Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt

Of all the comics that I've always wanted to learn more about but never had the chance to actually read, Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese is at the top of the list. The long-running Italian adventure hero has been a massive influence on some of my favorite creators, but it's never been fully printed in English -- an oversight that will be corrected this week when IDW publishes Corto Maltese: Under The Sign of Capricorn in paperback.

It's the first volume of a planned library of Corto Maltese collections, and if there was one thing that could get me even more excited about the project than I already was, it's seeing the actual pages. Well, that and finding out that the title character discovered as a child that his palm had no fate line so he carved one himself with his father's razor so that he could determine his own fate.

Check out the first seven pages of this new edition of Under the Sign of Capricorn below!

Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt
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Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt
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Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt
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Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt
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Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt
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Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt
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Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt
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Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt
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Here's the official description:

 

Corto Maltese: Under the Sign of Capricorn—SPOTLIGHT
Hugo Pratt (w & a & c)

This book, the first of 12 volumes, launches the definitive English language edition of Hugo Pratt’s masterpiece, presented in the original oversized B&W format with new translations made from Pratt’s original Italian scripts.

Long before the term “graphic novel” entered the popular lexicon—ten years before Will Eisner’s A Contract with God—Hugo Pratt pioneered the long-form “drawn literature” story. Corto Maltese set the standard for all adult adventure comics in Europe. By the mid-1970s Corto was the continent’s most popular series and Hugo Pratt the world’s leading graphic novelist.

Hugo Pratt’s peripatetic sailor was featured in a series of 29 stories. The adventures of this modern Ulysses are set during the first 30 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.

Corto Maltese: Under the Sign of Capricorn collects the first six inter-connected short stories Pratt created in France in the early 1970s: “The Secret of Tristan Bantam,” “Rendez-vous in Bahia,” “Sureshot Samba,” “The Brazilian Eagle,” “So Much for Gentlemen of Fortune,” and “The Seagull’s Fault.”

TPB • B&W • $29.99 • 140 pages • 9.25” x 11.75” • ISBN: 978-1-63140-065-0

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