The original French title - La Jeunesse de Corto - is a bit misleading, as the main characters in this adventure seems to be Rasputin and Jack London, rather than Corto. In early 1905, at the end of the Russo-Japanese war, Jack London (then an ambitious war correspondent) gets into a brawl with a Japanese officer. Rasputin is ostensibly a regular soldier in the Russian army, but when a whistle signals the end of the war he choose to disregard it, killing both an enemy officer as well as his own superior - on the dubitous grounds that nobody asked him his opinion! And Corto? As usual, he's more interested in hidden treasures than politics, and in this story we find him daydreaming about the famous gold mines of king Solomon...
Between 1913 and 1915, Corto and Rasputin are both employees for the mysterious "Monk", perhaps the last great pirate. From his headquarters at the secret island of Escondida, he controls large areas of the Southern Pacific, to the benefit of the Germans - who, in lack of more trustworthy allies and in dire need of coal supplies, find themselves forced to deal with freebooters and defrocked priests. The Ballad is much more than a tale about modern pirates, however. Above all, it is a great sea epic, with an athosphere reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's novels. The many references in the Ballad to famous maritime tales (such as Melville's Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Coleridge's Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the story of Jason and the Argonauts, etc.) clearly demonstrates that Pratt aspires to place his first major work in this particular tradition. The Ballad is also a collective novel: Instead of the "single hero-formula", the narrative portrays a number of characters which are of equal importance. Though many consider the Ballad as the first Corto Maltese adventure, this is only partly true. If there is a principal part in this story, it can perhaps be said to be played by the Pacific Ocean itself - at least the very first sentences in the Ballad appear to suggest this: "I am the Pacific Ocean and I am the largest..."
In 1916 Corto is in Dutch Guyana posting bail for the dipsomaniac Steiner. Together with Tristan Bantam they are pitted against Rasputin and the heirs of pirates in a treasure hunt involving four aces made of whale bones. Then Corto washes up on the shore of a small Caribbean island and receives a head wound from the beautiful Soledad Lokaarth. Steiner consults with South American trader Levi Columbia and tries to help Corto recover his memory using hallucinogenic mushrooms; they travel together in a dream quest for Eldorado. Corto again stumbles into the intrigues of "Gold Mouth" in the episode "Banana Conga" which pits him against agents and double agents of the U.S. government. We also meet the young prostitute Esmeralda, whose mother loved Corto, together with 'bad girl' Venexiana Stevenson.
Corto Maltese must once again post bail for the drunken Jeremiah Steiner before sailing to a corrupt Caribbean island republic. There he finds Soledad Lokaarth being tried for voodoo practices by a kangaroo court. In "Fables et Grands-peres", Corto helps a European surgeon find the grandson brought up by the child's other grandfather, an Indian sorcerer and medicine man. In the final story of the NBM version Venexiana Stevenson turns up in Venice in WWI.
Arguably the best of the series. Set in Europe during the war years 1917-1918. In the European version Corto arrives in Venice in the first of six stories; at the behest of Levi Columbia he is seeking a map to the lost mines of El Dorado. In the NBM version we begin in northern Italy where Corto is the moving power behind a plot to recover hidden Albanian gold during the battle of Caporetto. Next Corto is in Dublin after curfew looking for an old friend: an Irish Republican dead at the hands of British counter-insurgency forces. Then he's off to Brittany where he meets Cain Groovesnore in a tale of spying in WWI. More skullduggery is afoot in Great Britain and Faery King Oberon manipulates Corto into saving the Allied high command with the aid of Merlin and Puck. Corto winds up at an Australian aid station on the western front and witnesses the death of the Red Baron, the great German ace of WWI.
From the shores of the North Sea to the shores of the Red Sea! This album takes Corto Maltese to the African theaters of the First World War. The story begins in the Yemeni desert where a group of British troops are in Tuban, held prisoner by the Turks. Corto and the Danakil nomad Cush meet there during a mission to rescue a Bedouin petit prince; the pair then travel to Abyssinia where they consult aged sorcerer - or fallen angel? - Shamael, the poison of God, who may be able to resolve a dispute involving two lovers of different religions. Corto winds up in German East Africa where an African secret society of 'leopardmen' helps him avenge the murder of the brother of Captain Slutter (Ballad of the Salt Sea.)
A superb story. This album begins in Corto Maltese's home in Hong Kong; at the behest of a Chinese Secret Society Corto, Rasputin and a Chinese agent roam northern Asia in pursuit of an armored train carrying Imperial Russian gold. Quite a challenge because the train is guarded by Cossack troops of the White Russian dictator Admiral Kolchak! The quest is complicated by the Russian Civil War, with Bolshevik troops fighting White Russians supported by Allied powers and Chinese bandits and warlords looking for a piece of the action. We meet Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, descendant of Teutonic Knights, a White Russian officer who became for a time King of Mongolia, riding at the head of his Cossacks in pursuit of a mad dream of glory. A number of characters comment on the apparent disappearance of Corto at the end of the adventure; however he reappears in 1920 to chat up the (female) Chinese agent! Who is the mysterious She?
This is a self-conscious tale of intrigue and hermeticism set in the early years of Italian Fascism. The real main character of the story is the city of Venice; we linger in the shadows of its secret courtyards, navigate its canals, gaze from its balconies and leap from its tiled roofs. Freemasonry supplies a great deal of the atmosphere of a story which is very occult, full of esoteric symbols and historical references. We are also treated to a collection of Pratt's magnificent character studies. A personal favorite of mine!
Having left Venice Corto contemplates English Romantics on the roof of the Kawakly Mosque in Rhodes. Chased off by Italian occupiers he winds up in a cabal of Turkish plotters where he discovers he has a doppelganger. Corto recalls that his mother had warned him that meeting one's double is a presentiment of death! It turns out not to be Corto's... He re-unites with the Italian Carabinieri Captain Sorrentino before leaving for the Dervish School of Mawlawiyyah. Corto is seeking the Persian treasure which Alexander the Great hid in Central Asia, but it just so happens Rasputin is in a nearby Turkish prison: The Golden House of Samarkand! Venexiana Stevenson makes a surprise appearance as Corto narrowly escapes death at the hands of Turks, Kurds, and Armenians - he is saved from a Bolshevik firing squad by a phone call from Stalin!
Corto Maltese slicks back his hair and dances the tango in this tale of gangsters, gamblers, corrupt cops and persecuted prostitutes. It is 1923 and Corto is in Buenos Aires looking for Louise Brookszowyc, the beautiful Polish immigrant who nursed Corto in 'Fable of Venice'. Louise had travelled to Argentina to work for the "Warsavia", an organization passing itself off as a social service but in reality a white slavery network. Corto meets former acquaintances Esmeralda and Butch Cassidy as he seeks revenge on those responsible for his friend's death.
This story begins in the Swiss village of Montagnola in 1924. Accompanied by Jeremiah Steiner Corto Maltese has gone to Switzerland to visit the exiled German mystic writer Herman Hesse. Corto meets the Klingsor knight, alias Herman Hesse, alias Wolfram von Eschenbach. The story is dream-like and filled with alchemical and esoteric references, giving the reader some difficulty in following the ins and outs of the plot! Corto meets Death, the Devil, King Kong, Eve, Joan of Arc, and the Marquis de Sade in a mixture of modern and medieval myths. Literary fantasy rather than action adventure.
Pratt plays with the mythic and fantastic in his final Corto Maltese album. At long last Corto has followed up on the map of Mu first introduced in "The Secret of Tristan Bantam". All of Corto's friends are aboard a ship chartered by Levi Columbia, which has reached the island indicated on Tristan's map. The expedition is menaced by the gang of Black pirate Dandy Roll and Quetzal warriors. Also on the island is downed aviatrix 'Tracy Eberhard' - who falls in love with Rasputin! Soledad Lokaarth, too, finds a mate. Corto passes through a series of tests in order to enter the underground world of the Amazons and save them from their enemies. He learns the secret of the lost world aboard a Chinese junk after his friends abandon Levi Columbia! Not a satisfying ending to this wonderful series...
Corto Maltese was born in 1887, July the 10th, in the Valeta (Malta). His father was a British sailor from Cornualles and her mother was a gipsy, nicknamed "the little girl of Gibraltar" , born in Seville . Due to the Origin of his father Corto Maltese is British. Corto's official residence is in La Antigua, in the Antilles, but his favourite residence (and the only one we see in the comics) is in Hong-Kong. And don..t forget that Corto Maltese lived good part of his childhood in Cordoba, Spain.
The first appearance of Corto takes place in the title The Ballad of the Salty Sea. Where maltese is gathered out of the water by his ancient friend Rasputin. In this story, introduced by the Ocean, Corto gives us a small track of his origins. He tells Pandora how a friend of his mother, the gypsy Amalia, was interested in reading the future of the young Maltese in his line of the fortune. But something happenned, in the hand of Corto there was no line. To a child of only 10 and grown in this kind of knowledges and traditions the fact of not having this line caused a big impression to him and he decided to make one himself and so he could become the only owner of his destiny. The way to make the line of fortune was using the blade for shaving of his father, the result was a long and deep bloody line of fortune.
But previously to what is told in The Ballad other things happened, thus in 1900 Corto Maltese traveled to China, in the heat of the war of the Boxers (June-August, 1900) where in his first combat operation destroyed a tube. Corto Maltese was 13 yo then. (This episode was told by the assistant of Hugo Pratt, Rafael Vianello and autentified by the author). In the revolt of Manchuria, at the end of 1904 , during the Russian-Japanese war (February 1904- September 1905), Corto met Jack London that was a war journalist at that time. There was also Rasputin, prisoner of the Russians because of his different point of view about the ending of the war. Corto will help Rasputin to escape and both embark towards Africa with the intention of searching for the gold mines of Etiopia. (Youth 1904-1905)
But in the boat a riot takes place and changes the direction towards Argentina, where they arrive in 1905 . In the Patagonia Corto and Rasputin met Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid and Etta Place, the famous outlaws of the United States.
In 1907 Corto was in Italy, in Ancona, where he met Djougatchvili, the future Stalin, by then a modest gate-keeper. Because of this friendship Corto will save his life 14 years later as shown in the Golden House of Samarkanda.
Back to Argentina in 1908. Between 1908 and 1913 Corto made a great trip: Marseilles, Tunisia, the Antilles, goes to New Orleans, India and again to China. For Juan Antonio de Blas, a specialist in the work of Hugo Pratt, Corto, in 1910, is the second official in The Bostonian, a ship that made the route between Boston and Liverpool. On board Corto made himself responsible of the defense of John Reed, future leader of the International Communist, by then no more than a cabin-boy accused by the Captain of the death of another cabin-boy. Corto demonstrates in the process that Reed is innocent but the Maltese has to pay with the inclusion of his name in the "black list" of captains.
This the story of how Corto became a pirate. In 1913 he is working for the mysterious "Monk" in the South Pacific. In October the 31 the crew of Corto incited to riot (with the purpose of stealing the armament that transported) and he was left in the middle of the sea floating to the drift almost crucified in a wood small platform. To the following morning, the 1 of November, Corto was rescued by Rasputin, as we commented before, that is also a member of the secret organization of the Monk. This one is the beginning of the Ballad of the Salty Sea and the first appearing of Corto Maltese within the work of Hugo Pratt.
Once they arrived at the island La Escondida (169º West longitude and 19º South latitude) Corto Maltese and his companions of adventure were told of the beginning of the War in Europe. So they began to deal with stolen coal in benefit of the German boats. In this adventure were also implied Pandora and Cain, two cousins who had been rescued by Rasputin some time before. Any day of January 1915 Corto Maltés and Rasputin left La Escondida towards the island of Pitcairn.
The South American adventures begin. In 1916 , Corto Maltese with the professor of the Prague University Jeremiah Steiner and a young Tristan Bantam, went to Paramaribo, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, Salvador de Bahia and to the opening of the Amazon River. In 1917 Corto is in Saint-Kitts, in the Antilles, the British-Honduras (Belize), Maracaibo in Venezuela, Honduras, Barbados, enters in the delta of the Orinoco and the Peruvian amazonian forest.
Corto crossed the Atlantic and arrived to Europe in 1917 . The Celtics begin in Venice. Later on he will go to the Adriatic Sea, during the battle of Carporetto (24 October 1917). He also was in Dublin and assisted to an Ireland fighting for Freedom and went to Stonehenge, in England, where appeared sorrounded of prattling crows and tale fairies in the title A Dream of a winter morning. In the Spring of 1918 Corto was in France.The April 21st Corto watched to the sky just for seeing how the Red Baron was defeated. The beaches of the North Sea finish the Celtics.
When the etiopics begin have passed almost 12 months, Corto Maltese is in Yemen. Cush the Danakil Warrior, makes his first appearance within the first episode "In the name of Ala compassionate and merciful". The September 13 Corto crossed to the British Somalia, as shown in "The last shot". Then returned to Ethiopia (in Of other Romeos and other Juliets ), and later will make an incursion in German Eastern Africa next to the leopard men.
Corto returns to Hong-Kong, where lives in a district "of bad reputation, in the low side... a zone full of thieves and pretty women". Corto reads about the ends of the War the November 11 of 1918. There was also Rasputin, within a great raincoat, impatient to live new adventures. Thus Corto Maltese in Siberia begins. Commanded by a secret Chinese society, the Red Lanterns, they started searching for a gold loaded conboy property of the Russian Imperial family. But it wouldn't be an easy task, because it was being transported in an armored train commanded by the admiral Kolchak. In 1919 , Corto arrived to Shangai, after crossing three frontiers: Manchuria, Mongolia and Siberia. A quite problematic area, the confrontation place between the Bolsheviks and the Russian troops maintained by the Western powers.After the destruction of the general Tchang's train in February of 1920 Corto returns to his house of Honk-Kong badly wounded. This Asiatic adventure finishes within the Chinese province of Jiangxi, April 1920 .
After being in Asia, Corto Maltese made a stop in Venice between the April 19 and the 25. A Magical place where Corto lived a story that almost is a theatrical play: Fable in Venice . In the following adventure Corto is in Rodas searching for a new treasure. His new travel through Asia begins and will take us from the Turkish coasts to the Afghan mountains. A great adventure that tells us a year in Corto..s live looking for the treasure of Alexander Magnus. Corto disembarks in Adana, crosses Turkey until Azerbajian. There he will be stopped by the soldiers of the Red Navy, and saved himself from being shot with the help of a phone call. Corto crosses the Caspian Sea from Bakou to Krasnovodsk. Rasputin appeared again within the Emirate of Boukhara. Finally they arrived at Afghanistan where the treasure is waiting. The Golden house of Samarkanda ends when Corto and Rasputin cross the border of Pakistan in company of a colony of British soldiers.
June 1923, Corto Maltese is in Argentina. In Tango Corto investigated the disappearance of Louise Brookzowyc, that we saw in the title Fable of Venice . At that time Corto will have to go against the "Warsavia" (or Warsaw), a prostitution network which the young woman was working for. Corto had a new meeting with Butch Cassidy and Esmeralda, old friends . Finally he found the main responsible of the death of Louise. He left Argentina the night of the 20 of June
In 1924 , Corto took a walk by the Swiss corners. Gathered in the Helvetians . With professor Steiner he will go to Montagnola just to met the writer Herman Hesse. In spite of his skepticism, Corto will be confronted with the Swiss imagination. Inside a Dream he drinks the filter of Paracelso and becomes inmortal. We have left the doubt... It was in truth a dream?
In 1925 Corto Maltés, invited by Leví Columbia, takes part in the search of the continent of Mú. The last adventure of the Maltese in a comic.
In December of 1928 Corto is in Harar, Ethiopia, with the novelist Henry de Monfreid and Teilhard de Chardin. A watercolor of Hugo Pratt appeared in the Corto Magazine testifies it. In 1936 Corto took part in the war of Spain. In 1941, Cush within the work the Scorpions of the desert tell us: "it seems to be that Corto disappeared during the war of Spain". But to be disappeared does not mean to die.
On the other hand Corto didn..t die during the war of Spain. If we read the introduction of the Ballad we find a letter, dated in 1965, where Pandora tells how Corto is living with her family and the sad he is after Tarao..s death. "I see uncle Corto walking alone or sitting in the garden, watching to the sea, with the lost glance"
"The ash tree" is a selection of tracks registred in 2009. In this new CD you'll find songs inspired by mythological and popular tales that tell about the relation between humans and the nature. Two tracks with the cooperation of +AimA+ from Les Jumeaux Discordants 100 numbered copies with 23 limited edition with a mini CD containing two live tracks and a live of 2008 registred in a natural reserve in Friuli (Italy)
After you've finished here, you may like to hear this poem sung on myspace...
Poem 162 of 230, WalkaboutsVerse (please see my blog): TEES TO TYNE: FIRST IMPRESSIONS - SUMMER 2001
Where traditions are not so rare; Sea, country and works scent the air; A multitude of monuments, Planted tubs and patterned pavements.
The longish pedestrian malls; The remnants of defensive walls; Historic buildings are a gauge Of the respect for heritage.
Wheat, rape and pines in the fields; Estuaries guarded by shields; Long sandy beaches and wide scenes; Romantic-ruin go-betweens.
Rivers in parts licked by trees, Or fringed by boat clubs, wharfs, gantries, And crossed by practical delights - Varied spans, forming pleasing sights.
Fine churches headed at Durham; Football kits ad infinitum; Kept castles - one for study; Masonry behind masonry.
And, with moulding-works out that way, It’s somewhere for a longer stay..?
grazie per essere diventato amico del collettivomensa!
Annunciazio’, annunciazio’: Lo SpecialOne del Collettivomensa è pronto,
bellissimo e com’è che ho detto prima? Ah, avveniristico. Ben 80
paginone di racconti, fumetti, illustrazioni tutti lì a spaziare
sull’esperienza degli autori nel traforo malsano dell’underground e poi
proclami apocalittici, environment, ricette di cucina, accorgimenti
sulla pesca all’aspetto e naturalmente un sacco di pulzelle nude. 31
teste, 62 mani e 57 piedi hanno lavorato al meglio per questo progetto
e noi vi facciamo pure i cognomi. Ma non ora.
Uhhhh!!! L’eccezionale SpecialOne verrà presentato ufficialmente il 23
Settembre a Firenze al Festival della Letteratura ULTRA, e già da quel
giorno, pensate, potrete acquistarlo a prezzi outlet partecipando
all’iniziativa che durerà fino al 26, giorno in cui la rivista verrà
presentata agli inintellettuali nascosti tra il pubblico. In ogni caso
avete il permesso di richiedere le vostre copie all’email
collettivomensa[at]yahoo.it, e il Colmensa provvederà subito a
spedirvele direttamente a casa vostra insieme a un materasso e a un set
di pentole, disegnate.
Aiutate il Collettivomensa&Soci ad uscire vivi dall’undergound!!!
