MAIN SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR “CORTO MALTESE IN SIBERIA”

“Corto Maltese in Siberia” was first published in 1974. Hugo Pratt searched for an historical context appropriate to the plot, following the adventures of his character taking place at the end of the First World War. He therefore read first about the baron von Ungern-Sternberg in an English military encyclopedia and, in 1937, “Le Mors aux dents”, a work by Vladimir Pozner on the same topic. Steady applying his method of scripting based on documental search, the Venetian cartoonist integrated this initial approach with the reading of several books on the Russian civil war and on China and Chinese secret societies.
“Corto Maltese in Siberia”, in which Pratt’s graphic skills reach their peak, is also a tribute to Milton Caniff (1907-1988) that Pratt considered as his master. In 1934 Caniff, the real king of the American black-and-white adventure comic strip, created “Terry and the Pirates” developing it until 1947. This series starts with the adventures of the young Terry, who is looking for a golden mine in China together with his friend Pat Ryan and the coolie Connie. To create this series, Milton Caniff read up a lot on Asia and studied even the techniques of Chinese calligraphy. Terry was Hugo Pratt’s main graphic reference for the rest of his life.

“Corto Maltese in Siberia” steady hints at the film “Shanghai Express” (1932) by Josef von Sternberg. To create the character of the duchess Marina Seminova, Pratt took explicitly inspiration from Marlene Dietrich, the main character of the film in which her name is “Shanghai Lily” from which Pratt derived the name of the female guerrilla Shanghai Lil. Chang, the bad character of this comic book, has the same name of the bad character of the film.

In this comic book, Pratt amazingly mixes fictional elements and real elements of his own life. As a matter of fact, Shangai Lil is the portrayal of a Chinese friend he met in 1972. She was a member of the family of the three Soong (Song) sisters. Chingling, Meiling and Ailing Soong married, respectively, Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan), Tchang Kaï-chek (Jiang Jieshi) and H. H. Kung, a banker and politician. Their father Charlie Soong, a multimillionaire from Shanghai who was converted to Methodism, was one of the heads of the Triad. Likewise, the character of Jack Tippit is based on the homonymous former colonel of the American army and cartoonist of the series “Henry” originally created by Carl T. Anderson. Hugo Pratt met Tippit on that same year during a conference on comics in New York. Captain Nino, on the other hand, is the portrayal of the singer Nino Ferrer, a great friend of Corto Maltese’s creator. General Chang is reminiscent of the Chinese marshal Tchang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin), who died in 1928 in the explosion of a bomb placed on his armour-plated train while he was retreating to Manchuria after having tried to restore the imperial dynasty in Peking to his own benefit. In “Corto Maltese in Siberia”, Pratt described the same circumstances of Chang’s death with little changes in a way that clearly shows his steady play between real and fictional. Pratt’s stories are very often full of strange references, that, however, thanks to his great narrative talent, he manages to make incredibly consistent and plausible.