Corto Maltese v7: “Corto Maltese in Siberia”

Corto Maltese is, uhmm, a sailor — I guess — who goes on globetrotting adventures around the world in the early 1900s. He keeps some interesting company. Also, Hugo Pratt is an artistic legend for good reason.

This book has a title that sounds like an Asterix volume:

 

“Corto Maltese in Siberia”

 

High Adventure Across Europe and Asia

There’s a blank spot in my education for this historical period and geography.  It’s not the area that gets taught that much in American schools, at least as I was growing up.  By the time I went to college, I majored in American History and didn’t look much at Asia.

So I have to admit up front that I don’t have the background to follow everything in this story, or to know who the political and military enemies and allies are.  You have people from Germany, Japan, China, and Russia all racing across the country here, with various political entanglements and double-crossing and surprising alliances.

I think.

I’m not proud of this knowledge gap, but I admit that it’s there. I can only stuff so much stuff into my brain, I guess.

Still, I enjoyed the book a lot in spite of that.  I just followed along with the story, let Hugo Pratt explain things as the story moves along, and found a lot to admire. I don’t think the book asks too much of you in this department.  It explains itself as it goes along.  I just think I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t need it to be explained. Some of the things might have been better surprises.

 

Maltese In Action

“Corto Maltese” is classic storytelling. It’s dense and covers every story beat deliberately.   Pages are loaded up with memorable images and enough dialogue to spell everything out, if you can just keep all the names straight.  Given my deficit to start with, I found that to be very handy.

Honestly, once you get into that rhythm, Pratt carries the story along beautifully.  You need to slow your mind down a little bit from the modern day breakneck style, and you’ll find yourself in a comfortable groove.  It seriously feels like an old adventure comic strip from the newspapers of 60 years ago.  I couldn’t shake that feeling with every tier of every page.

Pratt imitates that pacing without falling pray to all its shortcomings, like the daily repetition of the story thus far and the need to end every row of panels on some kind of question mark or exclamation point.  This is still a comic book story.  It is paced and structured like one, complete with chapters that might, to an American reader, feel like multiple issues of a comic book series being collected.

And there’s a lot of story in one book. Pratt breaks it up into a few chapters that delineate each movement of the story, if you will.  Maltese travels across Asia to steal a gold-loaded train, but then gets wrapped up in larger issues and the shifting alliances of political frenemies.  He is held at gunpoint,  survives bridges blowing up from underneath him, can’t trust anyone, has friends who come and go as they please, and gets wrapped up with convenient political alliances to get his primary job done.

 

Environmental Studies

The book sticks to a structure of four tiers of panels per page, like something you’d see in a comic strip collection.  Because of that, Pratt doesn’t have any opportunities to use broad sweeping vistas spread across large spreads or splash pages.

Instead, he gives you a strong sense of the geography in the simplest ways possible.  It’s a panel crowded with people here, and an isolated landscape or seascape shot over there.  You can see the region clearly in your mind even though Pratt doesn’t draw much of it.

On the other hand, a lot of what he has to draw in this book are empty landscapes.  There’s some action on the seas and some action in the barren tundra of Sibera, covered in snow and distant mountains.  These are not on the level of dense cityscapes, whose backgrounds are large time sucks for the artist.  Detail is everything in those.

 

The Humor of Corto Maltese

Pratt also has a wicked sense of humor.  Maltese remains a rock throughout this book.  He’s the perfectly calm and stoic one throughout all the trials he goes through. He can see the absurdity of situations and call them out.

Pratt he can use his staging to sell a silly gag, like with the steam so strategically placed in the example above.

As a first time reader, Maltese is almost impenetrable. He’s so static and laid back. He needs to be convinced to do a lot of the things he does in this book.  He’s a bit of a romantic and a bit of an adventurous type, but neither are the single focus that drive him through this story.  Survival and keeping his promises and solving a mystery seem to be his biggest motivators.

He is the necessary center of the storm that makes everyone else so interesting by comparison.  He’s a great viewpoint into another world for the reader.

 

Glorious Black and White Art

Pratt’s art is clearly patterned after the likes of Alex Raymond and Noah Sickles.  It has that classic black and white illustrated look like you would have found in the glory days of the newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s.

IDW smartly advertises their collections from those cartooning giants in the back of the book,too.

I’ve read one or two “Terry and the Pirates” books. “Corto Maltese” gives me much the same feeling, though a bit more modern and sped up. That must just be because, again, this is a comic book and not a daily serial.

The illustration is top notch on the “Terry” books, and Pratt follows it well here.  It’s a clear influence, but he’s not copying. He uses more white space and less fancy brush work, to my eye.  He can pull out all the detail when he wants to, like any panel that involves a tank or a train.  But he can pull back on that a bit and let the lighting control the scene in a starker black and white.  His characters are also more cartooned than Raymond’s more photorealistic/photoreferenced style.  Rasputin in this book is as much a cartoon character as a real human.

If you want a more current comparison, then picture someone like Eduardo Risso, who is amazing in his black and white art, with stark contrasts between the two. He contorts people into crazier shapes than Pratt usually goes for, but there are definitely some characters in “Corto Maltese” who push the borders of the “realistic” box, as far as shapes and proportions go.

The thing I appreciate the most about this style is how the black areas fill up a page.  They give the page weight in a format that doesn’t let color dictate the lighting.  This style relies on the old comic strip conventions of indicating black areas just to keep a certain weight to every page.  Pratt uses that well, and can pull back and go to a simpler black and white when the situation calls for it.  It’s just Cartooning 101.

When there’s not a need for those large black shapes, Maltese is great at picking textures and patterns to fill in the gaps.  You can see it in the walls of a ship, the textures drawn on the clothes, the grass along the plains, and more.  You won’t notice it at first because you’re brain is using those details to help define the images it sees, but doesn’t normally link that fesäee

Production and Presentation

The production values in this book are off the chart great.  I hate to get that extreme about things, but I’m super impressed with what IDW put together for Corto Maltese.  As a physical object, this book is a can’t miss. They spared no expense, and still landed the book at under $30.

It’s a 120 page book that feels like 200 pages or more in the hands.  That’s because they didn’t skimp on the paper stock. This is heavy white stuff that doesn’t shine and reflect light sources back up into your eyes.

You can’t see through the pages. That’s easy to do in a black and white book, but those inks never stood a chance with this book. It almost feels like the ink is sitting on top of the paper, and you could brush a fingers across the page to feel those ridges. You can’t, but it almost feels like it.

When you turn the page, you’ll double check the page numbers quickly, thinking you just accidentally turned two.

The cover has full size french flaps on the front and back.  This isn’t just a two inch flap at the edges.  This is a full page flap, like something you’d get on that Kickstarter campaign you just backed after it hits its seventh stretch.  And, like the pages, it’s thick . This is a heavy cover with a glossy sheen. It looks and feels great.

You get a map of Asia on the inside spread across the two pages, with some supporting material on Huge Pratt’s life on the other side.

It’s a very nice package that serves the material well.

 

Recommended?

Definitely.  I’ll be jumping into more volumes soon.  Pratt’s style is mesmerizing to watch work across the page, and the story maintains that Saturday Afternoon Serial pace that’s satisfying and rewarding, even when you don’t necessary follow all the real world political back story behind it.  But, then, it’s pretty easy to pick it up as the story moves along.

IDW’s production on this book is superb, and worthy of the awards it gets nominated for. There’s nothing done on the cheap for this book. It’s a great value for the price. (Cover price is $29.99 — for an oversized 120 page heavy paperstock book with those nice cover flaps.)

Side note: Please forgive my images with this review.  I am reviewing an actual book here, and it’s one that’s too big to fit on my scanner and too nice to break the binding of to get pages to lay flat to grab isolated panels.  I took pictures of the panels with my iPhone and tried to make them look as good as possible.  Any imperfections in the art come from my reproduction, not the book, itself.  On actual paper, the art looks bright, clean, and sharp.

— 2018.082 —

 

Buy It Now

IDW’s “Corto Maltese” books are not available digitally.  They are, however, available in glorious trade paperbacks that are so heavy you might mistake them for a hardcover.  You can buy them at Amazon today, and Amazon will kick a few pennies back to this website to help keep the lights on: