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Corto Maltese is a comics series featuring an eponymous character, a complex sailor-adventurer. It was created by Italian comic book creator Hugo Pratt in 1967. The Corto Maltese series has been translated into many languages and is known worldwide.

Publication history

The character debuted in the serial Una ballata del mare salato (Ballad of the Salt Sea), one of several Pratt stories published in the first edition of the magazine Sgt.Kirk in July.
The story concerned smugglers and pirates in the World War I-era Pacific Islands. In 1970 Pratt moved to France and began a series of short Corto Maltese stories for the comics magazine Pif gadget, an arrangement lasting four years and producing many 20 page stories. In 1974 he returned to full-length stories, sending Corto to 1918 Siberia in the story Corte sconta detta arcana (Corto Maltese in Siberia), first serialised in Linus.
In 1976, Ballad of the Salt Sea was awarded with the prize for best foreign realistic comic album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.
Pratt frequently produced new stories in the following years, many first appearing in the comics magazine Corto Maltese, until 1988 when the final story Mu was serialised, ending in June 1989.

Character

Corto Maltese (possibly derived from the Venetian Courtyard of the Maltese) is a laconic sea captain adventuring during the early 20th century (1900-1920s). A "rogue with a heart of gold," he is tolerant and sympathetic to the underdog. Born in Valletta on July 10, 1887, he is a son of a British sailor from Cornwall and a gypsy Andalusian prostitute known as "La Niña de Gibraltar". As a boy growing up in the Jewish quarter of Córdoba, Maltese realised he had no fate line on his palm and therefore carved his own with a razor, determining that his fate was his to choose. Although maintaining a neutral pose, Corto instinctively supports the disadvantaged and oppressed.
The character embodies the author's skepticism of national, ideological, and religious assertions. Corto befriends people from all walks of life, including the murderous Russian Rasputin (no relation with the historical figure, apart from physical resemblance and some characteristic attributes), British heir Tristan Bantam, Voodoo priestess Gold Mouth and Czech academic Jeremiah Steiner. He also knows and meets various historical figures, including Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Hesse, Butch Cassidy, White Russian general Roman Ungern von Sternberg and Enver Pasha of Turkey. His acquaintances treat him with great respect, as when a telephone call to Joseph Stalin frees him from arrest when he is threatened with execution on the border of Turkey and Armenia.
Corto's favourite reading is Utopia by Thomas More, but he never finished it. He also read books by London, Lugones, Stevenson, Melville and Conrad.
Corto Maltese stories range from straight historical adventure stories to occult dream sequences. He is present when Red Baron is shot down, helps the Jivaros in South America, and flees Fascists in Venice, but also unwittingly helps Merlin and Oberon to defend Britain and visits the lost continent of Mu.
Chronologically, the first Corto Maltese adventure, La giovinezza (The Early Years), happens during the Russo-Japanese War. In other albums he experiences the Great War in several locations, participates in the Russian Civil War after the October Revolution, and appears during the early stages of Fascist Italy. In a separate series by Pratt, Gli Scorpioni del Deserto (The Desert Scorpions) he is described as disappearing in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

 Chronology

This is a list of the twelve Corto Maltese novels in chronological order. Original titles - French or Italian - are given first, followed by English ones. Please note that not all the albums are available in English and some NBM albums do not correspond to any original French or Italian title. French editions were published by Casterman, Italian by Edizioni Lizard.

• 1905 (French) La Jeunesse (black and white 1981, colour 1985); published in Italian as La giovinezza (colour 1983); in English as The Early Years
• 1913-1915 (French/Italian) Una ballata del mare salato/La ballade de la mer salée (black and white 1967-1969; colour 1991); in English as The Ballad of the Salt Sea
• 1916-1917 (French) Sous le signe du Capricorne (black and white 1971; colour edition as - episodes 1 to 3 - Suite caraïbéenne, 1990; and - episodes 4 to 6 - Sous le Drapeau des Pirates, 1991); various episodes are available in English as separate editions
• 1917 (French) Corto toujours un peu plus loin (black and white 1970-1971); various episodes are available in English as separate editions
• 1917-1918 (French) Les Celtiques (black and white 1971-1972); in English as The Celts
• 1918 (French) Les Éthiopiques (black and white 1972-1973); in English as Corto Maltese in Africa
• 1918-1920 Corte sconta detta Arcana (black and white 1974-1975), better known under its French title Corto Maltese en Sibérie; in English as Corto Maltese in Siberia
• 1921 (Italian) Favola di Venezia - Sirat Al-Bunduqiyyah (black and white 1977; colour 1984), in French as Fable de Venise, in English as Fable of Venice
• 1921-1922 (French/Italian) La maison dorée de Samarkand/La Casa Dorata di Samarcanda (published simultaneously in France and Italy, black and white 1980, colour 1992); in English as The Golden House of Samarkand
• 1923 Tango... y todo a media luz (first published in Italian, black and white 1985; editions in other languages normally use the same Spanish title)
• 1924 (Italian) Le helvetiche - Rosa alchemica (colour 1987; also known as La rosa alchemica); in French as Les hélvétiques, in English as The Secret Rose
• 1925 Mu (first published in Italian, first part in 1988–1989, second part in 1988-1989). In French as Mû (black and white and colour editions, both 1992). Not available in English.

Adaptations

In 1975–1977, Secondo Bignardi produced semi-animated Corto Maltese stories for the RAI television programme Supergulp, fumetti in TV!.
A 2002 French-language animated film, Corto Maltese: La Cour secrète des Arcanes, was based on the Pratt novel Corte sconta detta arcana, ("Corto Maltese in Siberia"). Also in 2002, Canal + produced a series of Corto Maltese adventures for television, adapting the stories La Ballade de la mer salée, Sous le signe du Capricorne, Les Celtiques and La Maison dorée de Samarkand.

In popular culture

• "Corto Maltese" appears in Frank Miller's graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as the name of an island at the centre of an incident not unlike the Cuban missile crisis. The choice of name is apparently an inside joke as Miller has stated he is a great admirer of Pratt's work. Miller also dedicated the Sin City one-shot Silent Night to the memory of Pratt, who died a few months prior. The Corto Maltese islands has been occasionally referenced in other DC Comics since. Similarly, in Tim Burton's original Batman, the character Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) tells Alexander Knox (Robert Wuhl) that she just came back from "the Corto Maltese". She shows him an issue of TIME magazine, which the Joker later flips through with Vale in the museum scene. Her pictures on the cover and throughout the magazine show a desert war zone strewn with dead bodies and the Joker gives his approval. Bruce Wayne also mentions her pictures from "the Corto Maltese" to Knox and Vale when they talk to him at his benefit party, regarding them as well above Knox's frivolous articles on "the Batman".

• Among the Knights of Rhodes (later the Knights of… Malta) in the second volume of Général Leonardo, a graphic novel by Erik Svane and Dan Greenberg, is one Frère (Brother) Correteaux, who bears a striking resemblance to Corto and may well be his ancestor.

• In the episodes "Justice" and "Combat", both from the sixth season of the television series Smallville, the name is referenced as being a site of Luthorcorp's 33.1 lab.

• In the 2001 film Dust, Corto Maltese appears briefly, only to be killed.

• In the Valérian and Laureline adventures Au bord du Grand Rien and L'Ordre des Pierres, Captain Sing'a Rough'a's crew includes a humanoid with the name Molto Cortès and with an unmistakable similarity to Corto Maltese.