HUGO PRATT THE WANDERING VENETIAN IN THE COMICS WORLD

Born on 15th June 1927, Hugo Pratt belonged to a Venetian family with English, French, Marrano and Turkish ancestries. Strictly linked to Venice, he spent there his whole childhood between the omnipresence of the fascist totalitarianism and a tendency to escape into fantasy. In addition to his esotericism, which was a legacy of his French-Mason and cabbalist ancestors, he got interested in comics, Anglo-Saxon literature and Hollywood films, which he watched at the Malibran cinema close to Marco Polo’s house together with his grandmother.

From 1937 to 1943 Hugo Pratt discovered Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia). Even though he was the son of an Italian colonial and military officer, he hated colonialism. Despite a short period in the army when he was 13, he held to his friendship with the African people against whom he should have fought and to his love for the other cultures. The cosmopolitan spirit of his family towards some British people of the opposite party convinced him of the absurdity of the war and of nationalism. Such a belief later strengthened even more after his return to Venice when he witnessed the Italian civil war between 1943 and 1945. Moreover, travelling became for him the best way to discover and know the others and their diversity.

From 1945 to 1949, he started working with “Asso di Picche” (Ace of Spades), a periodical edited by his friends of the “Venice Group” including cartoonists and scriptwriters that took inspiration from the American comics.

From 1949 to 1962 he moved to Argentina, where he continued to work as cartoonist collaborating mainly with the great scriptwriter Hector G. Oesterheld (1919-1977). He visited the United States, the Antilles, South America and Brazil in particular. Thanks to his passion for westerns, he discovered the Amerindians. He liked them because they fought against the whites’ colonialism and reminded him of the populations he had met in Africa. In 1960 he spent one year in London working for an English publisher.

From 1962 to 1970, Hugo Pratt returned to live in Italy. After a period of stagnation in his career, Florenzo Ivaldi, a Genoese patron of the arts, financed the publication of the magazine “Sgt Kirk”, which published for the first time in Europe the comics of his Argentine period and, in July 1967, “Ballad of the Salt Sea” featuring for the first time Corto Maltese.

From 1970 to 1984, Pratt lived mainly in France where Corto Maltese became the main character of a comics series initially published, from 1970 to 1973, by the magazine “Pif Gadget”, which brought him the recognition both of the general public and of the critics. Published as comic book, this series was translated into fifteen languages.

From 1984 to 1995 Pratt lived in Switzerland. He owed his international success to Corto Maltese, a very psychologically complex character resulting from the travel experiences and the endless invention capacity of his author. Wanderer by nature, Hugo Pratt continued to travel from Canada to Patagonia, from Africa to the Pacific area. He died of cancer on 20th August 1995. Thanks to him, comics have finally become an Art.