Hugo Pratt

Hugo Pratt (Ugo Eugenio Prat, Lido Beach, between Ravenna and Rimini, Italy, June 15, 1927 - Grandvaux, Switzerland, August 20, 1995), was an Italian cartoonist., mainly known for his Corto Maltese comics.

Biography

Origins

Hugo Pratt was always very interested in his family origins. He himself recalled that:

• The ancestors of his paternal grandfather Joseph Pratt had settled in Cornwalls from France in the time of the Norman conquest of England. Around 1700 they returned to France as a result of the so-called Glorious Revolution, as they were Catholics. Joseph, who was a relative of Boris Karloff, was born and studied in Lyon, later moving to Venice, although he never gave up his English nationality.^{[chuckles]required]}
• His paternal grandmother was a Sephardic Venetian from the Toledano family.
• The Genero, their maternal family, were Venetian merchants also of Sephardic origin, although converted to Christianity. His maternal grandfather was even one of the founders of Venetian fascism.

Childhood and youth

View of Harrar.

Hugo Pratt himself was born in a village near Rimini, but he considered himself a Venetian, Venice being the city where he grew up. However, he would subsequently travel around the globe. Already in 1937 his family moved to Ethiopia, after the occupation by Mussolini's Italy, where his father worked in an office dedicated to the construction of roads. When World War II broke out, his father enlisted him in a national defense battalion. In 1943, he and his mother were evacuated from Ethiopia, but his father was captured by the French at Harrar, dying in 1944 of liver cancer in a prison camp.

After the war, Pratt attended military school in Città di Castello (Province of Perugia, Italy). Thanks to his command of the English language in 1944 he became an interpreter for the allied army. The following year he joined the self-styled Venice Group and, with personalities from the world of comics such as Alberto Ongaro, Dino Battaglia and Mario Faustinelli, he created the magazine Asso di Picche .

Stay in Argentina

In 1949 Pratt moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he worked as an editor for Editorial Abril. In the adventure magazine Misterix he met Argentine artists such as José Luis Salinas, José Muñoz and Francisco Solano López, but above all, the person who would most influence his later career, the inventor of the scriptwriting trade of comics, Héctor Germán Oesterheld with whom he would collaborate drawing Sergeant Kirk (1952), Ticonderoga (1957-58) and Ernie Pike (1957-59) for him.

Three women were important in this period of Pratt's life: the Yugoslav Gucky Wogerer, whom he married in Venice in 1953 and with whom he had two children (Lucas and Marina); Gisela Dester, who was his assistant and later his partner, and Anna Frognier, with whom he had two other children, Silvina and Jonás. None of his children would end up dedicating themselves to comics: Lucas worked in the insemination of cows in Argentina and Jonás was a mathematician.

At the same time that he worked for Editorial Frontera de Oesterheld, he gave drawing classes together with Alberto Breccia at the Pan-American School of Art.

Between 1959 and 1960 he moved to England, where he published for Fleetway Publications, while attending classes at the Royal Academy of Watercolours.

Return to Italy

Pratt returned to Italy in 1962 to work for the children's magazine Il Corriere dei Piccoli. In 1967 he began Corto Maltese , which is about the adventures of a romantic and, in his own way, charmingly chivalrous pirate, who would later bring fame to its creator. The success of Corto spread from France, where they were published by Publicness, to Italy and, little by little, other countries. In total he made 29 stories about this character.

In 1967 he would start a new series: The scorpions of the desert.

In 1970 and 1973, Pratt would return to Ethiopia, the first time finding his father's grave in Harrar.

Pratt in 1989

Starting in the 1970s, Pratt became such a famous personality that many television reports were made about him and his work. Alberto Ongaro made him the hero of one of his novels and Milo Manara portrayed him as one of the protagonists of his series H.P. and Giuseppe Bergman. Precisely, with the latter drawings he would make two albums: Indian Summer (1983) and El gaucho (1991).

Style

Among his favorite cartoonists he cited Milton Caniff (from Terry and the Pirates) and Will Eisner, and among his favorite writers Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad, Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville or Jack London.

When studying the different types of lines used in drawing comics at the end of the 60s, Enrique Lipszyc described his brush stroke as "spontaneous, heavy and vigorous& #34;. His graphics evolved over the years, detaching himself, as Ignacio Fontes affirms, from Caniff's servitude,

too evident in the early days, to achieve a personal styling of an expressionist type. Any Pratt vineyard has only the lines and stains that are fundamental to its structure; sometimes it will be considered, not even the necessary ones.

List of works

Comics

• Asso di picche / L'as de pique / Piece (1945).
• Ray and Roy (1946).
• Sloogan and i piani scomparsi (1946).
• Silver-Pan (1946).
• Indian River (1946).
• A Nattale Allegro (1946).
• Indian Lore (1947).
• Allan delle stelle (1948).
• April e il ghost (1949).
• Junglemen (1949).
• Ray Kitt (1951).
• The white cacique (1951).
• Sergeant Kirk (1952), script: Hector Westrheld.
• Foreign Legion (1954).
• Ticonderoga (1957-1958), script: Hector Westrheld.
• Ernie Pike (1957-1959), script: Hector Westrheld.
• Wolf Conrad (1958).
• Ana de la jungla / Ann and Dan / Anna nella giungla / Ann of the Jungle / Ann de la jungle (1959).
• Battle Britton (1959).
• The Iron Fist (1960).
• Pathfinder (1960).
• The Crimson Sea (1960).
• Up the Marines! (1960).
• Strongpoint (1960).
• The Bayonet Jungle (1961).
• Dark Judgement (1961).
• Night of the Devil (1962).
• The Big Arena (1962)
• Captain Cormorant (1962).
• Fort Wheeling (1962-1995).
• Billy James. (1962).
• Le leggende indiane (1962).
• Battle Stations (1963).
• L'epopea dell'America (1963).
• Le avventure di Simbad (1963)
• Le avventure di Ulisse (1963).
• L'Oddisea (1963).
• Kiwi il figlio della giungla (1963).
• L'ombra (1964), with Alberto Ongaro.
• I giganti burloni (1964).
• Heroes always come back (1965).
• L'avventure di Ercole (1965).
• L'isola del Treasure (1965).
• Corto Maltés / Corto Maltese (1967-92):
  • The Salt Sea Ballad / La Ballade de la mer salée (1967).
  • Under the sign of Capricorn / Sous le signe du Capricorne (1970).
  • Always a little further / Corto toujours un peu plus loin (1970).
  • The Celtic / Les Celtiques (1971).
  • Ethopic / Les ethiopiques (1972).
  • Maltese Choir in Siberia / Short sconta detta Arcana / Corto Maltese in Sibérie (1974).
  • Fábula de Venice / Favola di Venezia - Sirat Al-Bunduqiyah / Fable de Venise (1977).
  • The golden house of Samarcanda / The dorata house in Samarcanda / La Maison dorée de Samarkand (1980).
  • Youth / The Jeunesse de Corto (1981).
  • Tango (1985).
  • Helvetics / Elvetiche / Les Helvétiques (1987).
  • Mu (1988).
• Il ragazzo rapito (1967).
• Fanfulla, script: Mino Milani (1967).
• Luck Star O'Hara (1968).
• The Scorpions of the Desert / Gli scorpioni defect / Les scorpions du desert / The Scorpions of the Desert (1969-92):
  • Les scorpions du désert [episode 1] (1969-73).
  • Piccolo chalet... (1975).
  • Vanghe Dancale (1980).
  • Dry Martini Parlor (1982).
  • Brise de mer (1992).
• Sven - L'homme des Caraïbes (1976).
• The mancumba of the gringo / The macumba du gringo (1977).
• West of Eden / À l'Ouest de l'Éden (1978).
• Jesuit Joe / Jesuit Joe (1980-84).
• Sogno di una Biennale di fine Estate (1982).
• Indian summer / Tutto ricominció con un'estate indiana drawings: Milo Manara (1983).
• Cato Zulu (1984-88).
• George e Arabella (1986).
• The gaucho, drawings: Milo Manara (1991).
• Baldwin 622 (1992).
• A cuore garibaldino (1992).
• In a London sky - 70 anni di aeronautica militare / In a distant sky (1993).
• Saint-Exupéry - The Last Flight / Saint-Exupéry - Le dernier vol (1994).
• Morgan (1995).
• Uomini a sei zampe (1996, unfinished).

Illustrated books

• West, Editori Del Grifo, Montepulciano (1985).
• Corto Maltese - Mémoires, Editions Casterman, Tournai (1988); (in Italian,Le memorie di Corto; in Spanish, "Memorias de Corto Maltés", Norma Editorial.
• "All'ombra del sole", in Il Mensaggero (1989).
• Le désir d'être inutile, Editions Robert Laffont, Paris (1991).
• Rimbaud, Arthur: Lettere dall'AfricaEdizioni Nuages, Milan (1991).
• Kipling, Rudyard: Poesie, Nuages, Milan (1993).
• I found an appunement, Editioni Socrates (1994).
• Les Femmes de Corto MalteseCasterman, Tournai (1994).
• Baffo, G.: Sonetti eroticiNuages, Milan (2002).

Novels

• He polished his penetrantiAlfieri Edizioni d'Arte, Venice (1971).
• They roman of Criss Kenton, Editions Pierre-Marcel Favre, Lausanne (1989).
• Jesuit JoePierre-Marcel Favre, Lausanne (1990).
• Vento di terre lontaneRobert Laffont, Paris (1993).
• I found an appunement (1994).
• Corto Maltese - A salt mare ballata, Giulio Einaudi Editore, Turin (1995).
• Corto Maltese - Corta Sconta detta ArcanaGiulio Einaudi, Turin (1996).

Books of interviews

• Mollica, Vincenzo: L'autore e il fumetto.
• Petitfaux, Dominique: Il desiderio di essere inutile (available in Galician: Hugo Pratt. Or dissex of being useless, Galaxy, 2009; in Spanish, "The desire to be useless", by Gabriel García Santos, ed. Confluencias, 2012).
• Petitfaux, Dominique: "De l'autre côté de Corto" (in Italian: All'ombra di Corto).

Album covers

• Gal Costa: LP Gal Costa (1969) - counterported.
• Sergio Endrigo: LP Mari del Sud (1982).
• Lio: LP Can (1988) / single "Seules les filles pleurent" (1988).
• Paolo Conte: LP Parole d'amore scrite a macchina (1990) / single "Dragon/Colleghi Trascurati" (1991).
• Scott Allen: single "How Do You Feel (Chansons du Film "Jesuit Joe")" (1991).
• Sylvie Courvoisier: LP Sauvagerie courtoise (1993).
• Nino Ferrer: LP Concert chez Harry (1995).
• Cover for Khadja Nin.

Filmography

Documentaries about Pratt

• Les mers da ma fantasie (Ernesto Laura, 1971).
• The ballade plus loin (Michèle Tournier and Jean-Claude Guilbert, 1981).
• Hugo Pratt in Africa (Stefano Knuchel, Switzerland, 2009). 91 minutes.

Pratt Comics Adaptations

• Jesuit Joe (Olivier Austen, 1991).
• Corto Maltese: Sous le signe du capricorne (Richard Danto and Liam Saury, 2002).
• Corto Maltese: La cour secrète des Arcanes (Pascal Morelli, 2002).
• Corto Maltese: La maison dorée de Samarkand (Richard Danto and Liam Saury, 2004).
• Corto Maltese: The mer salée ballade (Richard Danto and Liam Saury, 2003).

As an actor

• La notte dell'alta tide (Luigi Scattini, 1977).
• Quando c'era lui... expensive lei! (Giancarlo Santi and Santini Ferruccio, 1978).
• Mauvais sang (Leos Carax, 1986).
• Nero (Giancarlo Soldi, 1992).
• Blue Nude.