Classic European comics

[numberONE]

Nice thread. Out of the series reviewed so far, I've only read Lucky Luke (and I liked it a lot!), but I've also read Tintin and Asterix.

This Spirou sounds interesting. The title character looks a lot like Tintin, eh?

[Chris N]

I'm sold on Druillet, RR.

[Roquefort Raider]

Sorry for the delay; as the next subject is Hugo Pratt, there were a lot of things to scan! And since Pratt is as great a writer as he is an artist, I translated a lot of the pages. (Any grammatical error is mine, of course).

Hugo Pratt is an Italian cartoonist, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to put him on the same pedestal as Foster, Eisner or Raymond. In fact, I don't think it would be irrational to put him on the same level as Hemingway, whe it comes to parts of his work.

He's better known than many other European cartoonists in the US (he was inducted to the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2005) but I don't think his books have been available in English for a while, now, and anyway most of his output was not transtated in English. (Which is really, really, unfortunate)!

Pratt had an interesting life, which provided some material for his tales of exotic adventure. As a kid he lived in Venice and then in Italy-occupied Ethiopia; he was interned in a prison camp in WWII. As a cartoonist, he worked in Argentina with the famous Hector Oesterheld and then in England before returning to Italy. He remained an active traveler all his life.



His style is very elegant, almost sketchy, but carries tremendous emotional force and can convey a mood like nothing else. It works quite well in black and white (and some purists insist that it should always be in B&W), but personally I also like Pratt's subtle work with colors. (The big hardcovers collecting his stories usually include many watercolor sketches -Pratt did a lot of studies before starting a tale).



Storywise, Pratt favors Hemingway-like tales of adventure featuring tough-talking and very colorful characters (men and women alike). He also likes to input a little politics in his stories, as well philosophy, and a lot of arcana. I'm sure he and Howard Chaykin would have seen eye to eye. But it's not all action; in fact, while he goes for high drama, he doesn't do a lot of action scenes. He prefers to create tension using dialog and plot, and has a thing for bittersweet endings.

Pratt created may characters, but the most famous will always remain Corto Maltese. Corto is a sea captain, but a sea captain without a ship. (His boat burned down in his very first solo adventure, as I recall). His status as a seaman helps him maintain a certain aura as a romantic figure, one who endlessly travels the world. And Corto will indeed see a lot of the world.



Funnily enough, he was created as a supporting character in a tale of piracy on the south seas, "The ballad of the salted seas", which was really about a scion of a noble English family who had turned to piracy and ended up reclaiming his honor. But Corto (and, to a lesser extent, the infamous pirate Rasputin) were so well-received that Pratt kept them going. In that sense, Corto Maltese is like another famous comic-book sailor: Popeye himself.

[Roquefort Raider]

The French weekly comic journal Pif Gadget published many of the early Corto Maltese stories. (Pif was an outlet for the French Communist Party, which explained its red cover; but honestly, reading it as a kid, I would never have known that this cool periodical was associated with the nefarious red menace)! Later on, other journals such as Tintin and À suivre published the character, and finally Corto went straight to hardcovers.

So, what's it about? Well, Corto Maltese is a typical romantic adventurer with a (falsely?) cynical world view. Sometimes he hunts for treasure, sometimes he looks for Atlantis, sometimes he helps widows and orphans. He's resolutely against imperialism and fascism, but is no boy-scout and is on a first-name basis with Joseph Stalin. He seems to wander the world in search of the next horizon. His friends or acquaintances are many : Bouche Dorée the canbdomblé priestess; Prof. Steiner the archaeologist and specialist on Mu and Atlantis; Rasputin the insane anarchist and pirate; Cush the Danakil revolutionary; and many kabbalah experts, spies, secret agents, authors (such as Jack London). From time to time, Corto also lives oniric adventures that got him to interact with the characters from A Midsummer's night's dream or from Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal. He went from the battlefields of WWI to those of the Russo-Japanese war (though obviously not in that order!), from the jungles of South Americ to the steppes of Central Asia, from the deserts of the Middle East to the islands of the Pacific. And I don't think he had one boring adventure. The fallen angel Shamaël, whom he met in Ethiopia, claimed that Corto had slashed a false chance line in his palm using his father's razor, and that he was "a man carrying a sadness". What it is we never knew. (Corto was clearly romantically attracted to only one woman in all the series, and that was way back in "the ballad of the salted sea").

Here is the introduction of Corto in "the ballad of the salted sea". The bearded guy is Rasputin; here he just seems evil, but in later adventures he was depicted as more than a little insane (often amusingly so, as in "will shoot anyone for any reason at the most unexpected moment" insane).



Note that this is an early story, and Pratt' style is not yet as clean as it will later be (he went for a quasi-photographic approach for a few panels in this book).



The tone is already there : a sort of simmering violence, of constant threat... You never know if these guys won't turn on you.

[Roquefort Raider]

Pratt may write dialog sharp dialogs, but he's no slouch when it comes to visual poetry. The sea is often pictured in "the ballad of the salted sea", to no one's surprise I'm sure. But it's not just a flat expanse of blue... it's a living sea, with swells, waves, fish and seabirds. In a particular scene, two characters spent many pages on the Pacific, guided by the fin of a shark. (Tarao the Maori explains that sharks are friendly to his people, and that they can guide them to wherever they want to go. I would not have trusted such a guide not to eat me, but it made for a very good sequence).



Look at how the sea is drawn... There is a great economy of lines, here, but the mood is beautifully rendered. (I often judge a cartoonist's talent by how few pen strokes he or she needs to do justice to a scene).

[Roquefort Raider]

Pratt's storytelling abilities are mazing. His comics could often be used straightaway as storyboards for a movie.

The following sequence shows the start of a story. Witness the elegance and efficiency with which the author sets up the situation and the characters. It's all effortless, but very effective (and really makes one want to know what happens next).

[Roquefort Raider]

[Aaron Kashtan]

I like the look of Kuijpers's stuff, at least as far as I can tell from that one panel. Reminds me a bit of Daniel Torres with those sharp, clean, well-defined lines. Would you say that that style can generally traced back to Hergé?

That style is called Clear Line (ligne claire). Herge is the master of it, but it was also used by a bunch of other artists from Tintin magazine, like Jacobs, Vandersteen and Jacques Martin. I think Daniel Torres is one of the artists who deliberately revived the Clear Line style in the '80s, along with Chaland and Ted Benoit and Joost Swarte.

[Roquefort Raider]

That newcomer is Cush, of the Beni Amer tribe. He's my favorite supporting character. So cool you'd swear he had ice water in his veins. He's a muslim revolutionary, a disciple of the mad mullah, and a very dangerous man. Even his mother says he should not have been born, because of all the widows and orphans he's made! (Although you can tell that this is more of a compliment than an insut). Luckily, he's a man of his word, takes matters of honor very seriously, and is wise enough to know that if your enemy is also the enemy of a worse enemy, then a compromise may be reached (if temporarily).



At the end of this story (which includes the attack of the fort, Corto Maltese impersonating a muezzin so badly that the praying crowd think he's drunk, and more than a few deaths, there's a typical Cush scene. As Corto rejoins him and the rescued prince Saoud, he asks why the Danakil keeps annoying the prince with the end of his camel whip. Answers Cush : "because when he's grown up it won't be possible anymore".

[Roquefort Raider]

Here's another excellent piece of storytelling.





Note how Cush tolerates Corto's friendly ribbing. He wouldn't have done that at an earlier stage in their friendship. But that doesn't mean the Danakil has grown soft.

Captain Bradt has just committed a serious mistake by stating that he, a foreign invader on this land, was in any position to forbid Cush to do anything.

[Roquefort Raider]

Holy crap, this is why I love comics. See how the silence grows heavy in the first few panels, and how the characters don't move at all. And see how Cush, the integrist religious warrior, is ready to commit a sin just to give the finger to the imperialist.

[Roquefort Raider]

Shades of the Hemingway type of manhood again: "my friends are real MEN! They don't need NANNIES!"

Needless to say, Corto's prediction will turn out to be true. Gruesomely so.

[Roquefort Raider]

It's not all tough guys doing their Humphrey Bogart bit, though. Pratt's work is full of references to Jewish lore, Argentinian tango, communist politics, legends of lost cities, Brazilian religions, and more. Here we get a bit surreal (with a Thomas More reference, which rarely gets mentioned in, say, Youngblood).

[Roquefort Raider]

A lot could be said about this character, but let's move on to a few others. First, for a better overview, there's this site .

Pratt was behind the frontier adventures of Sgt. Kirk and Jesuit Joe as of those set in Fort Wheeling; he gave us the shenanigans of Ann of the Jungle, and more than a few standalones (such as a chronicle of the last days of St-Exupéry).

One of his character had a lot of success : Koinsky, a Polish soldier serving in the british army during WWII. He, too, was initially only one of many characters in a series called "Scorpions of the desert". Koinsky's adventures all occur in the desert, and are unusual as a war story in that the enemy is almost never the Germans : it's always the Italians.



Well, "the enemy"... this is also an unusual war story in that it's not a story about battling the enemy. It's mostly about spying, about trafficking, about how a few individuals try to make their fortunes in war-torn eastern Africa.

[Roquefort Raider]

Corto Maltese was around during world war I; Koinsky serves during world war II. But both men meet a certain Danakil. In this sequence, Koinsky, Cush and a certain Italian renegade named Stella are looking for a chest of gold that was stolen from a caravan and hidden in the desert.