world and pursued that gaze halfway between enchantment and disenchantment, poetic and ironic, now lost, a gaze which, as Pratt himself once said, was that of “a generation seeking beauty”.

There is an eloquent dialogue in this sense between Corto and the photojournalist. As for the magical, pervasive, almost unknowable mystery that surrounds the entire work of Pratt as well as the character of Corto Maltese, although present, it is nevertheless the element that will have to be more developed in the future, if the couple makes an encore of the experiment.

On the other hand, there are many concrete, possible and potential female loves for the modern Corto, but only one dominates: the most noble and intriguing one of a young Peruvian woman, a local woman, unlike the others, a fighter for peace in Fujimori’s Peru . This is a great character who deserves to fully flourish in the future.

As for loving goodbyes, they are now made in sterile airports and no longer among the flowers and butterflies, but the melancholy, humanistic sweetness remains. Perennial. As a state of the spirit, of the interiority that makes empathy something endemic and irrepressible. Also because here there are no cell phones and secret services to keep. With Corto Maltese, anarchist like its creator, the society of control loses. All time.